No abstract

Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007). This can be explained by differences in number morphology, but it can also be explained by many other differences between the languages and the environments of the children who were compared. The present study tests the hypothesis that the morphological singular/plural distinction supports the early acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one by comparing young English learners to age and SES matched young Mandarin Chinese learners. Mandarin does not have obligatory number morphology but is more similar to English than Japanese in many crucial respects. Corpus analyses show that, compared to English learners, Mandarin learners hear number words more frequently, are more likely to hear number words followed by a noun, and are more likely to hear number words in contexts where they denote a cardinal value. Two tasks show that, despite these advantages, Mandarin learners learn the meaning of the number word for one three to six months later than do English learners. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that prior knowledge of the numerical meaning of the distinction between singular and plural supports the acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one.

English language development or proficiency (ELD/P) standards promise to play an important role in the instruction and assessment of the language development of English language learner (ELL) pre-K-12 students, but to do so effectively they must convey the progression of student language learning in authentic school contexts for authentic academic purposes. The construct of academic English is defined as the vocabulary, sentence structures, and discourse associated with language used to teach academic content as well as the language used to navigate the school setting more generally. The construct definition is informed by a relatively modest number of empirical studies of textbooks, content assessments, and observations of classroom discourse. The standards of a state with a large ELL population and a large multi-state consortium are then reviewed to illustrate the role of the academic English construct in the standards’ coverage of language modalities or domains, levels of attainment or proficiency, grade spans, and the needs of the large number of young English learners. Recommendations and potential strategies for validating, creating, and augmenting standards that reflect authentic uses of academic language in school settings are also made.

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118 Mandarin-speaking immigrants and 24 native English speakers. Grammar knowledge was assessed by a grammaticality judgment task, and speech production was measured by native English speaking raters' ratings of participants' foreign accents. Results from the study revealed that the age of learning effect was robust for both L2 domains even after controlling for the influences of other variables, such as length of residence and years of education in the United States. However, the age of learning variable had a stronger impact on speech production than on grammar. The current results support the framework of multiple critical/sensitive periods (Long in Int Rev Appl Linguist 43(4):287-317, 2005; Newport et al. in Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jacques Mehler. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001; Werker and Tees in Dev Psychobiol 46(3):233-251, 2005).

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers’ comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers’ beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers’ comprehension of multiple texts and the processes used by readers to make sense of texts. Eighty‐three students (grades 5–7) participated in this mixed‐methods study. The sample consisted of monolingual students and emergent and proficient bilingual students who completed measures of expository comprehension, strategic knowledge and awareness, English‐language proficiency, prior content knowledge, and epistemic beliefs. Ten bilingual students from this sample also completed a think‐aloud protocol to allow for close examination of their meaning‐making processes. In a multiple regression analysis, English‐language proficiency was the strongest predictor of comprehension, followed by content knowledge. Strategy knowledge and awareness and epistemic beliefs were not related to multiple‐text comprehension in the model. The relationship between English‐language proficiency and comprehension was stronger for bilingual students than for monolingual students. Students in the think‐aloud sample demonstrated emergent knowledge of processes of disciplinary reading of multiple texts, including metacognitive monitoring, theorizing authorial identity, and intertextual integration, while also displaying a tendency to defer to institutionalized authority when evaluating credibility of the texts. The findings provide directions for future research on the way young adolescents comprehend and learn from expository texts in the discipline of science.