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摘要：Despite the popularity of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in foreign language (FL) education at elementary school, it remains unclear how young learners' FL abilities can best be evaluated with tasks. The present study seeks to understand developmental differences in interactions among elementary-school students during task-based language assessment (TBLA) and aims to address the possibilities and limitations of introducing paired-TBLA among young FL learners. The participants were 32 fourth-grade students (ages 9-10) and 32 sixth-grade students (ages 11-12) and their teachers from a FL program where TBLT was mandated. The students were engaged in two sets of assessment tasks with their peers. It was found that the interaction patterns were different between the two grade levels. Compared with the sixth-grade dyads, the fourth-grade dyads showed less mutual topic development, used formulaic turn-taking more frequently, and had a harder time taking their partners' perspectives during the tasks. Consequently, a smaller variety of interactional functions were observed among the fourth graders. The potential for eliciting a wide range of interactional functions, which is a primary advantage of introducing paired assessment, may have limited application for younger dyads. The study also discusses the strategic roles that such interactional characteristics may play among younger learners. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The extent to which risk for French as a second language (L2) reading and language learning impairment are distinct and can be predicted using first language (L1) predictors was examined in English-speaking students in total French immersion programs. A total of 86 children were tested in fall of kindergarten, spring kindergarten, and spring Grade 1 using an extensive battery of L1 predictor tests (in kindergarten) and L2 outcome tests (in Grade 1). Analyses of the kindergarten predictor scores revealed distinct underlying components, one related to reading and one to oral language. Further analyses revealed that phonological awareness, phonological access, and letter-sound knowledge in L1 were significant predictors of risk for reading difficulties in L2 while performance on L1 sentence repetition, phonological awareness, and tense marking tests in kindergarten were the best predictors of risk for L1 and L2 oral language difficulties. Both fall- and spring-kindergarten predictors predicted Grade 1 outcomes to a significant extent, with the spring-kindergarten predictors being more accurate. These results provide support for distinctive risk profiles for L2 oral language and reading difficulty and, furthermore, argue that assessment of L1 abilities can be used to make reasonably accurate predictions of later reading and/or oral language learning difficulties in L2 students. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

摘要：This study tested three hypotheses about the direct and indirect contributions of derivational morphological awareness to English reading comprehension in sixth-grade students from differing language backgrounds (n= 952). Students included Spanish-speaking, Filipino-speaking, and Vietnamese-speaking language minority learners as well as native English speakers. Multiple-group structural equation modeling indicated that morphological awareness made a significant direct contribution to reading comprehension, controlling for reading vocabulary and word reading fluency. Morphological awareness also made a significant indirect contribution to reading comprehension via reading vocabulary, but not via word reading fluency. Effects were similar across the four language groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in English reading comprehension for students from a variety of home language backgrounds. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study introduces the educational assistant robots that we developed for foreign language learning and explores the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) which is in its early stages. To achieve this purpose, a course was designed in which students have meaningful interactions with intelligent robots in an immersive environment. A total of 24 elementary students, ranging in age from ten to twelve, were enrolled in English lessons. A pre-test/post-test design was used to investigate the cognitive effects of the RALL approach on the students' oral skills. No significant difference in the listening skill was found, but the speaking skills improved with a large effect size at the significance level of 0.01. Descriptive statistics and the pre-test/post-test design were used to investigate the affective effects of RALL approach. The result showed that RALL promoted and improved students' satisfaction, interest, confidence, and motivation at the significance level of 0.01. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study describes the development and validation of the Extract the Base test (ETB), which assesses derivational morphological awareness. Scores on this test were validated for 580 monolingual students and 373 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in third through fifth grade. As part of the validation of the internal structure, which involved using the Generalized Partial Credit Model for tests with polytomous items, items on this test were shown to provide information about students of different abilities and also discriminate amongst such heterogeneous students. As part of the validation of the test's relationship to criterion, items were shown to correlate with measures of word identification, reading comprehension, and vocabulary measures. Differences in performances for fluent English students and ELLs, students of varied home language environments, and different grade levels were noted. Additionally, the task was validated using a dichotomous scoring system to provide reliability and validity information using this alternate scoring method. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：This study examined to what extent young second language (L2) learners showed morphological family size effects in L2 word recognition and whether the effects were grade-level related. Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (L2) and Dutch (first language, L1) children from second, fourth, and sixth grade performed a Dutch lexical decision task on words with varying family sizes. The responses of both L1 and L2 children were more accurate (in second grade) and faster (in fourth and sixth grades) for words with a large family than for words with a small family, even though the L2 children had a smaller vocabulary size in Dutch than the L1 children. These findings show how the spreading of semantic activation across languages can influence word recognition in L2 learners. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Vocabulary knowledge is of fundamental importance to reading comprehension, and many students lack the vocabulary knowledge necessary to facilitate learning to read. A study was conducted to determine the effects of an individualized, online vocabulary program on picture vocabulary test scores. Elementary summer school students (N = 43), entering grades 2-4, who scored poorly on a vocabulary pretest were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Students in the treatment condition received computer-delivered vocabulary instruction on a stratified sample of 100 words selected from 4000 of the most common words in written English. Posttest scores on a picture vocabulary test showed that students in the treatment condition outperformed control students by more than one standard deviation. The computer-adaptive, individualized instruction provided by this vocabulary program addresses a need for efficiency in remediation of vocabulary deficits. Further study is planned to determine whether improved vocabulary performance mediated by this computer assisted language learning (CALL) program might transfer to broader measures of vocabulary knowledge or reading comprehension. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines the Spanish use of students and teachers at a US two-way immersion school. Students and teachers from Grades 1, 3, and 8 (5-6-year-olds, 7-8-years-olds, and 12-13-year-olds, respectively) were observed and interviewed, and students completed questionnaires to determine what factors influenced their language of choice and their divergence from Spanish when it was the language of instruction. Although students showed an overall preference for English, particularly in interactions with peers, findings indicate that students' language background, culturally relevant teaching activities, teacher language use, and students' sensitivity to others' need for language accommodation influenced their use of Spanish with peers. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., chot-ure) or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., chot-ore). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic (ma lade), morphological (mal ade), morphological + 1 grapheme (mala de), or unsegmented (malade). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Despite acknowledgement of the limited English vocabularies demonstrated by many language minority (LM) learners, few studies have identified skills that relate to variation in vocabulary growth in this population. This study investigated the concurrent development of morphological awareness (i.e., students' understanding of complex words as combinations of meaningful smaller units) and vocabulary for LM learners in early adolescence. A cohort of Spanish-speaking LM learners (n = 90) was followed from fourth through seventh grade and assessed annually. Latent growth modeling results indicated a strong relationship between rates of growth in the two skills, such that learners with rapid growth in derivational morphological awareness also demonstrated rapid growth in vocabulary. Despite positive vocabulary growth during this period, the learners remained far below national norms. Findings highlight the need for language-focused instructional intervention for this population and suggest that morphological awareness may be a promising point of leverage for such instruction. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper examines the role of morphology in gradeschool children's learning to read nonpointed Hebrew. It presents two experiments testing the reading of morphologically based nonpointed pseudowords. One hundred seventy-one Hebrew-speaking children and adolescents in seven age/schooling groups (beginning and end of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 11th grade) and a group of adults participated in the study. Participants were administered two tasks of reading aloud nonpointed pseudowords with morphological composition: words in isolation and words in sentential context. Results pinpoint the developmental milestones on the way to efficient nonpointed word recognition in Hebrew: learning to use morphological pattern cues to fill in missing phonological information, where second grade is an important "watershed" period; and overcoming tomography by learning to detect morphosyntactic cues, an ability that develops more gradually and over a longer period than pattern recognition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. We show that French children in Grades 3 and 4 appear to use morphological information in spelling; spelling of sounds for which there are several alternatives was more accurate in derived than in nonderived words. The link between morphological awareness and spelling seems to be general, given that morphological awareness correlated with multiple spelling scores, including those that did not involve morphology. Further, the relationship between spelling and morphological awareness seems to be affected by both the developmental level of the child and the phonological structure of the items in the morphological awareness task. We discuss the implications of this research for clarifying the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We examined whether Grade 4, 6, and 8 children access the base form when reading morphologically complex words. We asked children to read words varying systematically in the frequency of the surface and base forms and in the transparency of the base form. At all grade levels, children were faster at reading derived words with high rather than low base frequencies when the words were of low surface frequency. Effects of the frequency and transparency of the base form on word reading accuracy occurred only in Grades 4 and 6. The results add to the growing body of evidence that children access the morphological structure of the words that they encounter in print. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The role of morphology in reading development was examined by measuring participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing either a hyphenated (e.g., ulko-ovi "front door") or concatenated (e.g., autopeli "racing game") compound. The participants were Finnish second, fourth, and sixth graders (aged 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively). Fast second graders and all four and sixth graders read concatenated compounds faster than hyphenated compounds. This suggests that they resort to slower morpheme-based processing for hyphenated compounds but prefer to process concatenated compounds via whole-word representations. In contrast, slow second graders' fixation durations were shorter for hyphenated than concatenated compounds. This implies that they process all compounds via constituent morphemes and that hyphenation comes to aid in this process. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined the abilities of young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to identify quickly new words from a nonostensive, indirect teaching context (known as fast- mapping) and their ability to commit the words to memory. Seventy-five fourth-grade EFL learners heard novel words embedded in sentences. They were then tested for their ability to fast-map the novel words to their referents and to recognize the new words. Six months later, the children were further tested for retention of the novel words and ability to commit the novel words to memory in a deliberate word-learning task. These young EFL learners were able to fast-map a novel word they had heard only once or twice and avoid mapping the novel word onto another new referent. They were also able to retain the mapping immediately after the exposure. However, the retention rate was low after 6 months when they were retested. Children's fast-mapping and deliberate word-learning performances related to phonological awareness of the native language and their existing English vocabulary. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In this longitudinal study we investigated whether different distributions of instructional time would have differential effects on the acquisition of English by young (aged 11-12 years) French-speaking learners. Eleven classes of Grade 6 students (N = 230) in two versions of a similar intensive English as a second language program were followed throughout their intensive experience. In one program, the 400 hours of instruction were concentrated in a 5-month block; in the other, the 400 hours were experienced in a series of intensive exposures across the full 10-month academic year. Language development was compared across the two contexts four times via a battery of comprehension and production measures. Overall, the findings showed substantial progress over time for both groups, with no clear learning advantage for either concentrating or distributing the intensive experience. These results are consistent with research comparing the effects of massed and distributed conditions on the learning of complex skills in other domains. The practical implications of the findings for the organization of instructional time for second language learning, as well as directions for future research in which variables such as age, proficiency, and learning targets are manipulated, are discussed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined Japanese elementary school students' motivational orientations for learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and fundamental psychological needs from a self-determination theory perspective, exploring the relations between motivational orientations (e.g., intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, introjected regulation, and external regulation) and basic psychological needs (e.g., autonomy, competence, and relatedness). An exploratory factor analysis of the motivational orientations of 505 fifth and sixth grade students of Japanese public elementary schools showed that this is composed by three factors: intrinsic motivation, introjected-and-identified regulation, and external regulation. Results showed a pattern of correlations reflecting a continuum of increasing self-determination from less self-determined forms of motivation to more self-determined forms of motivation. This study also assessed whether different types of basic psychological needs are linked to motivational orientations. Results show that psychological needs are more strongly related to intrinsic motivation than to less self-determined forms of motivation. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This study investigated the impact of content-based language instruction (CBLI) on EFL young learners' motivated behaviours, namely attention, engagement, and eager volunteering, and classroom verbal interaction. Situational factors play vital roles in shaping language learners' motivation particularly in EFL contexts. While many private schools implement CBLI programmes in Taiwan as it has been proved elsewhere that such language programmes improve language learners' motivation and academic performance in ESL contexts, such as US and Canada, the effects CBLI might have on EFL young learners have never been investigated in Taiwan. Twenty-five six-year-old year one primary students participated in this study. Both classroom observation implementing Spada and Frohlich's [Spada, N., Frohlich, M., 1995. COLT Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching Observation Scheme: Coding Conventions and Applications. Macquarie University, National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Sydney, Australia.] Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme and qualitative analysis of classroom video taping revealed that learners tend to participate more actively in subject-learning classes than language-input classes and have benefited from the programme in terms of eagerness to volunteer and classroom verbal output. Although the differences of the subjects' attention level and engagement between content-focused lessons and language-focused lessons were not evident, there was a dramatic improvement in both types of lessons over six weeks. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This study investigated children's motivation for learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and intrinsic motivation for learning in general. The participants were 268 third-sixth graders in a public school in Japan. Data were collected using two questionnaires, one measuring motivation for learning EFL and the other investigating intrinsic motivation for studying in general. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) indicated that intrinsic motivation for studying in general as well as motivation for learning EFL of the participating students generally decline from third through sixth grades. The results of a multiple-regression analysis indicate that curiosity is a predictor of intrinsic motivation for learning EFL, interest in foreign countries, and instrumental motivation; enjoyment is a positive predictor of intrinsic motivation for learning EFL and interest in foreign countries; endogenous attribution is a negative predictor of instrumental motivation, and internal causality is a positive predictor of instrumental motivation. It can be suggested that a developmental decline in intrinsic motivation for studying in general might influence English lessons. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]