Second language education context and home language effect: language dissimilarities and variation in immigrant students’ outcomes.

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as age and home language can be used in the teaching environment to predict and examine the development outcomes of SL students in verbal reasoning and vocabulary tasks. Hundred and six Portuguese participants, SL learners, between 8 and 17 years old, were assessed in vocabulary frequency, verbal analogies and morphological extraction tasks. In alphabetic languages (Romance languages), immigrant students (in a SL learning situation) with a strong linguistic distance (a home language with a very different orthographic foundation) are expected to struggle in language learning in spite of being aware of strategies that can improve their skills. The storage and combination of morphemes can be a demanding task for individual speakers at different levels. Cognitive mapping is strongly based on linguistic features of L1 development. Results show that home language, not age, was a significant predictor of variation in student’s outcomes. Speakers of alphasyllabary languages (Indo-Aryan languages as L1) were the poorest performers, the ‘linguistic distance’ of their languages explaining the performance’ result

What’s on : cultural diversity and new educational approaches for specific school populations

Education policy regarding the immigrant school population is of upmost importance for current scientific research in social sciences. Digital resources and assessment instruments are challenges in education and psychology research, demanding knowledge from school community to address specific traits of learning and academic achievement. The education of future generation should be conceived based on multicultural idea of existing different cognitive profiles that have different selfregulations in learning environments as language acquisition development process. Immigrant school population is frequently neglected by school management and become emergent the development of open educational resources, validated tools and digital materials. Method: This post-doctoral research is focused in the development of open repository of paper and digital resources for school education, particularly addressing educational approaches for Portuguese second language learners. In current empirical study we are assessing a large sample of immigrant students from public schools, aged between 8 and 17 years old, learning Portuguese as second language, with heterogeneous profiles, in Lisbon district, from several levels of education. The main goal is to determine learner’s cognitive profiles in second language setting, and which common performances we can find between different home language speakers answering to 15 tests in the same circumstances. We believe that accurate evaluation tests can produce new changes in learning environments of linguistic minorities. Preliminary results will be discussed regarding three hypotheses about verbal behaviors in cognates, idiomatic utterances and verbal analogy tasks according to three variables: age, home language and exposure to second language. The variation of these predictors might have influence in cognitive and linguistic profiles. Additionally will be evaluated the reliability and difficulty of each task to provide a more psychometric sound measure than traditional other tools of assessment in national second language area. Findings will demonstrate new understanding about different speaking proficiency levels, rationales about predictive factors, and cutoffs to be considered as standards that will be adopted for the specific portuguese diagnostic test that is in validation process. Some of these new insights could be extended to the general investigation of proficiency and cognitive decoding skills in second language research, mainly for European languages context.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

What’s on: Cultural diversity and new educational approaches for specific school populations

Education policy regarding the immigrant school population is of upmost importance for current scientific research in social sciences. Digital resources and assessment instruments are challenges in education and psychology research, demanding knowledge from school community to address specific traits of learning and academic achievement. The education of future generation should be conceived based on multicultural idea of existing different cognitive profiles that have different selfregulations in learning environments as language acquisition development process. Immigrant school population is frequently neglected by school management and become emergent the development of open educational resources, validated tools and digital materials. Method: This post-doctoral research is focused in the development of open repository of paper and digital resources for school education, particularly addressing educational approaches for Portuguese second language learners. In current empirical study we are assessing a large sample of immigrant students from public schools, aged between 8 and 17 years old, learning Portuguese as second language, with heterogeneous profiles, in Lisbon district, from several levels of education. The main goal is to determine learner’s cognitive profiles in second language setting, and which common performances we can find between different home language speakers answering to 15 tests in the same circumstances. We believe that accurate evaluation tests can produce new changes in learning environments of linguistic minorities. Preliminary results will be discussed regarding three hypotheses about verbal behaviors in cognates, idiomatic utterances and verbal analogy tasks according to three variables: age, home language and exposure to second language. The variation of these predictors might have influence in cognitive and linguistic profiles. Additionally will be evaluated the reliability and difficulty of each task to provide a more psychometric sound measure than traditional other tools of assessment in national second language area. Findings will demonstrate new understanding about different speaking proficiency levels, rationales about predictive factors, and cutoffs to be considered as standards that will be adopted for the specific portuguese diagnostic test that is in validation process. Some of these new insights could be extended to the general investigation of proficiency and cognitive decoding skills in second language research, mainly for European languages context

Adolescent Literacy and Textbooks: An Annotated Bibliography

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, provides an annotated bibliography of research on textbook design and reading comprehension for fourth through twelfth grade, arranged by topic. Calls for a dialogue between publishers and researchers

Electrophysiological Correlates of Reading Processes in School Age Children

Orthographic and phonological decoding skills are known to be important for learning to read. In an attempt to develop physiologically based screening tools which may identify children at risk for developing these skills, Auditory Event Related Potentials (ERP) were recorded from 84 nine-year-olds to a series of Probe tones while they were engaged in a series of orthographic, phonological, and spelling tasks. Electrodes were applied over both hemispheres at the frontal, temporal, and parietal regions of the scalp. Analyses focus on the relationship between hemisphere differences and children\u27s performance on each of these tasks

Reduced structural connectivity between left auditory thalamus and the motion-sensitive planum temporale in developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by the inability to acquire typical reading and writing skills. Dyslexia has been frequently linked to cerebral cortex alterations; however recent evidence also points towards sensory thalamus dysfunctions: dyslexics showed reduced responses in the left auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body, MGB) during speech processing in contrast to neurotypical readers. In addition, in the visual modality, dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left visual thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus, LGN) and V5/MT, a cerebral cortex region involved in visual movement processing. Higher LGN-V5/MT connectivity in dyslexics was associated with the faster rapid naming of letters and numbers (RANln), a measure that is highly correlated with reading proficiency. We here tested two hypotheses that were directly derived from these previous findings. First, we tested the hypothesis that dyslexics have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the auditory motion-sensitive part of the left planum temporale (mPT). Second, we hypothesized that the amount of left mPT-MGB connectivity correlates with dyslexics RANln scores. Using diffusion tensor imaging based probabilistic tracking we show that male adults with developmental dyslexia have reduced structural connectivity between the left MGB and the left mPT, confirming the first hypothesis. Stronger left mPT-MGB connectivity was not associated with faster RANnl scores in dyslexics, but in neurotypical readers. Our findings provide first evidence that reduced cortico-thalamic connectivity in the auditory modality is a feature of developmental dyslexia, and that it may also impact on reading related cognitive abilities in neurotypical readers

The Effects of Word Form Rehearsal and Language Experience on Fast Mapping in Young Bilingual Adults

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of both word-form rehearsal and language experience on fast mapping production and comprehension skills. This experiment studied thirty Spanish-English bilingual young adults. The experimental portion of the study contained four main parts: (1) word-form rehearsal, (2) presentation (3) production, and (4) comprehension. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of three word-form rehearsal conditions. Each participant began the experiment by repeating a set of sixteen novel nonwords either fifteen times each, five times each, or zero times (control group). Next, the participants were presented a visual and auditory nonword stimulus simultaneously. Next, each participant was aurally asked to verbally produce the nonword when presented with a visual stimulus. Finally, each participant was asked to identify a specific visual stimulus that corresponds with an aurally resented nonword. The participants completed these four tasks in two phonologically similar anguages (English and Spanish) and one phonologically unfamiliar language (Cantonese). Results demonstrated that the more speech training a participant undergoes, the better the performance on production fast mapping tasks. Results also showed a significant language effect, with participants performing better on fast mapping tasks in the familiar languages (English and Spanish)