Rules generalization in children with dyslexia.

BACKGROUND: Rule learning (RL) is the ability to extract and generalize higher-order repetition-based structures. Children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) often report difficulties in learning complex regularities in sequential stimuli, which might be due to the complexity of the rule to be learned. Learning high-order repetition-based rules represents a building block for the development of language skills. AIMS: This study investigates the ability to extract and generalize simple, repetition-based visual rules (e.g., ABA) in 8-11-year-old children without (TD) and with a diagnosis of Development Dyslexia (DD) and its relationship with language and reading skills. METHOD: Using a forced-choice paradigm, children were first exposed to a visual sequence containing a repetition-based rule (e.g., ABA) and were then asked to recognize familiar and novel rules generated by new visual elements. Standardized language and reading tests were also administered to both groups. RESULTS: The accuracy in recognizing rules was above chance for both groups, even though DD children were less accurate than TD children, suggesting a less efficient RL mechanism in the DD group. Moreover, visual RL was positively correlated with both language and reading skills. CONCLUSION: These results further confirm the crucial role of RL in the acquisition of linguistic skills and mastering reading abilities.

Flipped classroom in EFL: a teaching experience with pre-service teachers.

This research aims to test a flipped classroom model to improve students' English proficiency. To achieve this goal, two research questions were posed: RQ1 "Does the suggested model of flipped classroom teaching strategy increase the learners' accuracy in the use of grammar in the target language more than the non-flipped active-learning strategy used?" and RQ2 "Does the suggested model of Flipped Classroom teaching strategy increase learners' listening skills in the target language more than the non-flipped active-learning strategy used?" The participants involved in the study were 55 students from the Faculty of Education, University of Trnava (Slovakia), comprising 45 females and 10 males. All participants were pre-service teachers of English language and literature in their first year of undergraduate studies. The research had a semi-experimental pre-test/post-test design which was given to the control and the experimental group. The results show that students in the flipped classroom had a statistically significant positive effect on the participants' listening skills. As for grammar, both the control and the research group improved, but the results were not statistically significant. These findings partially match former studies, where language accuracy was also an indicator of flipped classroom success. The implications of this research are high since listening, often referred to as the "Cinderella" of language skills, has frequently been overlooked in EFL classes, leading to students not reaching expected proficiency levels.

Overlooked advantages of interactive book reading in early childhood? A systematic review and research agenda.

Previous reviews of the nature and consequences of adult-child book reading have focused on seeking impacts of interactive reading on the acquisition of vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. In this systematic review we examined to what extent there has been systematic study of the effects of interactive reading on four less frequently studied developmental outcomes important to children's academic and life prospects: socio-emotional and socio-cognitive (SEL) skills, narrative skills, grammar, and world knowledge. We identified 67 studies of interactive reading that met the inclusion criteria and that examined the targeted outcomes, using either experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, or single-group intervention methods. We found that studies of effects on grammar and world knowledge outcomes were very sparsely represented; though narrative was often studied as an outcome, the wide variation in conceptualizing and assessing the construct hampered any clear conclusion about book-reading effects. The most robust research strand focused on SEL skill outcomes, though here too the outcome assessments varied widely. We speculate that better instrumented approaches to assessing vocabulary and emergent literacy have led to the persistent emphasis on these domains, despite robust evidence of only modest associations, and argue that work to develop sound shared measures of narrative and SEL skills would enable cross-study comparison and the accumulation of findings. In addition, we note that the various studies implicated different explanatory principles for the value of reading with children: specific interactional features (open-ended questions, following the child's lead, expanding child utterances) or content features (emotion-enhanced books, talk about mental states, science topics), raising another topic for more focused study in the future.

What Impacts Early Language Skills? Effects of Social Disparities and Different Process Characteristics of the Home Learning Environment in the First 2 Years.

It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children's lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status (SES) of the family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children's language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn't take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), longitudinally assessed process characteristics (sensitivity in the sense of maternal responsivity to the child's behavior and signals in mother-child interaction; maternal stimulation behavior which goes beyond the child's actual level of action and development; frequency of joint picture book reading) and structural characteristics (mother's education, equivalised household income, parental occupational status) were considered. Language skills (vocabulary and grammar) of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument (child language checklist). Results showed that (1) all three process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) are associated with the family's SES; (2) across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children's vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; (3) despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and (4) socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment.