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This study aimed at improving oral development in the primary school of Ecuador, where teaching English at an early age focuses mainly on expanding reading and writing as productive skills. The purpose of this action research was to individually examine how the use of storytelling through picture description as visual support could benefit communicative skills among a group of second-grade students from a private school in Guayaquil. The study considered vocabulary, organization, and fluency as the basis of oral development using quantitative and qualitative instruments. A pre and post-A1 level speaking assessment measured the improvement of vocabulary and fluency. Results showed that there was an improvement of four points in the descriptive statistics (minimum, maximum and mean). The paired T-samples test revealed the study was highly reliable with a score of p = 0.000. There are few studies related to teaching English as a foreign language in early education worldwide and South A...

Language comprehension is expectation-based (e.g. Venhuizen et al. 2019). Statistical regularities in the linguistic input set up expectations that are utilized during incremental interpretation. A central part of language comprehension involves assigning grammatical functions (GFs) to NPs, thereby determining how participants are related to events or states. In many languages, speakers have many ways to encode GFs morphosyntactically (e.g. word order, case), and their encoding preferences depend on an interplay between NP properties (e.g., animacy) and verb semantic properties (e.g., volitionality) (Hörberg 2016). This creates complex statistical patterns in the distribution of these GF information types that can be utilized during on-line GF processing. I will present evidence indicating that GF assignment in transitive sentences in written Swedish is expectation-based, drawing upon such statistical patterns. I present a corpus-based probabilistic model of incremental GF assignmen...

This study aimed at improving oral development in the primary school of Ecuador, where teaching English at an early age focuses mainly on expanding reading and writing as productive skills. The purpose of this action research was to individually examine how the use of storytelling through picture description as visual support could benefit communicative skills among a group of second-grade students from a private school in Guayaquil. The study considered vocabulary, organization, and fluency as the basis of oral development using quantitative and qualitative instruments. A pre and post-A1 level speaking assessment measured the improvement of vocabulary and fluency. Results showed that there was an improvement of four points in the descriptive statistics (minimum, maximum and mean). The paired T-samples test revealed the study was highly reliable with a score of p = 0.000. There are few studies related to teaching English as a foreign language in early education worldwide and South A...