There is broad consensus on the need to foster oral skills in middle school due to their inherent importance and because they serve as a tool for learning and acquiring other competences. In order to facilitate the assessment of communicative competence, we hereby propose a model which establishes five key dimensions for effective oral communication: interaction management; multimodality and prosody; textual coherence and cohesion; argumentative strategies; and lexicon and terminology. Based on this model, we developed indicators to measure the proposed dimensions, thus generating a self-report tool to assess oral communication in middle school. Following an initial study conducted with 168 students (mean age = 12.47 years, SD = 0.41), we selected 22 items with the highest discriminant power, while in a second study carried out with a sample of 960 students (mean age 14.11 years, SD = 0.97), we obtained evidence concerning factorial validity and the relationships between oral skills, emotional intelligence and metacognitive strategies related to metacomprehension. We concluded that the proposed model and its derived measure constitute an instrument with good psychometric properties for a reliable and valid assessment of students’ oral competence in middle school.

This study investigated verbal imitation from a multimodal point of view, considering the mutual influence of children’s and adults’ participation. Sixteen Spanish-speaking children were observed longitudinally at 21, 24, and 30 months of age in natural settings. We analyzed the multimodal characteristics of children’s and adults’ repetitions, considering whether they were verbal, verbal-gestural, or gestural. In addition, we also analyzed the multimodal characteristics of the utterances that were repeated (source). Measures of vocabulary and grammatical levels were also taken into account at the three points in development. Results showed that verbal-gestural repetitions were frequent in the speech of children and adults, although not as frequent as verbal repetitions. Nevertheless, verbal-gestural speech was reproduced more frequently than verbal speech. Adults were more likely to reproduce children’s speech when it included gestures, which was also related to children’s linguistic level. Furthermore, children and adults synchronize their multimodal communicative behaviors, coordinating the modality of their repetitions with the modality of the source speech. The results are discussed taking into account the need to study the multimodal characteristics of child-directed speech, as well as the need to study verbal repetition and multimodal communicative behaviors simultaneously, as forms of interaction that are essential to language development.

Spontaneous verbal repetition is part of early adult–child conversational interchanges. However, most of the studies devoted to verbal repetition analyse child-produced and adult-produced repetition independently. The aim of this study is to analyse verbal repetition sequences that are extended by children and adults participating in turns. We carried out a longitudinal study of 17 parent–child dyads, which included children from the ages of 21 to 30 months. Results show that the frequency of these sequences decreases in the older age range, while the frequency of simple verbal repetitions increases. Participation in repetition sequences is related to the lexical and grammatical development that occurs within the younger ages. Verbal repetition sequences are discussed in terms of their role in early interactions, since they promote attention to the interlocutor and the co-construction of linguistic structures.

Multilingualism has become the norm in families all over the world. These families need to juggle their children’s linguistic identity and integration in their contexts. They may also need professional advice about which language(s) they should use at home, especially when children present with developmental disorders. There is a dearth of studies addressing the role parental views play in home-language maintenance with children with developmental disorders. This study is conducted in Spain, where Spanish is the national language, along with local languages in certain regions, as well as foreign languages. This qualitative study aimed to deepen our understanding of the views about language choice of multilingual families whose children have either typical language development or a developmental disorder in Spain. We recruited 26 parents of multilingual children aged between 5 and 10 years, from different linguistic backgrounds. Semi-structured online interviews were conducted. The data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. The findings illustrate the complexity and nuance of parents’ views and decisions regarding language choice in their contexts. The themes included identity and belonging, as well as the influences of external advice on parental decisions. It is important that professionals such as speech–language therapists understand these views to enable them to deliver family-centered care.