Becky H Huang

Becky H Huang
The Ohio State University | OSU · School of Teaching and Learning

PhD from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

About

48
Publications
21,438
Reads
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824
Citations
Introduction
Dr. Becky H. Huang is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the acquisition and assessment of second language and literacy. Dr. Huang uses mainly quantitative research methods, but also conducts mixed methods studies and collaborates with researchers with qualitative orientations. She has published in leading applied linguistics and education journals.
Additional affiliations
June 2018 - present
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
August 2016 - February 2017
University of Texas at Austin
Position
  • Researcher
August 2013 - May 2018
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Education
June 2009 - August 2009
University of California, Berkeley
Field of study
  • Linguistics
August 2003 - June 2009
University of California, Los Angeles
Field of study
  • Educational Psychology
August 2003 - June 2006
University of California, Los Angeles
Field of study
  • Educational Psychology

Publications

Publications (48)
Article
Full-text available
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions The current study examined the language-reading relationship for bilingual students in two grade levels (grades 1 and 3) and for two reading outcomes (decoding and comprehension) to understand the contribution of oral language in English reading. The study also explored the potential mediating role of...
Article
Full-text available
The current study investigated the validity of a locally-developed university-level English as a Second Language (ESL) speaking placement test using a mixed-methods design. We adapted Messick’s integrative view of validity (1996) and Kane’s interpretation argument framework (2013) and focused on two sources of validity evidence: relations to other...
Article
Full-text available
Mandarin-English dual language immersion (ME-DLI) programs have been growing rapidly in recent decades. Most dual language immersion programs are not mandated by the school or district but are initiated based on parents' demands. To better understand the need for ME-DLI programs, this study explored factors associated with ethnic Chinese parents' d...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Systematic reviews of bilingual children's reading development are very limited, and none of which solely focus on predictors of reading difficulties among those with developmental language disorder (DLD). The present scoping review fills an important need by analyzing the recent research literature on the reading outcomes of bilingual chil...
Chapter
Full-text available
As the number of young multilinguals continues to grow globally, there is a parallel need for fair and effective assessment of multilingual development. This chapter aims to provide a state-of-the art picture of the critical and unique needs of assessing multilingual children from ages 3 to 11. We first define the “multilingual” population and surv...
Chapter
The chapter examined the English language and reading outcomes and the relationship between language and reading for two bilingual adolescent groups (Proficient Bilinguals and Emergent Bilinguals) and their English-only peers (n = 78 total). Participants completed a variety of English language assessments, and their scores from a standardized accou...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The study examined the contributions of Spanish and English oral narrative skills to English reading among 95 early elementary dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. This sample of first- and third-grade DLL children attended Spanish–English dual language immersion programs and received language and...
Article
An assumption underlying replacing traditional paper-based (PB) writing tests with computer-based (CB) tests is that CB writing tests are more authentic than PB tests (Lessien, 2013). This study tested this assumption by examining the effect of test mode on the situational and interactive authenticity of English as a second language (ESL) writing a...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The present scoping review seeks to fill an important need in the bilingual research and education community by analyzing the recent research literature on how teacher factors potentially influence young bilingual children's language outcomes. The research aims are twofold: synthesize the research findings on teacher factors that influence...
Article
Full-text available
The population of young language minority (LM) students is rapidly growing worldwide due to global migration and immigration trends. The increasing representation of young LM students in school settings creates high demand for the language assessment of LM students in order to meet the needs of stakeholders, such as governments and language program...
Article
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Given the increasing emphasis of communicative competence in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and the lack of validation research on speaking assessments for adolescent EFL learners, in the current study we examined the validity of the TOEFL Junior® speaking test, a new speaking assessment developed by Educational Testing Service. We ut...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the prevalence of the TOEFL test preparation courses, research on the impact of TOEFL test preparation courses on language learning and teaching is quite limited (Green, 2013; Huang, 2018). The current study investigated the washback effects of TOEFL preparation courses on students’ attitudes and TOEFL scores improvement. The study implemen...
Article
This article presents a critical review of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS), a large scale standardized English language proficiency (ELP) assessment developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and administered since 2004. TELPAS is used as an annual summative assessment for all English Learners (ELs) in grades K-...
Article
Full-text available
This test review aims to provide a critical evaluation of the English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA 21), a large-scale, standards-based English language proficiency testcurrently used in eight participating member states. The ELPA 21 assessment system was developed by a consortium to help English language learner (ELL)...
Article
Full-text available
Young children’s oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was...
Article
The aim of the current study is twofold: to examine the effects of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term second language (L2) outcomes in a minority/foreign language context; and to understand the interaction between input and other potential predictors of L2 outcomes, specifically environmental variables, learners’ motivation and language lear...
Article
Relatively little research has been devoted to examining the predictors of early foreign language learning outcomes despite the global trend of early foreign language instruction. The current study focused on two contextual predictors, learners’ socio-economic status (SES) and input, both of which have been demonstrated to play a prominent role in...
Article
Research on the English language outcomes of bilingual adolescents is limited, particularly for the subgroup of proficient bilingual adolescents who are not classified as limited English profi- cient. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the correlates of English language outcomes in a group of proficient bilingual adolescents in g...
Article
Full-text available
Whether tone language experience facilitates non-native tone perception is an area of research that previously yielded conflicting results, potentially because of the lack of systematical control of speaker normalization effects across studies. Under a high-variability testing condition with controlled speaker normalization cues, Cantonese (native...
Chapter
This entry discusses professional development in testing preparation for university‐level English as a second language (ESL) assessments. To allow for a more in‐depth discussion, the entry focuses on speaking assessments. It covers professional development in test preparation for both high‐stakes standardized English language proficiency tests, suc...
Article
Background/Context Children from Asian ethnic backgrounds currently constitute the second largest group of child immigrants in the United States. Although stereotyped as model minority students due to their academic and economic success, studies have revealed that many Asian immigrant students struggle in school. Research has also shown that, compa...
Preprint
The distinction between mass nouns (e.g., butter) and count nouns (e.g.,table) offers a test case for asking how the syntax and semantics ofnatural language are related, and how children exploit syntax-semanticsmappings when acquiring language. Virtually no studies have examined thisdistinction in classifier languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) due t...
Article
Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers' comprehension...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudov...
Article
Full-text available
The project aimed to examine the effect of raters' familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass's (2013) definition of a heritage learner as being so...
Article
Early foreign language (FL) programmes have grown rapidly worldwide in the past two decades, resting on the assumption that ‘earlier is better’ for learning a FL. However, the majority of empirical studies that investigated the ‘earlier is better’ hypothesis were conducted in naturalistic immersion contexts. Given the substantial differences in the...
Article
Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners’ foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who diff...
Article
This study reports on a critical review of the language demands contained in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS-ELA) with the aim of deriving important implications for the instruction of English language learners. The language demands of the CCSS-ELA were compared with those of existing English language arts (ELA) and...
Article
Rater effects, defined as the construct-irrelevant variation associated with rater characteristics, are critical to the reliability and validity of speaking assessments (Bachman et al., 1995; Kunnan, 2000). The current study investigates two under-explored characteristics among untrained raters: familiarity with the speakers' non-native accents and...
Article
The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118 Man...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., Munro et al. 1996, Flege et al. 1997). The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers...
Article
Full-text available
This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N=10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of Englis...
Article
English language development or proficiency (ELD/P) standards promise to play an important role in the instruction and assessment of the language development of English language learner (ELL) pre-K-12 students, but to do so effectively they must convey the progression of student language learning in authentic school contexts for authentic academ...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments explored two-to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of classifiers, mandatory morphemes for expressing quantities in many Asian languages. Classifiers are similar to measure words in English (e.g., a piece of apple; a cup of apples), with the main difference being that classifiers are also required when counting s...
Article
The present study piloted a survey-based measure of Opportunity to Learn (OTL) and Academic Language Exposure (ALE) in fourth grade science classrooms that sought to distinguish teacher practices with ELL (English language learner) and non-ELL students. In the survey, participant teachers reported on their instructional practices and the context in...
Article
Full-text available
The distinction between mass nouns (e.g., butter) and count nouns (e.g., table) offers a test case for asking how the syntax and semantics of natural language are related, and how children exploit syntax-semantics mappings when acquiring language. Virtually no studies have examined this distinction in classifier languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) d...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The count-mass distinction often served as a test case for asking how syntax and semantics are related, whether knowledge of one helps the acquisition of the other. Virtually no studies examined this distinction in classifier languages which supposedly lack the distinction. However, Cheng and Sybesma (1998) argued Mandarin as a classifier language...
Article
This study expands on previous National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) work that has undertaken the articulation of the academic language construct for broad educational purposes. The primary goal was to describe the language of textbook selections in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and organization of disc...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the types of errors produced by Chinese learners of English when attempting to pronounce [T] in reading passages and presents a system for automatically detect-ing these pronunciation errors. The system achieves an accuracy of 79.8%, compared to the inter-annotator exact agreement rate of 83.1%. In addition, speaker-level scores...

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