Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds' (N = 32) learning of a new word for…

This article reports on a study that combined two strands of research: studies of incidental vocabulary learning and studies of the classroom lexical environment (in which vocabulary exposure is measured and the potential for learning estimated). The study looked at the orthographic lexical environment in a language classroom over a semester and…

This study examines the effects of corpus use on learning L2 collocations. The primary aim of this study was to investigate how the information extracted from corpus data helped learners memorize and output collocations. The effects of corpus use were examined by comparing the effects of dictionary use. 55 intermediate EFL learners from a…

Vocabulary knowledge plays a primary role in the ability to communicate in a second/foreign language. The present study examined how different input or output modalities combined with audiovisual input provided by TED-ED videos could foster vocabulary learning. In doing so, some written tasks and exercises were used to facilitate the process.…

Academic lectures are potential sources of vocabulary learning for second language learners studying at universities where English is the medium of instruction, as well as those in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. Topic-related vocabulary is likely to occur frequently in academic texts, and academic speech consists of a reasonable…

Although research and new technologies have introduced different ways of observing microorganisms, including scanning and electron microscopy, these methods are expensive and require equipment that is typically not found in a middle school classroom. The transmission-through-dye technique (TTD; Gregg et al., 2010), a new optical microscopy method…

The present study employed a mixed methods quasi-experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of applying motivational strategies and mental imagery (i.e. visionary techniques) to facilitate second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Four treatment sessions were integrated into a six-week language course offered to 150 intermediate students…

The study investigated the effect of marginal glossing and frequency of occurrence on the incidental learning of six aspects of vocabulary knowledge through reading in the second language (L2) Chinese. Participants were 30 intermediate L2 Chinese learners in an American public university. The MACOVA tests indicated that the treatment group who…

Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For…

Sixty target words were selected from two sets of graded readers. One set contained three readers with the same title, "The Railway Children," and the other set, three books about Sherlock Holmes. Students chose one of the two sets to read and were given a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a five-week delayed posttest on their…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…

The objective of this study is to determining the change in secondary school students' cognitive structure related to the concepts of environmental problems. There were 21th grades students of two middle schools in Kirsehir. In this research, the students participated in outdoor activities on environmental education programmes during 5 weekends…

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), a large base of research has shown the great influence of L2 reading on L2 vocabulary acquisition. Nevertheless, researchers have also found that acquiring new vocabulary happens rather gradually and in small amounts. Without altering the incidental nature of vocabulary acquisition through…

This paper reports results from two studies conducted to examine word learning among preschool children in group book reading while we developed a scalable method of teaching words during book reading. We sought to identify factors that fostered both depth and breadth of learning by varying the type of information children heard about words while…

Children's frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than…