District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to test the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

This report summarizes results from a sample of Dual Language (DL) Program classroom observations conducted in the 2017-2018 school year. Instructional specialists used an instrument to rate aspects of program implementation which included classroom environment and instructional methods.

Purpose: This clinical focus article will highlight the importance and role of morphological awareness (MA) across orthographies, in particular, the role it plays in reading development, specifically with bilingual populations. MA supports reading acquisition and development beyond other predictors of reading, such as phonological awareness,…

This article explores some of the common mathematical difficulties that 11- to 16-year-old students experience with respect to their learning of physics. The definition of "understanding" expressed in the article is in the sense of transferability of mathematical skills from topic to topic within physics as well as between the separate…

As students move through the grades, content area learning becomes increasingly significant for reading, writing, and speaking tasks. One research-evidenced approach to actively engaging adolescent learners in acquiring, remembering, and using academic vocabulary in reading, writing and speaking tasks across disciplines is multisensory structured…

A 20-year veteran teacher of college Spanish, the author decided to take an intensive First-Year German course during one summer. The author found the German class was not only a great opportunity to acquire another language, but a rich source of insight about the language teaching and the learning process itself. Not only did she take German…

Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based…

Works of art, whether modern or classical, can provide students with vehicles for communication. Whether a painting ignites a student's imagination while listening to a story or transports him into a cultural or historical situation portrayed by the artist, using art in educators' thematic units can double their chances of having students…

This paper presents a theoretical account for how learners might draw upon L1 lexical and conceptual knowledge when making assumptions about connections between words in the L2 lexicon. It is suggested that L1 lexical knowledge can be both a help and a hindrance when forming L2 connections, particularly in respect to collocations. Furthermore,…

Attempts to identify a specific learning effect attributed to the use of concordance software by language learners. In a series of tests involving transfer of word knowledge to novel context, a small, consistent gain was found for words introduced through concordances.(25 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the effects of Spanish-English bilinguals' first-language syntactic knowledge on the guesses they make about the meanings of new words encountered in English contexts. Examines a particular type of transfer to understand the process of vocabulary acquisition in second-language readers. (48 references) (Author/CK)

This article reports on an introspective study that examined the relationship between first language L1; Farsi lexicalization of the concepts represented by the second language L2; English target words and learners' inferencing behavior while reading English texts. Participants were 20 Farsi-speaking university students of English as a foreign…

Evaluates strategies undertaken to improve students' foreign language reading competence. The article focuses on the ability of pupils to cope with reading texts containing unknown vocabulary, students' motivation to overcome difficulties in comprehension, the best methods to attain a permanent vocabulary gain from reading, and the transfer of…

A university faculty member developed first-year French instructional materials with a computer authoring program. The materials covered three classes of regular verb conjugations, noncognate vocabulary, and major grammatical structures. Initial results indicate the exercises helped students learn the material and successfully transfer it to other…