In response to McLean (2021), Laufer (2021) makes three claims which are either not supported by research or are based on studies with important limitations. First is that a vocabulary size, instead of a level, can be used to match learners with lexically appropriate materials despite test creators and research not supporting this. Second is that…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

How do children learn the meanings of number words like "one," "two," and "three"? Whereas many words that children learn in early acquisition denote individual things and their properties (e.g., cats, colors, shapes), numerals, like quantifiers, denote the properties of sets. Unlike quantifiers such as "several" and "many," numerals denote…

Rural students are at risk for vocabulary underdevelopment and often have less access to educational resources. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effectiveness of an Internet-based Speech/Language Pathologist (SLP)-teacher consultation to support rural teachers' vocabulary instruction to improve their students' lexical…

Enhancing young children's early literacy achievement is a top priority in many countries. There is a considerable body of research demonstrating young children's language development as a critical factor in reading and later academic success. Implementation of high quality literacy instruction has the potential to improve literacy…

Adolescent English language learners (ELLs) with learning difficulties face many challenges when reading in the content areas. In this article, we review what research tells us about how best to support ELLs' reading comprehension and content learning. We draw from recent research syntheses as well as individual studies. We highlight one…

This formative experiment explored the extent to which two instructional frameworks that varied in the explicitness of academic vocabulary instruction, comprehension strategy instruction, and supports for student autonomy influenced reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, perceptions of autonomy supports, and reading engagement in…

Poor comprehenders are generally students who have significant language-learning deficits. A particular problem for students with poor comprehension is that they have difficulty learning new vocabulary because they are inclined to read less, and are unable to apply new meanings to unfamiliar words. This leads to the situation where the gap widens…

"Reading Mastery," one of several curriculum components that constitute the Scientific Research Associate's Direct Instruction curriculum, is designed to provide systematic instruction in English language reading. "Reading Mastery" is a full-year curriculum and is available in two versions, "Reading Mastery Classic"…

The study examines the impact of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on lexical inferencing and retention. Independent variables include (a) a topic familiarity questionnaire, and (b) a passage sight vocabulary test. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Ss read narratives…

A mixed methods study was conducted to examine female juvenile delinquents' opinions and reactions on nine language-based literacy activities. Forty-one participants ranging in age from 13 to 18 years responded to a survey consisting of nine multiple-choice items and one open-ended question concerning the usefulness of activities. Quantitative and…

Examines whether vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language by inferring the meaning of a word from its context makes an important contribution toward the retention of the word in question so long as the meaning is correctly guessed. (49 references) (GLR)

A Bayesian approach to sensitivity of inferences to possible outliers involves recalculating marginal posterior distributions of parameters of interest under assumptions of heavy tails. This strategy is implemented in the hierarchical model setting through Gibbs sampling, a Monte Carlo technique, and illustrated through a reanalysis of data on…

This quasi-experimental study compared the effects of morphemic and contextual analysis instruction (MC) with the effects of textbook vocabulary instruction (TV) that was integrated into social studies textbook lessons. The participants were 157 students in eight fifth-grade classrooms. The results indicated that (a) TV students were more…

This empirical study examines how English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners use their vocabulary knowledge for inferring meanings of unknown words in reading comprehension. The data, collected through interviews with young adult ESL students in Canadian universities, indicate that: (a) semantic and morphological aspects of vocabulary knowledge…