Language competence in various communicative activities in L2 largely depends on the learners' size of vocabulary. The target vocabulary of adult L2 learners should be between 2,000 high frequency words (a critical threshold) and 10,000 word families (for comprehension of university texts). For a TOEIC test, the threshold is estimated to be…

Explicitly informing students about learning goals has been argued to foster intentional learning. This study tested three theoretical hypotheses regarding the facilitating effects of learning goals by investigating 72 students' actual reading behaviour and cognitive processes (i.e., the use of learning goals). Participants studied a text…

Lexical competence constitutes a crucial aspect in L2 learning, since building a rich repository of words is considered indispensable for successful communication. CALL practitioners have experimented with various kinds of computer-mediated glosses to facilitate L2 vocabulary building in the context of incidental vocabulary learning. Intentional…

The aim of this study is to optimize CALL environments as a learning tool rather than a gloss, focusing on the learning of polysemous words which refer to spatial relationship between objects. A lot of research has already been conducted to examine the efficacy of visual glosses while reading L2 texts and has reported that visual glosses can be…

This research was conducted as part of Project CIRCLE, a collaborative project between the University of Texas at Austin College of Education, the Austin Independent School District, and the Eanes Independent School District. The intent of the project was to establish collaborative knowledge-building communities in high school classrooms among…

The effects of visual grouping strategies involving animated and static graphic presentations on learning were studied. Also studied was the ability of students to learn a scientific rule presented incidentally in an animated sequence in the hope of replicating results from previous research. A total of 39 fourth graders participated in an…

Effects of animated graphics presentations on incidental learning and the degree to which various computer practice activities contain intrinsically motivating characteristics were studied with 70 fourth graders learning about Newton's laws of motion. Incidental learning occurred without sacrifice of intentional learning. Students were highly…

Do children and adults who are novices in their use of microcomputers differ in their approaches when learning a computer language? Ten fourth- and fifth-grade students and 10 graduate students were observed learning the language BASIC on microcomputers. All sessions were tape recorded and verbalizations subsequently coded. Verbalizations, the…

The problem addressed in the study was whether 10- and 11-year-old children, collaborating within a computer-supported classroom, could engage in progressive inquiry that exhibits an essential principal feature of mature scientific inquiry: namely, engagement in increasingly deep levels of explanation. Technical infrastructure for the study was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of implementing cooperative learning and objectives with computer-based instruction (CBI). Subjects were 125 fifth and sixth grade students. Cooperative dyads and individuals worked through a CBI earth science program that contained either instructional objectives, advance organizers, or no…