Extramural exposure, through activities such as watching TV, gaming, networking, and online reading, has become an important source of vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language, particularly when learners' first language (L1) has many cognates with English. Our study examined extramural vocabulary acquisition of 10th-grade L1…

The awarding organizations that create and administer high-stakes assessments for beginner-to-low-intermediate 16-year-old learners of French, German, and Spanish in England provide optional topic-driven word lists as guides for teachers and textbook writers. Given that these lists are developed by the awarding organizations, they exert a powerful…

The present meta-analysis aimed to summarize the extent to which second language vocabulary is learned from the most frequently researched word-focused activities: flashcards, word lists, writing, and fill-in-the-blanks. One hundred effect sizes from 22 studies were included in meta-regression analyses and administered separately for the…

Focus on form (FonF) studies have predominantly addressed its effectiveness in improving learners' syntactic, lexical, orthographic, and phonological knowledge. Extending the scope of this line of research to formulaic FonF practices, this study investigates the relative effectiveness of incidental FonF targeting formulaic versus nonformulaic…

This study investigated incidental learning of single-word items and collocations through listening to teacher talk. Although there are several studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through listening, no intervention studies have explicitly investigated the extent to which listening to teachers in a classroom context might…

This study examined the contributions of morphological awareness (MA) to second language (L2) word meaning inferencing in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese (N = 50). Three research questions were posed: Are L2 learners sensitive to the morphological structure of unknown multi-character words? Does first language (L1) MA contribute to L2…

This study examined how well second language (L2) recall and recognition vocabulary tests correlated with a reading test, how well each vocabulary test discriminated between reading proficiency levels, and how accurate each test was in predicting reading proficiency when compared with corpus studies. A total of 116 college-level learners of…

This study investigated the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary breadth and depth knowledge. One hundred and fifty first-year university students in China took the Vocabulary Levels Test, a meaning recall task, and the Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Test. The first two tests were used to elicit two types of vocabulary…

In this study, word knowledge and its relation to text comprehension was examined with 50 Chinese- and 20 Korean-speaking second language (L2) learners and 40 first language (L1) speakers of Japanese. Breadth and depth of word knowledge were assessed by a word-definition matching test and a word-associates selection test, respectively. Text…

While research suggests that study abroad (SA) benefits second language (L2) oral fluency, its benefits for other domains are less clear, especially for shorterterm programs, which are becoming more common. Additionally, studies investigating the relationship between cognitive capacity and benefits of SA report inconsistent patterns. In light of…

This study examined the abilities of young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to identify quickly new words from a nonostensive, indirect teaching context (known as fast- mapping) and their ability to commit the words to memory. Seventy-five fourth-grade EFL learners heard novel words embedded in sentences. They were then tested for…

This study investigates the contribution of second-language (L2) morphological awareness to foreign language reading comprehension. Tenth graders (n = 188) at a South Korean high school were assessed on 6 reading- and language-related variables: phonological decoding, listening comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, passage-level reading…

Over the past 2 decades, research has demonstrated that learner collaboration facilitates second language (L2) acquisition (Lapkin, Swain, & Smith, 2002; McDonough, 2004; Storch, 1998, 2004; Swain & Lapkin, 1998). Adopting a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Swain & Lapkin, 1998), the current study compared the effectiveness of collaborative and…

Discusses the "fill-in" test, explains how to construct it, and gives statistical evidence for its effectiveness in testing English as a foreign language reading comprehension. In addition, a comparison is made between this test and the more conventional multiple-choice and cloze tests, citing the advantages and disadvantages of each.…