In a world driven by literacy, there is still unfortunately a stigma about teachers who are not English, language arts or reading teachers, undertaking teaching of reading skills and/or strategies in their courses. The maths world still does not accept reading as a major component; however, the consequences are too noticeable to ignore. It is time…

Hart and Risley's (1995) concept of a "word gap" (aka "language gap") is widely used to describe inferior cognitive development and lower academic achievement as by-products of the language patterns of families from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In recent decades, this line of deficit research has proliferated and…

Promoting students' self-regulatory capacity in vocabulary learning has been one of the instructional goals in language education. Learning strategies and motivational beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy) are the key, interrelated factors of self-regulated learning, which are crucial for learners' academic performance. This study investigated Chinese…

There remains a lack of published empirical data on the substantive outcomes of higher learning and the establishment of quality processes for determining them. Studies that do exist are nationally focused with available rankings of institutions reflecting neither the quality of teaching and learning nor the diversity of institutions. This article…

It is proposed that research on neurological organization, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence can contribute to understanding the relationship between second language learning processes and academic achievement. Relevant research in these areas and in the field of neurolinguistics is reviewed, with several themes or topics…

Studies second and third grade Spanish and English native speakers' proficiency in both languages and academic achievement, following exposure to extended-length bilingual/immersion program. Considers theoretical assumptions regarding language-thought relationship. Results link bilingualism and achievement. Identifies two language-proficiency…

A study was conducted to examine the associations among the processes, skills, and content of the writing of children aged 9 through 14 years. A further objective was to explore the impact of developmetal changes by comparing the performance of children at the 9-10, 11-12, and 13-14 year age-levels. Subjects were 340 average students and 268…

A study of the relationship between university-level second language development and previous language and other experience is described. The study, in its early stages at the time of writing, is being conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and involves students of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This report describes the subjects…

Papers in this report were presented at a conference on text characteristics, convened as part of the Learning from Text Project. The foreword describes the University of California and California State University Joint Projects Steering Committee project to determine the relationship between ability to learn from text and academic achievement,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: (1) conceptualization of main idea by special admission college freshmen; (2) the interactive effects of field dependence and adjunct questions on learning from prose; (3) an art based…

The present experiment investigated: (1) the effect of pictorial elaboration on low socioeconomic-status Mexican-American children's long term memory for noun pairs; (2) the effects of labeling mode on estimates of paired-associate acquisition and retention; and (3) the interrelationships between paired-associate task performance and school…

Papers on language processing, culture, and language learning and teaching include: "A Theory of Intelligence as Semiosis: With a Couple of Comments on Interlanguage Development" (John W. Oller, Jr.); "Along the Way: Interlanguage Systems in Second Language Acquisition" (Larry Selinker); "Strategy and Tactics in Second Language Acquisition"…