While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study…

I continue here the long-standing discussion on the familiar topic of whether subconscious language acquisition is more powerful than conscious language learning, with a focus on vocabulary, adding recent studies as well as older ones I missed in previous publications on this topic (e.g. Krashen, 2004).

Explicit strategy instruction combined with student-directed self-regulation in conjunction with cognitive strategies has proven effective in supporting low-achieving students' reading comprehension. Experts have extended 1 such approach, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) for the expository reading comprehension Think before reading,…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

Using Atkinson's Keyword Method--an imagery mnemonic for vocabulary learning--as a vehicle, this paper argues that even the most well-reasoned and explainable psychological outcomes need to be validated empirically. The paper provides 12 examples of applications of the keyword method in which an eminently reasonable cognitive outcome was…

A study investigated children's understanding (3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds) of the different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" as defined by the abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy of W. S. Hall, E. K. Scholnick, and A. T. Hughes. Results indicated that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and…

Reports a study which assessed and compared the verbal responses of good and poor readers at the end of the first grade using a paradigmatic-syntagmatic classification scale for responses. (JM)

Reports on three experiments that explored the metalinguistic competence of 26 deaf students to segment and manipulate their fingerspelled lexicons. Indicates their metalinguistic sophistication correlated selectively and significantly with reading success. Also reports on a training experiment that showed that deaf students identified more sight…

Addresses three questions: (1) What is involved in understanding a word or concept? (2) How do we presently measure word knowledge? (3) What are some alternative formats which teachers could utilize with their students? Suggests techniques such as paired word questions, categorizing, analogies, and sentence writing as ways to evaluate vocabulary…

Investigates the hypothesis that, in the case of individual similes, bits of lexical information, or word knowledge, are predictably and absolutely essential to the resolution of similes. (HOD)

Discusses how second-language reading research is focusing increasingly on the cognitive processes involved in reading--the interaction of lower-level, bottom-up processes such as vocabulary acquisition with high-level, top-down processes such as activating prior knowledge. This knowledge is combined with current research on learning with…

Reflecting the interdisciplinary emphasis that reading comprehension has received during the past decade, the articles in this volume deal with both the processes involved in reading and the instructional practices used in teaching it. The six articles devoted to reading processes deal specifically with the following topics: schemata,…

The "yes/no" method of vocabulary assessment requires students to indicate words they know from among a list of words and nonwords. Preliminary evidence gained from a study involving fifth grade students indicates that the method is superior in many ways to the multiple choice method of assessment. Analysis of "false alarms," cases in which…

Seventy-four high school seniors participated in a study that examined the construct validity of vocabulary tests and the nature of verbal ability by integrating findings and theories of cognitive psychology with those of differential psychology. The subjects completed three kinds of measurement instruments: (1) an experimental faceted vocabulary…

The process of acquiring word meaning from context was investigated for high- and low-ability fifth-grade children. Findings demonstrated characteristics of processing that differentiate successful and less successful acquisition and underscore the complexity of the meaning-acquisition process. (HOD)