We investigate the impact of a relatively brief cross-curricular intervention, Word Generation, on middle school students' development of taught academic vocabulary. Students (n = 8382) in forty-four middle schools in three urban districts were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Treatment teachers implemented the program with…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

The purpose of this replication study was to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG) professional development in vocabulary on first-grade teachers' knowledge of vocabulary instruction and observed teaching practice, and on students' vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-two schools from 16 districts in four states were randomly assigned to…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

Children develop linguistic competencies during interactions with more knowledgeable others. Consequently, one way to support this development is by enhancing the home literacy environment (HLE) in which children live. In this study a non-intensive intervention procedure was developed to improve HLE and linguistic competencies of 125 German…

A multi-cohort cluster randomized trial was conducted to estimate effects of rich vocabulary classroom instruction on vocabulary and reading comprehension. A total of 1,232 fourth- and fifth-grade students from 61 classrooms in 24 schools completed the study. Students received instruction in 140 Tier Two vocabulary words featured in two…

This study examined teachers' language use across the school year in 6th grade urban middle-school classrooms (n = 24) and investigated the influence of this classroom-based linguistic input on the reading comprehension skills of the students (n = 851; 599 language minority learners and 252 English-only) in the participating classrooms. Analysis…

Research Findings: This study compared the effects of content-based shared book-reading instruction versus an explicit vocabulary-only condition on the vocabulary development of preschool dual language learners (DLLs). Using shared book reading as the mode of instruction, we randomly assigned 48 bilingual preschool teachers and 281…

Achieve3000 publishes a number of online literacy programs that differentiate lessons and activities based on student performance. Magnolia Consulting--an independent, third party evaluation firm--assessed Achieve3000 Solutions' impact on student learning during the 2014-15 school year. The researchers used a randomized control trial, where…

The purpose of this study was to support teachers' child-directed language and student outcomes by enhancing the educative features of an intervention targeted to vocabulary, conceptual development and comprehension. Using a set of design heuristics (Davis & Krajcik, 2005), our goal was to support teachers' professional development within the…

A study was conducted in 26 Head Start classrooms with 264 children to compare the effect of a read aloud plus extension activities intervention over a control group to the effect of a read aloud only intervention over a control group on preschool children's vocabulary. Children were assessed before and after the intervention on target vocabulary…