Students in academic contexts are expected to engage with large amounts of reading and they frequently meet unknown words and phrases in those reading materials. Previous research has shown that second and foreign language learners can acquire some of the unknown vocabulary that they encounter during reading. However, these previous findings were…

This study investigated the relationships among vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, reading comprehension, and reading rate among college-aged students. While the relationships of some of these variables have been explored in previous research, the current study's focus on the role of vocabulary depth on the literacy measures within a sample of…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

This study examined the dimensionality of morphological knowledge. The performance of 371 seventh- and eighth-graders on seven morphological knowledge tasks was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggested that morphological knowledge was best fit by a bifactor model with a general factor of morphological knowledge and seven…

This meta-analysis synthesizes the last two decades of experimental and quasi-experimental research on reading instruction across academic contexts (e.g., social studies, science, mathematics, English language arts) for English learners (ELs) in grades 4 through 8, to determine (a) the overall effectiveness of reading instruction for upper…

Determining word meanings that ought to be taught or introduced is important for educators. A sequence for vocabulary growth can be inferred from many sources, including testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages, predicting from print frequency, or adult-recalled Age of Acquisition. A new approach, Word Maturity, is based on…

Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between children's morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the…

This article presents an empirical study that investigates the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension with 115 advanced Danish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The dimensions of depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge (measured by the Vocabulary Levels Test and the Word Associates Test) were found to be…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…