This paper suggests six areas of vocabulary research which the author believes would be fruitful for future research. They include (1) developing a practical model of vocabulary acquisition, (2) understanding how vocabulary knowledge develops from receptive to productive mastery, (3) getting lexical teaching/learning principles into vocabulary and…

This contribution examines how the diverse language resources that teachers and learners bring to the classroom can support the process of language learning. It draws on a range of linguistic ethnographic data collected at a French language course that was attended mostly by Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Luxembourg. Drawing on the analysis of…

Research with monolingual children has shown that early efficiency in real-time word recognition predicts later language and cognitive outcomes. In parallel research with young bilingual children, processing ability and vocabulary size are closely related within each language, although not across the two languages. For children in dual-language…

The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

There are normally two major research reasons for assessing second and foreign language (L2) knowledge: either to gauge a participant's actual level of competence/proficiency or to assess language development over a period of time. In testing, the corresponding contrasts are typically referred to as proficiency tests on the one hand and…

In recent years, researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have become increasingly interested in the implications of sociolinguistic research for L2 learning. Among the many questions that arise are whether the development of sociolinguistic competence should be an instructional goal as early as the beginning level, and what…

Attempts to overcome methodological problems in studies of vocabulary size. Problems occur when trying to answer the following three questions: (1) how do we decide what to count as words; (2) how do we choose what words to test; and (3) how do we test the chosen words? (31 references) (Author/VWL)

A literature review of listening comprehension research covers five areas: text characteristics; interlocutor characteristics; task characteristics (variation in listening purpose); listener characteristics; and process characteristics (variation in the listener's cognitive activities and the nature of the speaker/listener interaction). (Contains…

An experiment is described in which learners listened to two radio broadcasts in Spanish, then reported on their strategies, comprehension, learning, level of confidence, and affective response to the input. Elements that the learners had in common are cited, as well as some that seem idiosyncratic. (24 references) (Author/LB)

Although the constraints of time and environment under which most language learning is done mean that a natural language situation can never be reproduced in school, many of the findings from first language acquisition studies apply to second language (L2) learning. This would mean therefore that instead of stressing speaking in a beginning L2…

Defines "listening comprehension" and discusses both its role in the process of first and second language acquisition and the modes of language processing presumed to operate in listening comprehension. Presents specific teaching strategies and material incorporating listening comprehension in the foreign language classroom at all levels. (SED)

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, syntax, association, grammatical…

A literature survey of more than 800 sources, approximately 140 of which were judged to be relevant, assessed problems Alaska Natives and American Indians experience in learning English language skills required for survival and success in a modern, technological culture. Since the survey was to guide the adaptation and development of instructional…

The purpose of this study is to compare the English syntactic structures produced in spontaneous oral language and the receptive English syntactic and vocabulary skills of bilingual Spanish and Indian children and monolingual Anglo-Americans, all of whom qualify for Title I elementary schools (Grades 1-6). People in Action, the Northwestern Syntax…