This study examined the optimal learning schedule for second language vocabulary within an authentic classroom setting in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, fifty-two primary school students (Cantonese first language) studied 20 English adjectives over two learning episodes under spaced-short (1-day interval) or…

Increasingly, children are engaging in early literacy experiences through digital devices. This raises questions about how electronic reading compares to print reading. To assess this, we randomly assigned 200 children (3-5 years) to be read the same book (1) with auto-narration on a tablet or (2) by a researcher from a print book. Reading was…

Despite evidence that young children are sensitive to differences in angle measure, older students frequently struggle to grasp this important mathematical concept. When making judgments about the size of angles, children often rely on erroneous dimensions such as the length of the angles' sides. The present study tested the possibility that…

Although an abundant literature documents preliterate children's word learning success from shared storybook reading, a full synthesis of the factors which moderate these word learning effects has been largely neglected. This meta-analysis included 38 studies with 2,455 children, reflecting 110 effect sizes, investigating how reading styles, story…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…

In this article, we report on a study that examined the active and receptive English vocabulary of two different groups of Grade 3 learners in South African township schools. The groups consisted of English Home Language (HL) learners in the Western Cape and Xhosa HL and English First Additional Language (FAL) learners in the Eastern Cape. The…

A majority of the challenging words that adolescent readers encounter in school texts are morphologically complex and from the Latinate layer of English. For these words, bound roots carry important meaning, such as the relation between innovative and its bound root, nov, meaning "new." This study investigated the effects of instruction…

The interest in Digital Game-Based Language Learning (DGBLL) has increased considerably in recent years although being a relatively new approach. Despite the interest that DGBLL took, the studies in the context of German as a Foreign Language (FL) are quite limited. Moreover, DGBLL in the Turkish context is not prevalent. Due to this gap in the…

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…

Two ways of measuring change are presented and compared: A conventional "change score", defined as the difference between scores before and after an interim period, and a process-oriented approach focusing on detailed analysis of conceptually defined response patterns. The validity of the two approaches was investigated. Vocabulary…

Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable deficiencies are found in L2 students' vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way words are distributed is ignored.…

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at-home school, adults in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of four instructional methods--context clues, definition, elaboration technique, or word parts and word families--on the vocabulary growth and acquisition of adults enrolled in a community college developmental reading course. The study investigated whether performance in any or all of the four…

We examine the effect of direct and indirect teaching of vocabulary and word reading on pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children following use of an electronic storybook (e-book). The children in each age group were randomly assigned to an intervention group which read the e-book or to a control group which was afforded the regular school…

The effect of reading an electronic storybook (e-book) on Israeli children's language and literacy was examined in kindergarten children (N = 40; age 5:2-6:3) compared to first graders (N = 50; age 6:3-7:4). The children in each age group were randomly assigned to two groups: an intervention group which read the e-book five times and a control…