Deficits in academic vocabulary knowledge plague students who struggle with reading and impact their reading comprehension and performance in content area courses. Experts have developed interventions aimed at improving vocabulary instruction. However, questions remain concerning the effects of vocabulary gains on reading comprehension and content…

The aim of this study was to identify the effectiveness of a mobile application in vocabulary knowledge improvement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. This study adopted a quasi-experimental research design consisting of an experimental and a control group with 73 participants studying at two state universities in Turkey. During the…

This study investigates 62 EFL young adults' vocabulary learning rates immediately after reading ten graded readers, and their vocabulary decay rates after a three-month period. The participants were divided into two relative levels: higher (n = 31) and lower (n = 31). One hundred target words were semi-randomly selected from the reading texts and…

Theoretical models of word recognition suggest that knowing what a word means makes it easier to learn how to decode it. We tested this hypothesis with at-risk young students, a group that often responds poorly to conventional decoding instruction in which word meaning is not addressed systematically. A total of 53 first graders received explicit…

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…

In a classroom experiment during the first week of an introductory psychology course, randomly assigned students received a pretest and then a brief training on the definitions of general-vocabulary words either related (e.g., "facilitation") or unrelated (e.g., "rendition") to 16 technical terms (e.g., "social…

An emerging body of research examines language learning of young children from experiences with digital storybooks, but little is known about the ways in which specific components of digital storybooks, including interactive elements, may influence language learning. The purpose of the study was to examine the incidental word learning and story…

This is a report of a professional development project. The purpose of the project was to provide professional development to teachers in vocabulary instructional strategies and to examine vocabulary acquisition of English language learners. The participants were 8 second grade ELL students and 6 second grade teachers. The eight second grade…

This study investigated eighth-grade science students' (13-14-year-olds) perceptions of their vocabulary knowledge, learning, and content achievement. Data sources included pre- and posttest of students' perceptions of vocabulary knowledge, students' perceptions of vocabulary and reading strategies surveys, and a content achievement test.…

This article describes a research study that determined the depth of vocabulary knowledge of 28 intermediate ESL learners. The study was carried out with Bricklayer, a vocabulary assessment tool for L2 English which tested the ESL learners on 72 words. Two post-tests collected evidence for concurrent validity. A semantic distance test captured…

This study aimed to find whether meditation can be effective in terms of anxiety and vocabulary learning in a foreign language learning context. To test this, an experimental pre-test and post-test study was designed. 61 students (14 male-47 female) from the English Language Teaching Department of a state university in Turkey were assigned into…

Vocabulary learning and assessment are considered as the key basis for the training of English as a foreign language. However, it is time-consuming, uncertain and repetitious for the teachers to assess the proficiency of the students' vocabulary storage. This paper reports the results of a study which aimed to investigate the effect of Repeating…

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…

This study investigated the effects of a combined contextual and morphemic analysis strategy to increase prediction and analysis of science vocabulary words by three high school (9th--10th grade) English language learners with reading disabilities. A multiple baseline across participants design was used. Students analyzed science words using the…

While learners can acquire vocabulary through extensive reading (Pigada & Schmitt, 2006), research suggests that acquisition can be more effective when supplemented with targeted vocabulary activities (e.g., Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Problems arise, however, in determining what vocabulary learners have acquired, and what items should be…