This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

The aim of this study was to clarify whether fingerspelling provides a sophisticated mechanism that promotes the development of detailed orthographic knowledge for deaf individuals even in the absence of paralleling phonological knowledge. An intervention program comprised of various procedures chaining between fingerspelled sequences; their…

Teaching a homograph by using context clues is more effective than just teaching vocabulary separately. The goal of the study reported on here was to teach 12 homographs to d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (d/Dhh) students in the sixth grade by applying metacognitive skills to understand the meanings and contexts in sentences. A single case design…

Good spelling is a result of good teaching. And good teaching requires a full understanding of what spelling is--not the rote learning of strings of letters, but a sociolinguistic construction, each word a wonderful tapestry of meaning and history. The teaching of all the linguistic threads that weave through words is key to equity of outcomes in…

Chinese character learning requires various reading subskills, such as radical awareness and character knowledge. Radical awareness refers to learners' ability to identify, analyze, and apply semantic radicals in compound characters. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness and character knowledge facilitate learning semantically…

This review examines and integrates studies of second language (L2) vocabulary instruction with adult learners in a laboratory setting, using a framework provided by a modified version of the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), the Revised Hierarchical Model-Repetition Elaboration Retrieval. By examining how various training…

The purpose of this article aims to analyze the effect of word-word space in written Chinese to advanced non-native speakers when they read and process Mandarin texts. The participants have performed one online reaction time experiment and another one offline pencil-paper test. The results indicate that the structure of word segmentation in…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

Learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) tend to swap the two characters within a coordinative compound word in verbal identification and written production. This mixed methods study not only investigated how CFL learners identified intercharacter orthographic and semantic relationships within two-morpheme coordinative compound words, but…

The article discusses the results of a study of L1 proofreading competence conducted among young adult native speakers of Polish who acquired English through formal education at school and university in Poland. Students with various levels of proficiency in English were asked to make acceptability judgements for Polish structures presented to them…

Lexical inference through reading is considered an important method for vocabulary building; however, empirical research has not consistently offered strong evidence of the application of lexical inference in second language vocabulary learning. A recently burgeoning line of research focuses on second language (L2) lexical inference of compounds…

This study examined the role of error-type and working memory (WM) in the effectiveness of direct-metalinguistic and indirect written corrective feedback (WCF) on self error-correction in first-language writing. Fifty-one French first-year psychology students volunteered to participate in the experiment. They carried out a first-language…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…