Discusses how semantic mapping can be used in educating students who are deaf or hard of hearing by making important concepts visual and by helping students find connections among ideas and subject areas. Examples are given of how semantic mapping can be used to teach science and mathematics. (CR)

The study, involving 61 learning-disabled junior high students, compared the short-term and long-term effectiveness of definition instruction with interactive vocabulary strategies (semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, and semantic/syntactic feature analysis). Students participating in the interactive strategies demonstrated greater…

This article begins with a brief overview of the psychological research on the pedagogical efficacy of questions and describes how recent research has led to a reevaluation of the role of questions within the framework of a theoretical model of discourse comprehension processes and knowledge representation. A computer-based tutor for reading…

Teaching vocabulary to primary grade children is essential. Previous studies of teaching vocabulary (word meanings) using story books in the primary grades reported gains of 20%-25% of word meanings taught. The present studies concern possible influences on word meaning acquisition during instruction (Study 1) and increasing the percentage and…

The aim of this research was to show the importance of instruction in learning a specific set of words. Two different tasks were used in the experiment: one in which subjects were required to fill in sentences and choose the appropriate answer in a multiple choice exercise (lexical test), and the other was a rating task designed to assess semantic…

College students learning about language and using this knowledge to learn how to teach reading and writing should participate in strategies that simulate systems in the language and strategies that they in turn will use in their own classrooms. Cognitive and constructivist strategies are interactive and thus more powerful than the traditional…

This article presents a case study of academic language instruction in a high school "English Learner Science" course. It illustrates how a teacher's understanding of academic language affects her instruction and students' opportunities for learning. We examine a transcript of classroom discourse for the "didactic tension" that exists between this…

One of the major findings in previous research on reflexive coreference in a second language is that learners of English violate the locality requirement of the reflexive form "x-self" more readily when it appears in the subordinate infinitival clause than when included in the subordinate tensed clause (a phenomenon called the…

This glossing system is designed to fill the gap between grammar studies and reading. The system reflects flexional and derivational morphology of words as well as lexical relationships of synonymy, antonymy, homonymy and structural similarity and polysemy. It is intended to help students learn and understand vocabulary for successful reading.…

Foreign language instruction, particularly the learning of new vocabulary, could greatly benefit from the structural description of semantic fields. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

Although knowledge of multimeaning words is important for reading comprehension, deaf readers may know only the most common meanings or nuances of high-frequency multimeaning words. Results of a study are reported in which 33 profoundly hearing impaired students stratified into three equal age groups (ages 10, 11, and 12) were administered a…

Children learn to speak their mother tongue by immersion in it; they can learn to read their language in the same manner. (JH)

The article outlines the need to eliminate rote-learning and pure imitative strategies in second language learning, particularly in the areas of syntax and semantics. Theoretical foundations for this need are discussed, with reference to the coding hypothesis for memory functions in language learning. Results of experimental investigations are…

Discusses the nature and the semantic interpretation of visual aids used in level-one audiovisual language instruction. (Text is in French.) (AM)