District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The lessons…

In an effort to improve student achievement at an urban high school, teachers and administrators developed a five-part, schoolwide vocabulary plan. Over four years, teachers provided students with increased opportunities to read, read to their students, developed content-specific vocabulary instruction, taught students academic words, and focused…

Describes a teaching method for vocabulary development based on word formation by means of affixes. Discusses inflectional and derivational suffixes, prefixes, and their meaning. Offers examples of practice materials and of receptive and productive tests. (MES)

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

A questionnaire used to elicit from university students their uses for, attitudes about, and problem areas in French vocabulary learning is presented and discussed. In the questionnaire, a series of brief lexical exercises tests understanding of word similarities and commonalities, lexical functions, registers, antonyms, paraphrasing,…

English-as-a-Second-Language students in Japan were tested at the beginning and the end of the school year to examine changes in word associations and grammatical suffix knowledge. Results showed an average vocabulary gain of 330 words, a poor knowledge of the allowable suffixes for the verbs learned, and 19 to 25 percentage points more receptive…