The 338 14-year-olds who participated in a study to determine effects of pictures on readability of science topics completed a cloze test during the study and an objective items recognition test afterwards. Posttest scores showed pictures made topic easier to remember although they had little effect on cloze test results. (MBR)

Recent trends in English Language Teaching (ELT) research necessitates the study of course books and instructional materials from various perspectives including but not limited to their cultural, social, and psychological qualities and effects (Kramsch 2000). Age, social class, and gender, as represented in course books are studied because…

Explores direct techniques, such as semantic mapping and formal word analysis, as ways of supplementing the incidental learning of French vocabulary through reading by high school students in immersion and extended French classes. Findings indicate that these techniques can play a positive role in the second language classroom. (38 references)…

Investigates the color term knowledge of two-year olds and the influence of schooling on their color term acquisition. Findings reveal considerable knowledge in these children. Conclusions are that contemporary children's early and frequent experience with color terms may account for this cohort's improved performance over previous generations of…

Outlines a teaching approach for oral English for special purposes that inputs chunks of natural language orally. These "chunks" can be segmented by the learner into fixed and variable units, while simultaneously making the learner aware of the paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and phonological aspects of the language being taught. This…

Describes a mispronunciation detection task, in which listeners' sensitivity to deviations in speech is measured by their pressing a button upon hearing a mispronounced word in lists or sentences. Notes that reaction times and miss rates indicate the effects of position of a misplaced phoneme in a word, the size of the phonemic deviation, lexical…

Examines a task that can be applied in a uniform fashion across different languages to compare levels of vocabulary development in foreign-language learning. Results indicate that the lexical decision task can be a useful tool for the assessment and cross-linguistic comparison of lexical development in foreign-language learning. (37 references)…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)

Reports on an experiment where 64 elementary school students participated in reading, clapping, and vocalizing rhythms notated in color. Results after a 23-week treatment period revealed that the experimental group scored slightly higher reading both colored and uncolored notation than a control group. (MJP)

Describes the development of a 3-D virtual environment for secondary school and college physics and chemistry. Discusses individual learning styles; the effectiveness of visual stimuli in science education; implications of visual learning in designing instruction for differences in learning styles; and conceptual understanding. (LRW)

The relative effectiveness of 3 instructional procedures (sight word, fading, tactile-kinesthetic) in teaching 32 students (age 9-20) with moderate to severe mental retardation to read a series of monosyllabic words was investigated. No one experimental condition was superior to the others, and no skill acquisition differences were found in…

Two visually impaired children, aged 8 and 10, appeared to have severe difficulty in recognizing faces. After assessment, it became apparent that only one had unusually poor facial recognition skills. After training, which included matching face photographs, schematic faces, and digitized faces, there was no evidence of any improvement.…

Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…

Argues that the nature of mental representation contributes little to the specification of synchronic syntactic competence. Psycholinguists, syntacticians, and morphologists can benefit from a collaborative approach to the construction of an integrative model of language and mind, covering competence, representation, processing, and acquisition.…

Twenty-three senior high school special education students were trained in the use of either a teacher-directed graphic advance organizer or a student/teacher-shared graphic advance organizer. Results revealed that the use of either type of advance organizer generated higher quiz scores in mathematics and science. (Author/JDD)