In this paper, the development of a web application for self-access English vocabulary courses at a national university in Japan will be reported upon. Whilst the basic concepts are inherited from an old Flash-based online vocabulary learning system that had been long used at the university, the new HTML5-based app comes with several new features…

Early language learning for children is increasingly common, and the majority of parents and the public do not see it as superfluous or overburdening children. Moreover, teaching a foreign language to very young children has been an increasingly dominant trend in most globalized societies. While there is abundant literature that supports teaching…

This study, which is an experimental research with pre-test and post-test control groups, aims to determine the effectiveness of the Synectics Instructional Model on foreign language vocabulary teaching. The research was conducted with two experimental and two control groups and 82 students taking part in these groups. The experimental application…

This study investigated the effects of dual coding elucidation on raising learners' awareness of L2 lexical errors and correct usage. Participants included 135 Korean EFL middle school students assigned to either a single-coding or dual-coding group. The single-coding group studied the incorrect and correct usage of target lexical items under a…

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of…

Attention allocation in word learning may vary developmentally based on the novelty of the object. It has been suggested that children differentially learn verbs based on the novelty of the agent, but adults do not because they automatically infer the object's category and thus treat it like a familiar object. The current research examined…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

In order to trace how mobile assisted language learning (MALL) has evolved in recent years, we analysed studies published from 2000 to 2012 to examine their characteristics and research trends. These studies were published in international journals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Sixty-nine studies that fit the time frame and…

A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that infants of 6-9 months know the meanings of some common words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings. With a new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6-16 months, n = 49) are presented with side-by-side video clips depicting various common early words, and one clip is…

In an earlier randomized clinical trial, daily communication and language therapy resulted in more favorable spoken vocabulary outcomes than weekly therapy sessions in a subgroup of initially nonverbal preschoolers with intellectual disabilities that included only children with Down syndrome (DS). In this reanalysis of the dataset involving only…

Children with hearing loss often experience communication and language delays that result in difficulties acquiring novel vocabulary and literacy skills. This research examined the effectiveness of using repeated storybook reading paired with explicit teacher instruction to teach novel vocabulary to young children with hearing loss who were…

This study uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the coupling of specific linguistic items with specific gestures in second language (L2) learning over time. In particular, we are interested in how gestures accompany learning of new vocabulary. CA-informed studies of gesture have previously shown the importance of embodiment in L2 use and…

Since the late '60s, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has grown enormously. Throughout its development, SLA researchers have investigated a wide range of issues including the processes involved in second language learning, as well as the psycholinguistic, affective and social factors that influence its success or failure (Spada,…

Mathematics scores on national and international tests for students in the United States have indicated that students in the United States have procedural understanding of mathematics but lack conceptual understanding (TIMMS, 2012; U.S. Department of Education, 2013). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine if an added enrichment of…

Although vocabulary acquisition research has shed much light on practical methods for increasing lexical knowledge (Nation, 1994), many foreign language teachers hesitate to implement focused vocabulary-training programs in their classrooms. The reasons most often cited for this hesitation are associated with the difficult tasks of creating,…