This article is about an Action Research project carried out at a public Institution in Sincelejo, Colombia. The research purpose was to determine the effect of transactional communication strategies (TCS) on pre-service teachers' speaking skill. In a diagnostic stage, problems in the speaking skill were identified then an action stage was carried…

The effectiveness of explicit instruction, within the context of strategy development in learners, has been widely accepted for several years. However, the methods used within explicit vocabulary instruction are varied and comparatively few studies have directly compared methods. This study investigates the type of instruction (in a visual or…

For this dissertation, teacher linguistic awareness (TLingA) involves teacher linguistic knowledge, teacher language awareness (TLA), and teacher cognition for second language (L2) teachers. Teacher linguistic knowledge is an understanding of how language functions and is compiled within the different areas of linguistics. And TLA is the knowledge…

Language instructors play a decisive role in adult language learners' learning and retention of vocabulary through planning, selection, and teaching of vocabulary and strategies. However, some professional language schools lack extensive teacher-training programs that prepare instructors with the skills required to select and teach vocabulary,…

In this study, we examined the role of morphology, an important yet largely understudied source of difficulty, in reading ability among 7th grade students in one junior high school in the southwestern United States. We sought to find out how much variance in reading ability is accounted for by these students' morphological knowledge, and whether…

Although it is a core component of a language user's overall linguistic competence, vocabulary has traditionally not received the kind of attention it deserved, being usually lumped with other kinds of competence till 1980s and 1990s when researchers started focusing on it with great interest. The present paper discusses what the notion of lexical…

This preliminary study examined a prekindergarten multimodal French program conducted for students in an inclusion charter school. Due to the age and varied ability levels of the students, media such as video and songs combined with kinesthetic activities served as the primary instructional approach. Data on children's ability to understand and…

Vocabulary, the backbone of any language including English, is foundational for listening, speaking, reading and writing. These four macro-skills are necessary not only in gaining knowledge as English is the language to access major information sources particularly the World Wide Web but also in the demanding globalized workplace. Vocabulary is…

There is a growing need for the inclusion of direct, explicit vocabulary instruction in the early elementary grades. Young children are entering school with a wide range of early literacy experiences, including vocabulary knowledge. Those students who are limited in their vocabulary knowledge are at a greater risk for later language and reading…

Purpose: This study examined use of a speaker's direction of gaze during word learning by boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), boys with nonsyndromic autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and typically developing (TD) boys. Method: A fast-mapping task with follow-in and discrepant labeling conditions was administered. We expected that the use of speaker…

Vocabulary development is critical for children's ability to learn to read and their success at school. Vocabulary has also been identified as a key factor in the achievement gap, with children from low-income families knowing significantly fewer words when they enter school. Although book reading has long been celebrated as an effective way for…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

In a classroom experiment during the first week of an introductory psychology course, randomly assigned students received a pretest and then a brief training on the definitions of general-vocabulary words either related (e.g., "facilitation") or unrelated (e.g., "rendition") to 16 technical terms (e.g., "social…

This article focuses on defining academic language in physical education and provides a step-by-step approach designed to help preservice and inservice teachers understand and incorporated academic language into their lesson planning. It provides examples of discipline-specific vocabulary, language functions, syntax, and discourse, aiming to…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…