Vocabulary knowledge is vital for students' success in school and beyond. However, students with disabilities and others who consistently score below their peers on various measures of vocabulary knowledge have difficulties in secondary-level content area courses. Because many students with disabilities are now educated primarily in general…

In this year-long randomized control trial (RCT), we evaluated the effectiveness of a year-long, intensive, and structured virtual professional development (VPD) accompanying science-integrated English-as-second-language (ESL) instructional intervention on 187 second grade English learners' English language and literacy development in suburban…

At present, there are few studies which explore the learning strategies employed by students of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) and even fewer that focus specifically on mobile application use. This study provides insights into how adult learners at varying levels of proficiency employ mobile apps to support their Chinese character learning.…

In this thesis, I present three related papers that collectively investigate the instructional supports on screen and in the media viewing context that influenced English and heritage language vocabulary knowledge in DLLs. In study 1, I examine how specific pedagogical approaches used in educational media might benefit DLLs. In study 2, I…

This edited collection presents a selection of contributions made to the 12th eLearning symposium, held at the University of Southampton, in January 2019. It focuses on how innovative and creative language teaching approaches can respond to modern, ever-transforming educational landscapes. The contributors are educators from higher education…

This study examines whether books that contain personalized content are better facilitators of young children's word acquisition than books which are not personalized for a child. In a repeated-measures experimental design, 18 children (mean age 3;10) were read a picture book which contained both personalized and non-personalized sections, with…

Form preparation in word production, the benefit of exploiting a useful common sound (such as the first phoneme) of iteratively spoken small groups of words, is notoriously fastidious, exhibiting a seemingly categorical, all-or-none character and a corresponding susceptibility to "killers" of preparation. In particular, the presence of a…

Qian and Schedl's Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Test was administered to 31 native-speaker undergraduates under an "unconstrained" condition, in which the number of responses to headwords was unfixed, whereas a corresponding group ("n" = 36) completed the test under the original "constrained" condition. Results…

"I found it!" Addison proudly proclaimed, as she used an iPhone and Global Positioning System (GPS) software to find the hidden geocache along the riverbank. Others in Lisa Bostick's fourth grade class were jealous, but there would be other geocaches to find. With the excitement of movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and…

In this article, teachers are reminded that their content subject areas require acquainting children with special words or symbols related to that subject area (e.g. mathematics or social studies). Because children can read well does not mean they would be understanding of any special reading skill required in a content subject area; that the…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

Children's ability to learn and retain new words is fundamental to their vocabulary development. This study examined word retention in children learning a home language (L1) from birth and a second language (L2) in preschool settings. Participants were presented with sixteen novel words in L1 and in L2 and were tested for retention after…

Writing result sections of research studies demands that graduate students have adequate abilities to receive, to encode, to translate, and to reproduce content presented in statistical textbooks. These abilities are all aspects of the reading process; therefore, it is likely that reading ability plays a role in the technical writing process. The…

This research aimed to explore the relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition in 129 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children were from a ten-year longitudinal project. At each year, a number of measures were administered. The 129 children's data of nonverbal reasoning at age 4, phonological awareness, morphological awareness,…

The following commentary presents an overview of earlier studies of discourse functions and syntactic complexity as well as recent investigations that focus on interaction and measures of syntactic and lexical complexity in learners' output in traditional classrooms and computer-mediated environments. Recent studies emphasize the need for better…