This study used a Web-based naturalistic story-reading paradigm to investigate the impact of number of exposures on incidental acquisition and long-term retention of new meanings for known words by native English-speaking adults. Participants read one of four custom written stories in which they encountered novel meanings (e.g., a safe concealed…

Some researchers have argued that low-achieving students may never acquire sufficient levels of academic vocabulary to be successful in school without some form of explicit vocabulary instruction (e.g. Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009). In this paper, I summarize the available data on the efficiency, in words learned per minute of instruction, of…

Spaced practice, or the distribution of practice opportunities across time, is a well-known and effective practice for improving retention. However, spaced practice is not effectively implemented in schools, perhaps as a result of a lack of educationally relevant research in the area. We conducted an educationally relevant investigation of the…

Several researchers have advocated explicit instruction of vocabulary in order to help students improve their reading comprehension, especially low-achieving readers who need to "catch-up" to their age peers. Very few studies, however, have attempted to compare the time efficiency of direct instruction to its alternatives. In this…

This paper suggests six areas of vocabulary research which the author believes would be fruitful for future research. They include (1) developing a practical model of vocabulary acquisition, (2) understanding how vocabulary knowledge develops from receptive to productive mastery, (3) getting lexical teaching/learning principles into vocabulary and…

As teachers worldwide struggle to serve an ever-increasing number of children and their families who do not speak the dominant language, the authors present a research-based scenario illustrating practices in Hungarian preschools.

We examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Eye movements were recorded as adults read novel words embedded in sentences. In the learning phase, unfamiliar words were presented either in the same sentence repeated four times (same…

In an effort to improve an understanding of content area vocabulary instruction and how to support teacher-educators, in this study I sought to determine which vocabulary instructional practices were selected from the corpus and applied in instruction. I examined the knowledge and beliefs held by the participants about vocabulary instruction in…

Students in higher education should work on acquiring academic vocabulary as this is essential to skilfully communicating with other members of the academic community. Vocabulary acquisition is an essential but frequently neglected process due to the intensity, time pressure, and high stakes of short, assessment-based English for Academic Purposes…

A common, long-held belief of teachers and parents is that "the more you read, the better you read." Because many students either did not choose to read at home or did not have books at home, schools began to provide independent reading time in the classroom. As the years progressed, more and more requirements were added into English…

Over a 12-week period, this naturalistic cross-case ethnographic and exploratory study examined how a continuum of teacher characteristics impacted students' use and understanding of a subset of basic concept words called conceptual relational words (CRWs). Four carefully bound inclusive preschool classrooms were purposefully selected to explore…

Readers read for different purposes and the texts they read vary in topic and difficulty. These situational factors influence standards of coherence--how much understanding a reader aims to have for a given text. Three studies examined whether individual differences in reader-based standards of coherence influenced off-line and on-line…

Students with Learning Disabilities (LDs) have less extensive vocabularies than their typically developing peers (Simmons & Kameenui, 1990). This is a critical problem, as the importance of vocabulary knowledge in relation to reading comprehension is widely documented in the literature (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Stahl, 1983) and has been…

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent bi-modal input improves the word segmentation ability of L2 learners of Japanese. Accurately identifying words in continuous speech is a fundamental process for comprehending the overall message, but studies show that second language (L2) learners often find this task difficult, even when…

This article examined longitudinal relations among socioeconomic risk, maternal language input, child vocabulary, and child executive function in a large sample (N =1,009) recruited for a prospective longitudinal study. Two measures of maternal language input derived from a parent- child picture book task, vocabulary diversity and language…