Many teachers, especially novice teachers, believe that teaching vocabulary is among their easier duties, but Shanklin makes a convincing argument that high-quality vocabulary teaching requires thoughtful preparation. Here she offers several sound techniques for engaging students with vocabulary in meaningful ways.

This study examines the relationship between how learners of Japanese as a second language perceive the learning of "kanji" (i.e., the logographic characters shared with Chinese) and their ability to learn novel "kanji" words using morphological and contextual information. Eighty college students learning Japanese as a foreign language completed a…

The present study examined the merits of different methods of introducing rehearsal techniques. (Author)

Components of word analysis and synthesis that are important for vocabulary development instruction are word structure and morphemes. Morpheme study includes bases, prefixes, suffixes, epenthetic elements, and affixation processes. Word structure includes capitalization, abbreviations, contractions, number, possessives, and affixed words.…

This report summarizes information presented in a technical report concerning the role of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension and is designed to be read by educators not directly involved in research themselves. It states that while an assessment of the number of meanings a reader knows enables a remarkably accurate prediction of an…

Because of the increasing demands that today's society places on language, there is an increasing need for vocabulary building. The opening of new fields, industries, and media and the vocabularies of specialized fields have all contributed to making increased word knowledge a necessity. New words have been coined to describe developments in new…

This book is designed to aid the student in developing word skills. It contains rules, games, stories, exercises, definitions, limericks, word origins, and other information related to words. (CK)

Free word association testing with 224 college students showed that the free word association patterns produced by adults to relatively unfamiliar adjective stimuli tended to be similar to the association patterns given by young children to common adjectives. Adult responses to familiar adjectives were essentially the same as older children's…

Understanding words like "bionics" will open the mind to the horizons of another time when words like "railroad" evoked wonder and "to fly to the moon" was a metaphor for the impossible dream. Suggests that history teachers and English teachers should join together in using words to teach both subjects. (Editor/RK)

Comparison of 38 learning disabled and 38 normally achieving eighth graders on a vocabulary learning task indicated that the two groups did not differ in observable learning strategies used during the study period and that strategy use did not account for vocabulary learning score. (Author/DB)

A framework developed to describe effective vocabulary instruction suggests that teaching methods can be described by the types of information they provide and the types of processing they require. (FL)

Principles, processes, and information that can be used in selecting an initial lexicon for severely handicapped persons are discussed. Two strategies for lexicon selection, one based upon functional-remedial logic and the other upon developmental considerations, are presented together with guidelines for selecting lexical items derived from each.…

Begins a four-part series dealing with practical suggestions for improving the vocabularies of high school students. (Author/RB)

This article presents a wholistic picture of the major factors in the language learning process. (RC)