Addresses two broad issues: the current understanding of spelling development and how this understanding fits within a broader model of literacy development; and the implications of the developmental model for spelling instruction and word study. Suggests that it is essential that instruction balance authentic reading and writing with purposeful…

Tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for three adult learners with advanced proficiency in English. Four kinds of words were measured for knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and meaning. (Author/JL)

Language and reading outcomes at age 13 were examined in 22 children who were late talkers as toddlers. Compared to 14 controls, children who were late talkers had significantly poorer vocabulary, grammar, reading/spelling, and verbal memory skills, although they performed in the average range on most language and academic tasks. (Contains…

Focuses on the issue of the optimal on-line glossing format. Two glossing methods are compared. The first provides readers with sentence-level translation equivalents of the second language words. The second method connects the words with their meanings through basic dictionary forms. Examined which of the two methods is most beneficial for text…

Through the use of a question notebook, students can practice grammar and develop their vocabulary. This class activity also helps students to begin to write and express their own curiosity. (Author/CK)

Investigates whether knowing more than one language enhances the learning of lexical items and syntactic constructions in other languages. Multilingual (M1) students outperformed unilinguals in both types of acquisition, suggesting that M1s' heightened metalinguistic skills, enhanced lexical knowledge, and a less conservative learning procedure…

This issue's tips focus on making students self-sufficient, challenge them to be creative and accurate at the same time, give them the opportunity to pose cultural questions anonymously, urge teachers to stop talking and encourage teachers to hold students accountable for their queries. (Author/CK)

Examined three-year-old children's ability to generalize novel words to new instances. Suggested that children's similarity judgments and feature selection in name generalization are guided by nonstrategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information. Proposed that these findings may explain the extraordinary…

Describes a lesson that is part of a summer enrichment program in Japanese language and culture and is taught by Interactive Distance Learning (IDL) through the Southeast Kansas Education Center. The class is designed for students going into Grades 4, 5, and 6 and runs 2 hours daily for 2 weeks. (Author/VWL)

Provides four techniques for teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. These include a newspaper scramble, a focus on learning styles, learning vocabulary through poetry, and an in-class survey. (Author/VWL)

Describes a study of elementary students' acquisition of vocabulary, comprehension of content area concepts in science and social studies, and ability to distinguish between fact and fiction in informational books read aloud by pre-service teachers in the classroom. Suggests appropriate uses and cautions considered when informational storybooks…

Describes a connectionist model, using a simple recurrent network trained on a phoneme prediction task, that accounts for the child's ability to identify word boundaries. The model shows that aspects of linguistic structure that are not overtly marked in the input can be derived by efficiently combining multiple probabilistic cues. (Author/MSE)

Presented successive auditory time gatings of unfamiliar words--familiar, phonologically-related words and familiar, phonologically-unrelated words--to school-age children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). The groups did not differ significantly in the point at which they recognized familiar words, but the subjects with SLI…

A follow-up study of 71 adolescents with preschool histories of speech-language impairments found children whose language problems had been resolved by ages 5 to 6 did not differ from controls on tests of vocabulary and language-comprehension skills, however, they performed significantly less well on tests of phonological processing and literacy…

Proposes an interactive model of vocabulary acquisition that accounts for acquisition of knowledge and the mental processes involved in vocabulary acquisition, emphasizing the characterization of mental processes more than any other aspects. The model, which can account for first or second languages, attempts to capture how vocabulary is…