This study was designed to investigate the development of third-person singular (3SG) -"s" in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage-based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2-year period.…

Learning to read requires knowledge of word meanings for those words most commonly encountered in basic reading materials. Many young students lack the basic vocabulary knowledge needed to facilitate learning to read. Two randomized studies were conducted to test the effects of an online, computer-adaptive vocabulary instruction program designed…

This article compares the effects of listening and reading on the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary. Two hundred thirty students participated in the study: They either (a) read three academic texts, (b) watched three lectures, or (c) received no input at all and just completed the vocabulary measures. This study also assessed and…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

This article examines a recent example of published research on the vocabulary profile of a financial corpus based on the Academic Word List (AWL) to illustrate not only the erroneous output from vocabulary profiling tools but also the pitfalls of using the AWL as a filter for academic lexis. Recent research has cautioned against eschewing high…

This study aims to investigate the techniques of teaching new lexis which are adopted by non-native teachers of English language. It also aims to investigate the strategies of learning new lexis which are adopted by learners in relation to their level. The work is based on two hypotheses: It is hypothesized that there is a relationship between the…

This study builds on previous work exploring reading and listening lexical thresholds (Nation, 2006; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Schmitt, Jiang, & Grabe, 2011) in order to investigate productive vocabulary targets that mark successful entry-level undergraduate writing. Papers that passed the Effective Writing Test (EWT) were chosen…

This study explored relationships between writing sample features and LMS usage patterns for 366 college students who enrolled in Theology courses, junior-level courses cross-listed with theology courses, or Senior Perspective Program courses in the fall semester of 2012. These hybrid courses were managed inside the Canvas(TM) learning management…

Reflective learning, a practice carrying relatively high educational value, has been with us for some time. Its popularity has grown to the extent that it is often adopted unquestioningly by educational practitioners. However, there are some important questions to be asked in relation to reflective practice. In reality, its impact on improved and…

This study addresses research gaps in predicting second language (L2) writing proficiency using linguistic features. Key to this analysis is the inclusion of linguistic measures at the surface, textbase and situation model level that assess text cohesion and linguistic sophistication. The results of this study demonstrate that five variables…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine how between-language interaction contributes to phonological acquisition in bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. Method: A total of 24 typically developing children, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 4;0, were included in this study: 8 bilingual Spanish-English speaking children, 8…

Performance in a lexical decision task is crucially dependent on the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination. More wordlike nonwords cause not only a latency increase for words but also, as reported by Stone and Van Orden (1993), larger word frequency effects. Several current models of lexical decision making can explain these types of…

This study explores the potential for automated indices related to speech delivery, language use, and topic development to model human judgments of TOEFL speaking proficiency in second language (L2) speech samples. For this study, 244 transcribed TOEFL speech samples taken from 244 L2 learners were analyzed using automated indices taken from…

By adopting corpus-based approach in this research study, the authors examined the various aspects of the copular verbs used by Chinese school children learning English. This study revealed that Chinese school children use copular verbs less frequently than native English speakers; they select a limited variety of copular verbs and less often use…

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because…