The purpose of the Teacher Prep Review is to guarantee teachers have expertise in reading instruction (as well as other essential areas NCTQ assesses) before being trusted to teach children to read. By regularly reviewing the reading coursework provided by nearly 700 elementary teacher preparation programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

Gestures and other bodily movements are frequently used as instructional strategies in second language classrooms. Research has demonstrated that gestures are an effective strategy to improve L2 vocabulary recall. However, previous studies have only used vocabulary items that are known to participants in their native languages. Additionally,…

Pre-kindergarten (pre-k) is thought to have both direct and indirect effects on children's outcomes in early elementary school. Direct pre-k effects consistently include moderate to large gains in academic skills and sometimes include increases in problem behaviors that affect acquisition of skills in school. Indirect pre-k effects assume that…

This transnational comparative study between Costa Rica and the United States provides an in-depth understanding of the similarities and differences of the early literacy practices of educators in the Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten classroom settings. Drawing upon Costa Rica's curricular approach to Early Childhood Education, based upon the…

Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Indigenous studies has come a long way. In this paper, we share some bold steps we have taken to develop a learning process that situates Indigenous people as a people of place, a people of knowledge and a people of science. This teaching disengages students from learning about Indigenous people as remnants of the past. We extend earlier…

This article on word-learning strategies describes a theory- and research-based set of procedures for teaching students to use word-learning strategies--word parts, context clues, the dictionary, and a combined strategy--to infer the meanings of unknown words. The article begins with a rationale for teaching word-learning strategies, particularly…

There is considerable lack of evidence concerning the linguistic and cognitive skills underpinning abstract vocabulary acquisition. The present study considers the role of emotional valence in providing an embodied learning experience in which to anchor abstract meanings. First, analyses of adult ratings of age-of-acquisition, concreteness and…

Sleep is known to play an active role in consolidating new vocabulary in adults; however, the mechanisms by which sleep promotes vocabulary consolidation in childhood are less well understood. Furthermore, there has been no investigation into whether previously reported differences in sleep architecture might account for variability in vocabulary…

The Chinese Radical Assembly Game (CRAG) is an online platform that assesses the lexical competence. In which, individuals select different Chinese radicals to combine them and form a legitimate character. This concept is similar to that of creative synthesis. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the CRAG response process involves…

This papers looks at bilingual books for German-speaking learners of English and discusses their potential for vocabulary acquisition. Specifically, it focuses on bilingual books following a sociolinguistic structural principle, i.e. books in which the arrangement of languages reflects multilingual practices of non-monolingual language users. The…

We examined the relation between maternal responsiveness and children's acquisition of mental and non-mental state vocabulary in 59 pairs of mothers and children aged 10 to 26 months as they engaged in a free-play episode. Children wore a head camera and responsiveness was defined as maternal talk that commented on the child's actions (e.g., when…

The aim of this study was to examine variation in early reading comprehension development for second language (L2) readers compared with first language (L1) readers and to investigate the impact of vocabulary knowledge in their first and second language. Participants were 75 Dutch monolingual children (L1 readers) and 71 Turkish-Dutch bilingual…

Language is key to how we understand and describe mathematics teaching and learning. Learning new terms can help us reflect on our practice and grow as teachers, yet may require us to be intentional about where and how we look for opportunities to expand our lexicons.