This article draws on an action research process carried out by professional learning and development (PLD) facilitators supporting teachers in New Zealand secondary schools. Questions about students' developing knowledge of academic vocabulary, especially for English-language learners, were explored as part of responsive PLD inquiries within…

This exploratory research is aimed at studying facial emotion recognition abilities in deaf children and how they relate to linguistic skills and the characteristics of deafness. A total of 166 participants (75 deaf) aged 3-8 years were administered the following tasks: facial emotion recognition, naming vocabulary and cognitive ability. The…

Mobile phones are becoming more acceptable toolkits to learn languages. One aspect of English language which has been subject to investigation in mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) is vocabulary. This study reviewed some of the studies conducted in various contexts on the effect of MALL on vocabulary learning. We investigated some of the…

This article analyses how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects of word class, frequency, imageability and…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

A growing body of research has established incremental rehearsal (IR) as an effective intervention for teaching basic skills in various student populations. However, there have been no published studies to date in which interventionists have been school-based personnel rather than researchers. In this study, a paraprofessional implemented IR with…

Background: Population-based studies have found that early language delays are associated with poorer long-term outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Few studies have explored the influence of change in language ability over time on adult outcomes. Aim: To examine the educational, vocational and mental health outcomes for adults accounting for…

Researchers have consistently found a link between the quality of early parent-child book-reading interactions and children's language skill. Two aspects of quality (level of abstraction and utterance function) were examined simultaneously in the current study to further refine our understanding of how parents' talk during shared reading predicts…

This paper provides an overview of the theories on the organization and development of L1 mental lexicon and the representation mode of bilingual mental lexicon. It analyzes the structure and characteristics of Chinese EFL learners and their problems in English vocabulary acquisition. On the basis of this, it suggests that English vocabulary…

This study compared the effects of 2 strategy-based comprehension treatments intended to promote vocabulary and content knowledge for elementary students at risk for developing reading difficulties (N = 105) with a traditional content approach. The study examined the effectiveness of strategy versus nonstrategy instruction on reading…

This study examined the contributions of morphological awareness (MA) to second language (L2) word meaning inferencing in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese (N = 50). Three research questions were posed: Are L2 learners sensitive to the morphological structure of unknown multi-character words? Does first language (L1) MA contribute to L2…

Knowing how to provide effective literacy instruction is important for all educators, but it is critically important for urban educators. This article is built on the assumption that deepening urban educators' understanding of the reading process will better equip them to facilitate students' reading development, and to diagnose and intervene if…

Poor comprehenders have reading comprehension difficulties but normal word recognition ability. Here, we report the first study, which investigated (i) the dissociation and (ii) the prevalence of L1-L2 reading comprehension difficulties, and (iii) the levels of key metalinguistic skills in poor comprehenders among Chinese-English bilingual…

The research team has developed a web-based multiplayer trading card game to allow teachers choosing cards as rewards for students who actively participate in discussions and classroom activities as well as perform well in terms of doing assignments and writing exams or quizzes. In order to verify the effectiveness of the use of in-game cards as…

The ultimate goal of any academic program is to educate and bring up thoughtful citizens in societies. By "thoughtfulness" we mean paving the spectrum from simply applying the rules (lower order thinking) to finding proper solution to authentic novel problems (higher order thinking). It is helping the practitioners pave the continuum of…