There is a growing need for the inclusion of direct, explicit vocabulary instruction in the early elementary grades. Young children are entering school with a wide range of early literacy experiences, including vocabulary knowledge. Those students who are limited in their vocabulary knowledge are at a greater risk for later language and reading…

Purpose: This study examined use of a speaker's direction of gaze during word learning by boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), boys with nonsyndromic autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and typically developing (TD) boys. Method: A fast-mapping task with follow-in and discrepant labeling conditions was administered. We expected that the use of speaker…

Vocabulary development is critical for children's ability to learn to read and their success at school. Vocabulary has also been identified as a key factor in the achievement gap, with children from low-income families knowing significantly fewer words when they enter school. Although book reading has long been celebrated as an effective way for…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

In a classroom experiment during the first week of an introductory psychology course, randomly assigned students received a pretest and then a brief training on the definitions of general-vocabulary words either related (e.g., "facilitation") or unrelated (e.g., "rendition") to 16 technical terms (e.g., "social…

This article focuses on defining academic language in physical education and provides a step-by-step approach designed to help preservice and inservice teachers understand and incorporated academic language into their lesson planning. It provides examples of discipline-specific vocabulary, language functions, syntax, and discourse, aiming to…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

Results of a vocabulary pretest showed that students majoring in translation had several weaknesses such as: poor vocabulary knowledge, faulty pronunciation, inability to connect the pronunciation with the written form, relating words to their part of speech, poor spelling, and inability to categorize words into groups sharing the same semantic…

Inquiry-based active learning in science is helpful to all students but especially to those who have a hearing loss. For many deaf or hard of hearing students, the English language may be their second language, with American Sign Language (ASL) being their primary language. Therefore, many of the accommodations for the deaf are similar to those…

The present study sought to examine the improvement in vocabulary comprehension and retention of Saudi English as foreign language female students at King Abdul Aziz University as a result of integrating YouTube in their reading classes. The study also investigated the perceptions of both students as well as teachers towards the inclusion of…

The purpose of this preliminary study was to determine whether incorporating vocabulary instruction in individual reading fluency interventions for English Language Learners (ELLs) would improve reading comprehension. Two vocabulary instructional procedures were contrasted with a fluency-building only condition in an alternating-treatments design…

While most studies on L2 vocabulary learning through input have addressed learners' vocabulary uptake from written text, this study focuses on audio-visual input. In particular, we investigate the effects of enhancing video by (1) adding different types of L2 subtitling (i.e. no captioning, full captioning, keyword captioning, and glossed keyword…

Guided by the conceptual framework for next generation designs for mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) in informal setting, our study investigates how mobile devices impact the learning practices and habits amongst adult distant learners of English at a higher education institution in China. Data sources include quantitative data of 148…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

Background: This article investigated the potential of Grade 3 English Second Language (ESL) teachers' vocabulary development practices to equip learners in English-deprived environments with English vocabulary requisite for transition to Grade 4 where English is the Language of Learning and Teaching and where learning to read gives way to reading…