Students who are incarcerated in juvenile correctional facilities (JCF) often struggle with reading proficiency. Nevertheless, limited research addresses the academic needs of these vulnerable learners with reading deficits. The primary purpose of this survey study is to identify the reading instructional approaches used regularly by educators in…

The Vocabulary Enrichment Full Programme combined three existing programmes--the Vocabulary Enrichment Intervention Programme (VEIP), Sounds-Write and Literacy Plus--and aimed to improve the reading abilities of pupils in Year 7. VEIP is a structured scheme that teaches children new words and encourages them to use these words in speaking and…

This paper reports our experience in using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, a variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, as a second language. The parallel corpus consists of pairs of word-aligned sentences in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, drawn from television programs in Hong Kong (Lee, 2011). We evaluated our pedagogical approach with…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the major patterns in content-based instruction (CBI) lesson plans among practicum teachers at the final stage of an MA TESOL program. One hundred and seven lesson plans were coded according to a typology developed to evaluate clarity and identify areas of potential difficulty in the design of…

Sustainable, or "green," manufacturing and its practices are becoming more and more a part of today's industry, including wood product manufacturing. This article provides introductory information on green manufacturing in wood technology and a crossword puzzle based on green manufacturing terms. The authors use the puzzle at the college level to…

This quasiexperimental single group design study investigated the validity of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) to identify fourth and fifth grade students who are at-risk in vocabulary development. The subjects of the study were 88 fourth and fifth grade students at one elementary school in Washington State. The Group Reading Assessment and…

Second language vocabulary acquisition has been modeled both as multidimensional in nature and as a continuum wherein the learner's knowledge of a word develops along a cline from recognition through production. In order to empirically examine and compare these models, the authors assess the degree to which the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS;…

This study analyzed phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and working memory (WM) and their relationship with vocabulary and grammar learning in an artificial foreign language. Nonword repetition, nonword recognition, and listening span were used as memory measures. Participants learned the singular forms of vocabulary for an artificial foreign…

It is well-established that vocabulary is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension from grades 2 or 3 on. In this article, I argue (a) that English vocabulary is acquired in a similar sequence by native-English speakers and English-language learners; and (b) that it is possible to identify words that both lower-vocabulary English-speakers…

This study focuses on the pedagogical outcomes connected with the use of an e-dictionary by intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese to aid in reading an expository Chinese e-text. Twenty intermediate and advanced participants read an e-text twice aided by an e-dictionary and wrote recalls of the text in English. In addition to low frequency…

This study explores different aspects of the mapping between phonological form and meaning of signs in British Sign Language (BSL) by means of four tasks to measure meaning recognition, form recognition, form recall, and meaning recall. The aim was to investigate whether there is a hierarchy of difficulty for these tasks and, therefore, whether…

Recent research demonstrated that although 24-month-old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast-mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants' ability to bridge between the initial fast…

Vocabulary presents a challenge to students in content area classes, making it difficult to understand new concepts and make connections to background knowledge. This article describes the 5 Cs, a tool developed to help content area teachers consider vocabulary as part of lesson planning. By selecting a set of key words for instruction, teachers…

How do young infants discover word meanings? We have theorized that caregivers educate infants' attention (cf. Gibson, J.J., 1966) by synchronizing the saying of a word with a dynamic gesture displaying the object/referent (Zukow-Goldring, 1997). Detecting an amodal invariant across gesture and speech brackets the word and object within the…

Neighborhood density--the number of words that sound similar to a given word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998)--influences word learning in native English-speaking children and adults (Storkel, 2004; Storkel, Armbruster & Hogan, 2006): novel words with many similar sounding English words (i.e., dense neighborhood) are learned more quickly than novel words…