This study investigated the instructional talk of three math teachers from two urban middle schools as they implemented a curriculum designed to develop students' knowledge of academic vocabulary and encourage word use during classroom discussions. Data were drawn from audio- and video-recordings, classroom observations, and teacher…

Why are some words harder to learn than others? In a long-term CASLR (computer-assisted second language research) study, a vocabulary flashcard program that employs spaced repetition for explicit vocabulary training was used in order to arrive at data on the difficulty of individual words. The vocabulary content of a beginner's Welsh course was…

Purpose: Cross-linguistic cognates are words that share form and meaning in two languages (e.g., "helicopter-helicoptero"); translation equivalents are words that share meaning but not form (e.g., "house-casa"). Research consistently demonstrates a performance speed and/or accuracy advantage for processing cognates versus noncognates in bilingual…

The goals of this study were to examine (a) whether extratextual vocabulary instructions embedded in electronic storybooks facilitated word learning over reading alone and (b) whether instructional formats that required children to invest more effort were more effective than formats that required less effort. A computer-based "assistant" was added…

Content-based language instruction and form-focused instruction (FFI) have been investigated extensively in the context of English as a second language. However, there has not been much research concerning FFI in the context of English as a foreign language. The study described here explores the effect of integrated and isolated FFI on the…

For second language learners vocabulary growth is of major importance, and for many learners commercially published coursebooks will be the source of this vocabulary learning. In this preliminary study, input from three levels of the coursebook series "New English File" (Oxenden and Latham-Koenig, 2006; Oxenden, Latham-Koenig, and Seligson, 2004,…

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic…

In this study, word knowledge and its relation to text comprehension was examined with 50 Chinese- and 20 Korean-speaking second language (L2) learners and 40 first language (L1) speakers of Japanese. Breadth and depth of word knowledge were assessed by a word-definition matching test and a word-associates selection test, respectively. Text…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

Three common assumptions concerning bilingual children's language proficiency are: (1) their proficiency in two languages is usually unbalanced; (2) low socioeconomic status (SES) indicates low proficiency in both languages; and (3) encouraging parents to speak some societal language at home will promote its development. Examining the vocabulary…

This study examines whether unfamiliar proper names affect English as a second language (ESL) learners' listening comprehension. A total of 110 intermediate to advanced ESL learners participated; comprehension of a short news text was tested under two conditions, Names Known (all proper names pre-taught in advance) and Names Unknown (all proper…

The study reported in this article investigated the use of input-based tasks with young, beginner learners of English as a second language by examining both learning outcomes (i.e. acquisition) and the interactions that resulted from implementing the tasks. The participants were 15 learners, aged six, with no experience of second language (L2)…

Five groups of children defined by presence or absence of syntactic deficits and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) took vocabulary tests and provided sentences, definitions, and word associations. Children with ASD who were free of syntactic deficits demonstrated age-appropriate word knowledge. Children with ASD plus concomitant syntactic language…

The Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) is a 23-item questionnaire used in primary screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The current studies examine the concurrent validity of the M-CHAT in its ability to predict 18-month-olds' performance on theory of mind and word learning tasks. In Experiment 1, infants' understanding of…

This paper proposes a new method for the combined teaching of pronunciation and vocabulary to learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). While there is commonly strong emphasis on the teaching of vocabulary, pronunciation teaching is frequently neglected in the EFL classroom. The proposed method aims to address such imbalance which may…