In culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms reading comprehension is essential for students to access all areas of the curriculum. For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, research has identified the need to combine literacy strategies with second language principles to scaffold students' comprehension of text. To illustrate…

In the current study, explicit vocabulary learning strategy instruction was integrated into an EFL curriculum to investigate its effects on learners' vocabulary acquisition. A total of 180 EFL learners enrolled in the freshmen English program at a university in Taiwan participated in the study. The participants were guided to explore and practice…

Results of a study are presented that suggest the grammatical structures of English some deaf and hard of hearing students struggle to acquire. A review of the literature from the past 40 years is presented, exploring particular lexical and morphosyntactic areas in which deaf and hard of hearing children have traditionally exhibited difficulty.…

This study builds on previous work exploring reading and listening lexical thresholds (Nation, 2006; Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010; Schmitt, Jiang, & Grabe, 2011) in order to investigate productive vocabulary targets that mark successful entry-level undergraduate writing. Papers that passed the Effective Writing Test (EWT) were chosen…

Vocabulary acquisition associated with watching high-quality educational television has been documented in a number of studies. One lingering question is whether adding strategically placed onscreen print to a program can enhance vocabulary acquisition beyond those effects attributable to viewing educational content alone. The present study was…

Despite some school efforts to offer students the best second language learning, English language lessons are often taught with an overuse of the mother tongue. Hence, an action research project was conducted in order to discover how to adapt some features of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) component: Lesson delivery, for the…

The importance of professional development (PD) is clearly understood; however, little is known about how the most effective PD influences teachers' learning and how teachers perceive PD that goes beyond the typical two-hour session on an aspect of instruction. In this article, the authors present the response of a group of middle school teachers…

Purpose: This study examined the longitudinal effects of social behaviors in predicting phonological awareness outcomes in 4-year-old children. Method: One hundred two children (52 boys, 50 girls) were recruited from 11 schools serving low-income neighborhoods in a large metropolitan city and were assessed at the beginning and end of the preschool…

This paper describes the design and development of a CALL resource that teaches aspects of word combinability (i.e., grammatical collocation, transitivity, and complementation) to tertiary-level ESL learners by integrating conceptual understanding with related text-analysis and web-based dictionary skills. The resource delivers an automated,…

The present study investigated the effect of form-focused and non-form-focused tasks on EFL learners' vocabulary learning through written input. The form-focused task aimed to draw students' attention to the word itself through word recognition activities. Non-form-focused tasks were divided into (a) the comprehension question task, which required…

This study examines bilingual vocabulary knowledge in relation to arrival age among first language (L1) Japanese students attending "hoshuukoo" (i.e., supplementary academic schools for Japanese-speaking children) in the United States. It also examines the relationship between L1 Japanese and English as a second language (L2), as…

This exploratory study seeks for understanding the relationship between Turkish elementary school English teachers' espoused beliefs about the effective ways of teaching English and their self-reported practices. 6 teachers, who were working at different state schools in a town located in the Northwestern part of Turkey, were interviewed.…

The paper aims at investigating students' learning attitudes after they are exposed to three vocabulary learning methods, namely Contextual Clues, Dictionary Strategy and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The study involves 123 undergraduates, who were surveyed to identify the factors that affect their attitudes in learning vocabulary…

The present article reports on the results of a study designed to investigate the effects of two types of lexical modification i.e., lexical simplification and elaboration, on incidental vocabulary acquisition of Iranian EFL learners.To this end, four versions of experimental texts containing 20 target words were created: baseline and simplified…

A commentary on Williams's (2012) invited article on the use of adapted vocabulary learning interventions focuses on three areas: (a) Vocabulary interventions with storybook reading originally designed for hearing children can be adapted for deaf children. (b) Teachers are invited to reflect on how the read-aloud process in English differs from…