Offers tips for incorporating Shakespeare into a creative dramatics program for elementary students: ensure a speaking part for every child; assign parts best for the child; produce the play most comfortable for the class; allow for student input on characterization; rehearse a portion of the play each day; plan for several performances; and…

Assessed children's and mothers' speech at the times of children's first word and first vocabulary spurt. Found that infants were more likely to talk before than after their mother spoke and that about one-third of infants' speech occurred in response to mothers' speech. Results support a model of language development in which the child's role is…

Discusses articles contained in this special issue of the journal, raising issues concerning key terms, with particular emphasis on "incidental." Argues there is no clear way to show that a word has been learned incidentally, if the suggestion is that specific attention is not drawn to that word either by some external force or by the learner.…

Reviews four recent books of current research in vocabulary acquisition: "Exploring the Second Language Mental Lexicon," (D. Singleton); "Assessing Vocabulary," (J. Read); "Vocabulary in Language Teaching" (N. Schmitt); "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" (L.S.P. Nation). (Author/VWL)

Encourages student awareness of the connections between their classroom experiences and real life. Develops an idea to motivate and keep track of students' findings, the "I Spy Vocab Words" contest. Describes how the author implemented the contest. Notes how the program has students keep a log of vocabulary words they find in their everyday lives.…

Explores "fast mapping," one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a study of the early lexical acquisition of two children who acquired Spanish and English simultaneously. Data provide strong counter evidence to Faingold's (1996) proposal that children acquiring languages not closely related tend to favor a reduction strategy, whereas those acquiring closely related languages favor a maintenance…

Provides annotations to eight documents in the ERIC database on the subject of content area reading and vocabulary development. (SG)

Investigation into the relative effectiveness of four input strategies for two-year-olds' (N=56) category evolution found that the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes. (Author/CB)

Four experiments which involved 160 children aged 2 to 19 investigate the mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning. Results indicate that the bias develops after the second birthday but does not gain full strength or become accessible to consciousness until after the third birthday. (RJC)

Study of the relationship between family frequency, form frequency, and elementary school students' word knowledge indicated that family frequency tended to be a sizably better predictor of student word knowledge than was form frequency. (Author/CB)

Suggests a spelling riddle activity that can stimulate students' awareness of the complexities of English while providing practice in dictionary skills, phonics, and vocabulary development. Presents several examples. (MS)

Argues that a loss in general literacy occurs as the potential for imagery decreases through lack of understanding of the root meanings of words. Argues that the rich stores of imagery that contribute to English vocabulary are denied to those ignorant of the linguistic contributions to the English language. (RS)

Describes several approaches for teaching vocabulary words as concepts, including semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, and the Freyer Model, a seven step model of concept development. (MM)

Suggests several teaching approaches to spelling instruction at the secondary level. (MM)