Offers advice for teaching English-as-a-Second-Language vocabulary in a way that makes a difference for students and boosts their sense of achievement. (Author/VWL)

Describes an activity for middle school learners of French called "body parties, or giant body part people. It is an arts and crafts project that students do mostly at home. The activity will help students understand and manipulate body part vocabulary. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the development of decoding (efficiency), reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling during the elementary school years. Determines the differences between poor, average and good performers with regard to the development of these skills. Finds clear seasonal effects for reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling, but the…

A study of J. Locke's theory of specific language impairment (SLI) found that children (n=10) with SLI who were limited to single-word utterances showed deficits in their lexical comprehension, supporting Locke's proposal. A second study found that children with SLI who had reached the grammatical stage of development showed age-appropriate…

Attempts to stimulate theoretical thinking and empirical research in the domain of second language vocabulary learning by introducing a construct of involvement with motivational and cognitive dimensions: Need, Search, and Evaluation. Reviews a number of constructs that are currently debated and investigated in the literature on cognitive and…

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) were collected from 669 British Children aged between 1 and 2 years. Comprehension and production scores in each age group were calculated. This provides norming data for the British infant population. Data from British infants is compared to data from American infants. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the teaching of conceptual fluency via basic vocabulary development in the Italian as a second language classroom. Lists a series of strategies to assist the teacher and students in teaching and learning vocabulary. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how the "Guinness Book of World Records" can be adapted for use in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. Particular focus is on teaching vocabulary. (Author/VWL)

Considers Boysson-Bardies' book a thorough and thought-provoking description of early language development and the research related to how infants learn to talk and respond to speech. Notes the value of the book's discussion of cross-cultural variation in vocabulary development and individual differences related to special education. (JPB)

Investigates the use of literature as a context for teaching unfamiliar vocabulary to high school students. Compares two methods of instruction. Suggests taking a mediational approach to analyzing the vocabulary teaching problems identified. Illustrates how the knowledge gained through this action research study reshaped the teacher's classroom…

Vocabulary development and the role it plays in reading skills acquisition have received much less attention than decoding and comprehension strategies. There is a close relationship between vocabulary and comprehension; hence, individuals with poor vocabulary have difficulty understanding written text. Further, students with poor vocabulary…

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was…

This paper reports evidence from a longitudinal study in which children's attention to shape in a laboratory task of artificial noun learning was correlated with a rate shift in noun acquisitions. Eight children were tested in the laboratory at 3-week intervals beginning when they had less than 25 nouns in their productive vocabulary (M age=17…

Drawing on themes found in James Marshall's writings on Nietzsche, the arts and the self, this paper explores the nature of influence in the arts and its relevance to education. It considers what Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of influence" and amplifies this in terms of broader questions concerning Emersonian self-reliance. The particular…

This article provides an overview of a multicomponent comprehension strategy and graphic organizers designed for older readers to gain meaning from text. Practices designed to capitalize on the best research-based elements associated with improved outcomes in reading comprehension, particularly for expository texts, are described. The graphic…