Students with learning disabilities may gain from use of "flip-flop" study guides to gain key vocabulary and concepts. Rather than providing definitions for terms, the student provides terms for definitions and concepts in the study guide. Such guides allow the teacher to focus on particular concepts and provide repetition of information for…

Challenges Gentner's (1982) claim that nouns are universally predominant in children's early vocabularies, noting that when a conservative method of counting nouns was used, 9 out of 10 22-month-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children produced more verbs or action words than nouns or object labels in their naturalistic speech. (MDM)

Discusses materials that help primary-grade students develop a richer supply of words: books, audiotapes, and magnetic poetry kits for teachers and/or for students. (SR)

One hundred sixth-graders studied a list of new vocabulary items according to either a semantic-context or mnemonic learning strategy, combined with either an individual or pair format for studying and testing. Results indicate that when a scripted learning pair-learning/testing format was incorporated, vocabulary learning benefits were observed…

Examines which of the image modalities--dynamic video or still picture--is more effective in aiding vocabulary acquisition. Thirty English-as-a-Second-Language students were introduced to a hypermedia-learning program, designed for reading comprehension. Concludes that a video clip is more effective in teaching unknown vocabulary words than a…

Over 2,500 secondary students in the Torrance (California) Unified School District who read below the 30th percentile on state tests have access to a second-chance program. Participants engage in extensive recreational reading and vocabulary development, address comprehension on multiple levels, and use writing to assist comprehension. (MLH)

Argues that corpus linguistics could radically change grammar teaching in the 21st century in three ways: register-specific grammatical description could replace the grammar of English, grammar and vocabulary teaching could become more integrated, and emphasis could shift from structural accuracy to appropriateness of grammatical choice.…

This study compared language skills in a group of very low-income toddlers with those of a middle-income sample matched on age and sex. The assessment instrument used was the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for toddlers, a parent report form. Scores for low-income group were strikingly lower on three key indices evaluated: size of…

This article discusses preliminary research that found that more than 90 percent of sentences written by children or for children contain verbs from 1 of 13 verb semantic-syntactic subsets. A strategy for assessing a child's knowledge of verbs from each subset is described, along with an assessment protocol. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Describes two experiments that examined the acquisition of second language lexical fluency. Considers the implications of these results for models of the developing lexicon. (Author/VWL)

Presents four primary-level activities designed to help students learn to love words and enjoy the process of writing. The activities help students craft poems, build their vocabularies in writing, integrate more imagery into their writing using rebus stories, and find missing parts in their stories through questioning. (SM)

Demonstrates that etymology as a word attack strategy for second language students does not offer an unfair advantage to students whose first languages are Latin-based. Much of the English language makes use of Latin roots and affixes. Students whose original language is derived from Latin will initially have an advantage in word recognition due…

Expressive vocabulary was studied in 130 children (ages 1 to 5 years) with Down syndrome. Although there was continuous growth in expressive referential vocabulary from birth through 5 years, age 5 was found to be an important developmental marker for multiword combinations and grammatical vocabulary. (Author/CR)

Explored the relationships between depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in English as a Second Language. Results support the hypotheses that scores on vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension are highly and positively correlated; and scores on depth of vocabulary knowledge can make a…

This article discuses how educators can challenge gifted students with classical literature, enriched vocabulary, and the study of grammar. It argues that classic literature presents a complete spectrum of challenge at many levels, including the level of language, the level of idea, and the level of meaning. (Contains three references.) (CR)