Shares three teachers' experiences writing their own computer-assisted instructional materials to improve the vocabulary development portion of a course designed to help at-risk first-year college students develop vocabulary and contextual analysis skills. Discusses theoretical foundation, program design, development and implementation of the…

In the Dictagloss method, a short text is read at normal speed to a class of learners who jot down familiar words as they listen. Students then gather in small groups to review and reconstruct a version of the text and then compare their version with that of other groups. Implications for creativity and memory are discussed. (three references) (LB)

Reviews research concerning the preteaching of content area vocabulary. Questions the value of solely preteaching content terms and suggests teaching both general and content vocabulary in ways that aid students in becoming independent word learners. (MG)

Describes an activity/assignment involving composition and cooperative learning which is designed to help students learn to attend to context clues. (SR)

In an activity for the French classroom, teams of four student pairs read and summarize newspaper and magazine articles, extract a vocabulary list, prepare content questions, and become experts on portions of the text for a small-group discussion game. Changing partners and solo presentation are important features of the exercise. (MSE)

Discusses ways in which various aspects of language or words may be addressed by using children's literature. Such use generates an interest in language and words that carries over into children's reading, writing, listening, and speaking. (BB)

The place of literature in the foreign language classroom is described, and the effectiveness of the short story is noted. Suggestions are offered regarding selection criteria, classroom activities, oral activities, role play, oral comprehension, and a variety of written exercises including sequencing and writing dialog. (Contains seven…

Used growth curves and dynamic-systems modeling to examine early lexical and grammatical development of one male child. Found that lexical development described a pattern of logistic growth. Plural growth began after reaching a threshold in vocabulary size. Lexical growth slowed as plural growth increased, and increased when plural use reached…

Examines the discrepancy between spoken and written vocabularies in modern standard Chinese (MSC) textbooks that contributes to slow vocabulary development, and outlines a teaching technique to extend students' vocabulary using the ideographic nature of MSC characters rather than phonetic learning to increase efficient use of vocabulary…

A study involving 32 children with language delays investigated the effectiveness of Dialogic Reading, an interactive language-facilitation technique. After adult instruction in Dialogic Reading, children spoke more, made longer utterances, produced more words, and participated more in shared book reading. No differences were found in vocabulary…

Six children were studied from the age of 6 months to 1 year and 6 months to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational…

Examines whether or not learning unknown words in a context is useful to Japanese high school students. Particular focus is on the learning effect of unknown word inference strategies in reading.(Author/VWL)

Gives a detailed account of the lexical growth in a bilingual child (German and English) and discusses its theoretical implications. Evaluating the principle of contrast in bilingual acquisition, concludes that evidence of lexical-equivalent learning and usage of equivalents can contribute to the debate on language separation in bilingual infants.…

Describes a film poster-based activity that is designed to help students in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom understand new vocabulary and raise their awareness of both the position of words in the structure of a sentence and their grammatical patterns and combinations. (Author/VWL)

Examined the effects of text-based tasks and background knowledge on incidental vocabulary acquisition among adult English-as-a-Second-Language-learners who received treatments involving reading and retelling text with or without generative training. Pretesting and posttesting indicated that reading and retelling promoted incidental vocabulary…