Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some…

Learning to read English requires learning the complex statistical dependencies between orthography and phonology. Previous research has focused on how these statistics are learned in neural network models provided with as much training as needed. Children, however, are expected to acquire this knowledge in a few years of school with only limited…

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study that explored the differential effects of input- and output-based tasks on L2 vocabulary learning. The study adopted a pretest-posttest within-participants design, with sixty Vietnamese EFL university students. Participants in the experimental group completed four input and four output tasks in an…

This study explored the role of early oral language in reading development among adult heritage language (HL) learners to provide insights into the possible developmental pattern of HL reading development. One hundred and ninety-five English-speaking Chinese HL (CHL) students participated in this study. They completed a language background survey…

The teaching of vocabulary is essential in the world of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). EFL learners have problems in learning vocabulary. To attract the students' attention, the teachers should have adequate teaching methods. One of the teachers' efforts to engage the students is by applying ESA (engage, study, and activate) through…

While recent studies find that contextual diversity (CD) is a better determinant of visual word recognition than token frequency, there is a dearth of work comparing contextual diversity and token frequency in developing readers. In two sets of character and lexical decision experiments we examined token frequency and contextual diversity effects…

A number of studies have suggested that extensive reading can lead to gains in different language skills. Few studies on extensive reading have been conducted outside the East Asia classroom setting. This study investigated the impact of an extensive reading programme conducted over 12 weeks with 90- minutes group sessions 3 times a week involving…

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

Vocabulary, as important as it is, is largely relegated to the domain of memorization in the English as a foreign language (EFL) situations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Assessment and achievement tests have proven time and again that this strategy is not doing any good for the learners' proficiency. This study was conceived to suggest…

Previous research indicates that infant-directed speech (IDS) is usually slower than adult-directed speech (ADS) and mothers prefer placing a focused word in isolation or utterance-final position in (English) IDS, which may benefit word learning. This study investigated the speaking rate and word position of IDS in two typologically-distinct…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…

A repeated acquisition (RA) design was used to compare the effectiveness of research-based instruction embedded in repeated storybook reading facilitated by an adult or tablet application (app) on the vocabulary knowledge of six preschool children. All participants selected scored below the 40th percentile on the "Preschool Language…

In this study we examine the effectiveness of a technology-based vocabulary intervention compared to an extended vocabulary intervention that has been validated in previous studies. At-risk first grade students learned new words through each condition in a within-subjects design. Comparisons of target word knowledge between the two conditions were…

In recent years, mobile applications (apps) have been increasingly used and investigated as a vocabulary learning approach. Despite the extensive use of commercial English as a Foreign Language (EFL) vocabulary learning apps in China, there is a lack of a review of these apps for a systematic understanding of the components and usefulness of…

Integration of technology in the teaching/learning process has caused many changes in education in recent years. In addition, due to the pandemic that surrounded the world at the beginning of 2020, schools had to switch from face-to-face to distance education; therefore, the need for technology use and expansion of online applications became…