Twenty-four studies were included in this systematic review of vocabulary research literature. The review corroborates the findings of past studies that several strategies have emerged that increase students' vocabulary knowledge. Findings further reinforce the National Reading Panel's recommendations regarding the context and magnitude of studies…

Eighty-five Hong Kong Chinese children were tested across both the 2nd and 3rd years of kindergarten (ages 4-5 years) on tasks of inhibitory control, working memory, vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and word reading. With age, vocabulary knowledge, and metalinguistic skills statistically controlled, the…

Talamas et al. (1999), Ferre et al. (2006) and Sunderman and Kroll (2006) exposed participants to first-language/second-language (L1/L2) pairs of words and asked them to decide whether the second word was the correct translation of the first. In the critical condition, the L2 word was either the translation of the L1 word ("man" [right arrow]…

Vocabulary development for students with learning disability (LD) is affected by "differences in the amount of independent reading, lack of strategies to learn words from content, and diffuse word knowledge" (Jitendra, Edwards, Sacks, & Jacobson, 2004, p. 300). Generally, students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have relatively strong skills…

The study examined whether exposure to Kindergarten PAVEd for Success, a vocabulary instruction program, improved expressive vocabulary of kindergartners. The study analyzed data for nearly 1,300 kindergarten students in 64 schools serving predominantly rural and high poverty youth in the Mississippi Delta region and surrounding areas.…

This research explored the notion of what constitutes literacy, particularly as pertaining to people who are blind or visually impaired, specifically those that do not use Braille as their primary way to access and produce text. To achieve this goal, a mixed design was used including a biographical presentation of what it means to be blind and…

A single-subject design of the effects of teaching Tier Two vocabulary on the vocabulary knowledge, comprehension, fluency, and prosody of fifth-grade nonnative English speakers was conducted. Results suggested that vocabulary instruction improved vocabulary knowledge, but further research and study is needed to determine ways to improve fluency,…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of similar sounding words to a target word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998) and influences first language word learning in adults learning English (Storkel, Armbruster, & Hogan, 2006). There are two processes in word learning: lexical configuration and lexical engagement (Leach & Samuel, 2007). Lexical configuration…

This highly practical resource for K-6 teachers is packed with 25 classroom-tested, step-by-step strategies for developing word knowledge. The emphasis throughout is not only on teaching new words, but also on strengthening students' comprehension and long-term vocabulary acquisition. Especially valuable are guidelines for how to differentiate…

Classwide instructional strategies to improve not only reading fluency but also comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are essential for student reading success. The current study examined the immediate effects of two classwide listening previewing strategies on reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Twenty-one, fourth-grade general…

This article presents the authors' reply to Beniko Mason and Stephen Krashen's comments on their recent article published in "TESOL Quarterly." Mason and Krashen have provided an interesting reinterpretation of the authors' results and have also brought up several valid points regarding the efficiency of vocabulary learning from instruction,…

Educators deal with the many dynamic functions and applications of the human brain on a daily basis. The theoretical research of the biology and functionality of the human brain is on the rise, and educational publishers continue to support books and scholarly articles that promote the notion that "brain research" can and should be applied to…

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

One of the challenges of teaching disciplinary vocabulary effectively is the paucity of available, classroom-friendly vocabulary assessments that can be used to gauge students' vocabulary growth and to inform vocabulary instruction. This article describes the intricacies of word knowledge that make assessment difficult. Three continua…

Halberda (2003) demonstrated that 17-month-old infants, but not 14- or 16-month-olds, use a strategy known as mutual exclusivity (ME) to identify the meanings of new words. When 17-month-olds were presented with a novel word in an intermodal preferential looking task, they preferentially fixated a novel object over an object for which they already…