The REAP tutoring system provides individualized and adaptive English as a Second Language vocabulary practice. REAP can automatically personalize instruction by providing practice readings about topics that match interests as well as domain-based, cognitive objectives. While most previous research on motivation in intelligent tutoring…

Poor comprehenders are generally students who have significant language-learning deficits. A particular problem for students with poor comprehension is that they have difficulty learning new vocabulary because they are inclined to read less, and are unable to apply new meanings to unfamiliar words. This leads to the situation where the gap widens…

We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…

This article presents the concept development, research programming, and learning design of a lexical processing web application, Virtual Vocabulary, which was developed using theories in both cognitive psychology and second language acquisition (SLA). It is being tested with first-year students of German at the University of Victoria in Canada,…

It is important for children to develop knowledge of words' meanings from a young age because vocabulary development has an impact on their reading comprehension and academic success as they get older. Some children come to school knowing far fewer words than others. Hart and Risley studied young children's vocabulary development and found that…

Repeated reading, a procedure involving repetition of the same text, has received copious attention from first language reading research providing highly converging evidence of its potency for reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. In contrast, second language research on repeated reading has been scarce. The very few studies extant have,…

This longitudinal study examined the process of English reading comprehension at age 11 years for 173 low-achieving Spanish-speaking children. The influence of growth rates, from early childhood (age 4.5 years) to pre-adolescence (age 11 years), in vocabulary and word reading skills on this complex process were evaluated with structural equation…

Michael is a 6-year-old boy with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). He and the other children in his class have delays in their verbal and nonverbal communication skills and difficulty with social interactions. Higgins and Eliza are two lovable cockapoos who help young children with ASD learn new words, expand the length of their sentences, try…

The ability to define a word with accuracy and precision is an important skill that has been associated with academic achievement. This study investigated the feasibility of conducting a lesson on formal word definitions to improve children's definitional production. The participants were 18 children in grade 4 (mean age: 9 years; 8 months) who…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

This study investigated the extent to which language skills at ages 2 to 4 years could discriminate Hong Kong Chinese poor from adequate readers at age 7. Selected were 41 poor readers (age M = 87.6 months) and 41 adequate readers (age M = 88.3 months). The two groups were matched on age, parents' education levels, and nonverbal intelligence. The…

With increasing numbers of women joining the workforce, there is a need for quality childcare. This project, conducted in Japan and using a large number of participants, sought to standardize an evaluation scale to measure the development of children. The development of children under six years of age (N = 22,819) who are enrolled in childcare…

A significant body of research exists on the development of early literacy skills and their relationship to the development of literacy as a whole. Phonological awareness, orthographic processing, rapid automatized naming, phonological memory, and receptive vocabulary have all been shown to be predictive of early reading outcome measures. What is…

This study investigated the effectiveness of an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) program on Turkish learners' vocabulary learning. Within the scope of this research, an ICALL application with a morphological analyser (Your Verbal Zone, YVZ) was developed and used in an English language preparatory class to measure its…