This article presents a study of the teacher trainees in an English department who have received instruction in metacognitive awareness for reading comprehension. Metacognition or "thinking about thinking" involves the awareness and regulation of thinking processes. Metacognitive strategies are those strategies which require students to…

Concerns about how to build academic vocabulary and weave its instruction into curricula are common among classroom teachers. The column includes a review of the research and some practical suggestions for teachers.

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

To "help students think carefully about specific words and their uses," Darren Crovitz and Jessica A. Miller conceive a diagram that visually expresses the spaces and ties between words. Students eagerly explore contextual connotations and defend subtle shifts in word meaning, discovering how time, use, and circumstance all influence meaning.…

Seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, and learning! The authors observed that their English Language Learner (ELL) students achieved a deeper understanding of the properties of matter, as well as enhanced vocabulary development, when they were guided through inquiry-based, multisensory explorations that repeatedly exposed them to words and…

In recent years there has been much research interest in looking for behavioural phenotypes (or specific profiles of strengths and weaknesses) that are associated with specific conditions--particularly conditions with genetic origins such as Down syndrome. This kind of information may be very helpful in alerting parents and professionals to the…

This study describes a pilot project that included senior volunteer readers reading aloud to third graders in diverse schools across a district in northeast Florida. The researchers interviewed students about their perceptions of the aging process before and after the read aloud as well as their view of the read aloud events. The children enjoyed…

Student-centered tasks, such as having students select vocabulary to be learned, offer one way of supporting both content area learning and independent word learning. The underlying foundation of these tasks is the vocabulary terms and phrases that students personally deem important for understanding what is read. With this in mind, the authors…

This paper reports on a study which investigated the effect on vocabulary recall of introducing new words via two different methods. A one-group quasi-experimental research design with alternating time series measures was employed. A group of 60 fourth graders were taught 80 carefully selected words either in semantically related sets or…

Vocabulary can no longer be said to be "a Cinderella topic", at least so far as its representation in other journals is concerned. Research articles on vocabulary learning and teaching now occur frequently and have been particularly well represented in recent issues of the North American research journal "Language Learning". While studies of…

This article synthesized the morphology intervention studies conducted in English with students in kindergarten through 12th grade between 1986 and 2006. Seven studies were identified as focusing primarily on morphology instruction, including roots and affixes, and measuring one or more reading-related outcomes (e.g., word identification,…

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that childhood language problems persist into early adulthood. Nevertheless, little is known about how individual and environmental characteristics influence the language growth of individuals identified with speech/language problems. Method: Individual growth curve models were utilised to examine how…

In this review, texts used in the research on which the National Reading Panel based its conclusions in its 2000 report about the role of fluency in reading and its sensitivity to practice were grouped in 4 categories. Three of these text categories (pre-1990 basals, skill builders, and high-interest/low-vocabulary texts) used controlled…

This study compared the effects of writing new words in sentences with word picture repetition learning alone. Second language (L2) Spanish learners attempted to learn 24 new Spanish words in one of two conditions while viewing word picture pairs. In Experiment 1, in the no sentence writing condition, the participants viewed 4 repetitions of each…

In the traditional ELT in China, much emphasis has been put on the students' mastering vocabulary and grammar. Language form was regarded as the content of teaching. And listening skill has been ever neglected for a fairly long time in ELT in China. Recent years, more and more attention has been drawn to learners' listening ability. This paper…