Preschool is a complex place, and some preschool educators come to their classrooms without formal training in language and literacy pedagogy. As a result, they need practical guidance and support to ensure that they are facilitating literacy success. An area ripe for targeted language and literacy instruction is shared storybook reading. We have…

The present study investigates the effects that different types of multimedia glosses, namely textual, pictorial, and textual + pictorial, have on text comprehension and vocabulary learning when the goal is exclusively comprehension of a computerized text. This study is based on the theoretical framework of attention, which maintains that…

This quasi-experimental study explored the effect of a "Teacher Guided Multimedia" CD-ROM program as a supplement in teaching vocabulary acquisition to EFL students. Eighty seven juniors in the Food and Beverage Management Department at Yuanpei University in northern Taiwan participated in the study. Students from two intact classes were…

A read-aloud program focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills for children bilingual in Quechua and Spanish was evaluated for efficacy. The authors present a study with classrooms of first-grade students, suggesting that specific read-aloud strategies that target the use of background knowledge in a discussion-based format can be a…

"Decoding"--converting the written symbols (or graphemes) of an alphabetical writing system into the sounds (or phonemes) they represent, using knowledge of the language's symbol/sound correspondences--has been argued to be an important but neglected skill in the teaching of second language (L2) French in English secondary schools.…

Objective: To examine the effects of early maternal and paternal depression on child expressive language at age 24 months and the role that parent-to-child reading may play in this pathway. Participants and methods: The 9-month and 24-month waves from a national prospective study of children and their families, the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Despite being one of our most important and most often used modalities, listening is an area of language instruction that is often overlooked by teachers and researchers alike as fertile ground for the enhancement of students' vocabulary knowledge. For low-level learners, especially those not in full control of the first 2000 most-frequent words…

Language samples elicited through a picture description task were recorded from 38 adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and one control group matched on age, and another matched on age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. The samples were coded for use of various types of inferences, dramatic devices, and verbal fillers; acoustic analyses…

Recent research has shown that infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of words when tested using a preferential looking task. The results of these studies indicate that infants are able to access the phonological detail of words when engaged in lexical recognition. However, most of this work has focused on mispronunciations of consonants in…

This study examined the effect of first language (L1) phonological awareness on the rate of learning new second language (L2) color terms and the rate of processing old color terms. Two groups of 37 children participated; they differed on L1 phonological awareness measured at Grade 3. At Grade 5, over multiple trials, the children learned new L2…

Integrating vocabulary games and activities more often into the structure of the day, Thomas B. Smith establishes a word-rich environment for high school students to experiment with unfamiliar words in varying, playful contexts. Smith asserts that giving frequent opportunities for hearing, speaking, and writing in the typical context of the day is…

In this paper, we describe an initial exploratory study designed to compare the outcomes of online listening and online text-based tasks in the context of the study of Italian at The University of Melbourne. Our findings allow us to characterise online listening and online reading as a qualitative difference between deep and surface approaches to…

This article discusses an experiment in sending regular Short Message Service (SMS) messages to support language learning, and vocabulary learning in particular, at beginners' level in Italian at an Australian university. The approach we took built on the initiatives of Thornton and Houser (2005) and Dias (2002b), and was informed by the results…

Using a reliable and broad-based measure of morphological awareness, which tapped knowledge of relational, syntactic, and distributional morphology, we examined the development of morphological knowledge among older elementary students and the relationship of their morphological knowledge to a range of literacy measures. We found that…

This paper describes a single-subject study of vocabulary acquisition. The subject, an L1 English speaker, was required to learn 300 vocabulary items in Arabic at a rate of 15 new words a day over a period of 20 days. The learning period was followed by immediate and delayed tests of receptive and productive knowledge of target items. The…