To compete in the work force today, the global and national economy demands our 21st century learners to write efficiently, effectively, and coherently. Due to minimal progress in writing scores over the past decade, spelling has increasingly become a subject of national debate as poor spelling can impede a writer's ability to formulate ideas and…

Among risk factors associated with reading difficulties, poverty and underdeveloped oral language skills can be particularly detrimental to reading success. The City Early Reading First (CERF) project implemented a comprehensive curriculum, professional development, intensive mentoring, and home supports to enhance children's language, literacy,…

Offering fresh alternatives to common instructional practices that fail to get results, this accessible, highly practical guide highlights ways to motivate middle school students while enhancing content-area learning. Each chapter features an enlightening case study of a teacher whose current strategies are not supported by research; describes…

Using an approach based on a Harvard study that found "when the whole body is involved, the number of brain cells brought to the learning activity doubles," the author offers over one hundred kinesthetic activities for classroom use. Activities are organized by content area, include directions for number of players, objective, and…

Whereas the penetration of mobile phones in Asian countries keeps climbing, little research has explored the application of the short message service (SMS) in second language learning. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of SMS vocabulary lessons of limited lexical information on the small screens of mobile phones. Thirty high school…

The authors studied a longitudinal English intervention in a 70/30 (Spanish/ English) developmental bilingual education (DBE) program (n = 302) and compared this model with a typical-practice, 80/20, late-exit transitional bilingual education program (n = 187) in terms of students' language and literacy acquisition from kindergarten to second…

The paper reviewed studies in word-level processing skills and related areas, and profiled how the development of L2 word recognition and integration skills would contribute to autonomous "kango" (Chinese originated words or words created from Chinese originated words) vocabulary learning. Despite the fact that the acquisition of a…

The purpose of this action research project was to improve student vocabulary acquisition through a multisensory, direct instructional approach. The study involved three teachers and a target population of 73 students in second and seventh grade classrooms. The intervention was implemented from September through December of 2006 and analyzed in…

The authors assert that, in order to teach vocabulary more effectively and better understand its relation to comprehension, we need first to address how vocabulary knowledge and growth are assessed. They argue that "vocabularly assessment is grossly undernourished, both in its theoretical and practical aspects--that it has been driven by…

This study was designed to examine the effects of looping, a practice whereby teachers and students stay together for more than one year, on perceived values and academic achievement in language arts at a Fresno Unified School District elementary school in Fresno, CA. Looping has many perceived advantages, such as the development of long-term…

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long-term memory…

Because of difficult academic vocabulary and ambiguous explanations of many concepts, science texts are hard for students to read and understand. To become skilled readers of content material, students need to learn the meanings of the academic science vocabulary. They must also be able to understand the concepts presented in the textbook.…

This analysis evaluates the receptive tests of targeted lexical knowledge in the written medium, which are typically used in empirical research into lexical acquisition from reading foreign/second language texts. Apart from the types of second language cues or prompts, and the language of the responses, the main issues revolve around: (a) the…

This paper focuses on the aspects of the lexicon in 66 prematurely born very-low-birth-weight and 87 full-term Finnish children at 2;0, studied using the Finnish version of the "MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory". The groups did not differ in vocabulary size. Furthermore, the female advantage in vocabulary size was not seen…

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and…