Reading is critical for scientific thinking. It is a foundation for many of the skills in which scientists and engineers must be proficient, such as conducting research, developing informed conjectures, and engaging in reasoned argument (NRC 2012). Yet, students frequently find science reading difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Strategies…

Series of international studies have shown that subtitled television programs provide a rich context for foreign language acquisition. This study investigated whether incidental language acquisition occurs from watching a television program with/without subtitles. Children in the experimental conditions watch: (a) a 15 minute snapshot of a well…

Developing a large and rich vocabulary is central to learning to read. Children must know the words that make up written texts in order to understand them, especially as the vocabulary demands of content-related materials increase in the upper grades. Studies have documented that the size of a person's vocabulary is strongly related to how…

Students from Turkish-speaking families are the largest minority language group in Germany. Yet, little is known about this group's literacy development. Using data from a 3-year longitudinal study, we examined whether the same base reading skills are involved in early reading comprehension of 100 Turkish-German bilingual and 69 German monolingual…

Dynamic analyses of language growth tell us how vocabulary and grammar develop and how the two might be intertwined. Analyses of growth curves between 17 and 42 months, based on longitudinal data for 34 children, revealed interesting patterns of vocabulary and grammatical developments. They showed that these patterns were nonlinear, but with…

Research with monolingual children has shown that early efficiency in real-time word recognition predicts later language and cognitive outcomes. In parallel research with young bilingual children, processing ability and vocabulary size are closely related within each language, although not across the two languages. For children in dual-language…

Incidental word learning is influenced by context, task, and reader characteristics. The present study aimed to determine the contribution and interactions of these factors for fifth-grade students. The focus was on contextual differences: words' meanings are inferred from local or global contexts. This effect was tested as a function of task: gap…

The aim of the present paper is to show how captioned tactile jigsaw flashcards (CTJF) can be used in teaching English vocabulary to children with special educational needs. The idea of the following technique, inspired by Montessori's Three Period Lesson (1964, 1967a, 1967b), was presented by this author and colleague Dorota Beltkiewicz in March…

The aim of this study was to investigate verbal and nonverbal cognitive deficits in Italian students with developmental dyslexia. The performances of 32 dyslexic students, 64 age-matched typically reading controls, and 64 reading age-matched controls were compared on tests of lexical knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming,…

As teachers organize classroom schedules to meet curricular demands and time constraints, they strive to seek ways to motivate and sustain student engagement in quality vocabulary instruction, enjoyable learning experiences, and interesting informational books. This article addresses these concerns and describes a vocabulary acquisition strategy…

This qualitative video study explores how two elementary school teachers taught for conceptual understanding throughout different phases of science inquiry. The teachers implemented teaching materials with a focus on learning science key concepts through the development of word knowledge. A framework for word knowledge was applied to examine the…

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

Generalizability and decision studies provide a mathematical framework for quantifying the stability of a given number of measurements. This approach is especially relevant to the task of obtaining a representative measure of communicative behavior in young children and supports an alternative to the debate regarding which type of assessment…

In this paper, we present a series of studies performed in the last decade that examined the contribution of e-books reading to the language and literacy of young Hebrew-speaking children. Children worked with two e-books designed by the researchers to achieve this aim. We present the effect of reading these e-books on the language and literacy of…

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese--homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness--to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were…