British learners acquire very little vocabulary in their foreign languages, compared to pupils elsewhere in Europe, particularly learners of English as a foreign language. Could the materials used for teaching help explain this difference? An analysis of the vocabulary loading of a textbook for French as a foreign language commonly used in…

Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Goksun, Kuntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument…

We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards…

Research shows that children accrue vocabulary knowledge by understanding relationships between new words and their connected concepts. This article describes three research-based principles that preschool teachers can use to design shared book reading lessons that accelerate content vocabulary knowledge by helping young children to talk about…

Toddlers who are "late talkers" demonstrate reduced expressive vocabulary in the absence of physical, social, cognitive, or sensory impairment; they are usually identified at age 2, when they produce fewer than 50 words and do not combine words (Rescorla, 1989). This study analyzed spontaneous language samples of 10 late talking toddlers and 11…

Transitional Probability (TP) computations are regarded as a powerful learning mechanism that is functional early in development and has been proposed as an initial bootstrapping device for speech segmentation. However, a recent study casts doubt on the robustness of early statistical word-learning. Johnson and Tyler (2010) showed that when…

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…

The law requires that juvenile justice facilities must provide education to all school-age students, and these facilities often do so despite challenges that would baffle most high school administrators and teachers. This "Adolescent Literacy Guide" provides guidance to both administrators and teachers who want to increase opportunities…

The interest in Digital Game-Based Language Learning (DGBLL) has increased considerably in recent years although being a relatively new approach. Despite the interest that DGBLL took, the studies in the context of German as a Foreign Language (FL) are quite limited. Moreover, DGBLL in the Turkish context is not prevalent. Due to this gap in the…

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic…

Research Findings: This study examined the heterogeneity in Spanish-speaking children's (N = 117; M age = 53 months; SD = 5 months; 57% boys) vocabulary and letter-word skills in English and Spanish after one year of preschool and the extent to which early self-regulation abilities (i.e., executive function and effortful control) were associated…

Background: Reading attitudes are recognised as an influencing factor on the language and literacy achievement of school age monolingual English-speaking children. The relationship between reading attitudes and achievement in young Spanish-speaking English Learners (ELs) remains understudied. Purpose: The aim of the current study was to describe…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…