"I found it!" Addison proudly proclaimed, as she used an iPhone and Global Positioning System (GPS) software to find the hidden geocache along the riverbank. Others in Lisa Bostick's fourth grade class were jealous, but there would be other geocaches to find. With the excitement of movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and…

In this article, teachers are reminded that their content subject areas require acquainting children with special words or symbols related to that subject area (e.g. mathematics or social studies). Because children can read well does not mean they would be understanding of any special reading skill required in a content subject area; that the…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

Children's ability to learn and retain new words is fundamental to their vocabulary development. This study examined word retention in children learning a home language (L1) from birth and a second language (L2) in preschool settings. Participants were presented with sixteen novel words in L1 and in L2 and were tested for retention after…

Writing result sections of research studies demands that graduate students have adequate abilities to receive, to encode, to translate, and to reproduce content presented in statistical textbooks. These abilities are all aspects of the reading process; therefore, it is likely that reading ability plays a role in the technical writing process. The…

This research aimed to explore the relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition in 129 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children were from a ten-year longitudinal project. At each year, a number of measures were administered. The 129 children's data of nonverbal reasoning at age 4, phonological awareness, morphological awareness,…

The following commentary presents an overview of earlier studies of discourse functions and syntactic complexity as well as recent investigations that focus on interaction and measures of syntactic and lexical complexity in learners' output in traditional classrooms and computer-mediated environments. Recent studies emphasize the need for better…

Whilst enhanced perception has been widely reported in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs), relatively little is known about the developmental trajectory and impact of atypical auditory processing on speech perception in intellectually high-functioning adults with ASD. This paper presents data on perception of complex tones and…

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother-infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants' vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother-infant toy play at…

Although repeated reading--a pedagogical practice often involving phonological support in which learners revisit novel forms in context--has been extensively studied in terms of reading fluency and comprehension, little research has explored whether it promotes language acquisition. The current study, an attempt to fill this gap, found that…

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

The study examined whether exposure to spellings of new vocabulary words improved monolinguals' and language minority (LM) students' (n = 25) memory for pronunciations, meanings, and spellings of the words. College students who are native English-speaking monolinguals (n = 12) and LM students who learned English as their second language (n = 13)…

It has been observed that data-based translation programs are often used both in and outside the class unconsciously and thus there occurs many problems in foreign language learning and teaching. To draw attention to this problem, with this study, whether the program has satisfactory results or not has been revealed by making translations from…

Second-language learners display poorer general language skills in the language used at school than their monolingual peers, which is a concern because general language skills (vocabulary, grammar, language expression, and comprehension) provide the foundation for later academic success. In a randomized controlled trial, we examined the efficacy…

The current study investigated the effect of cooperative and competitive learning strategies on the acquisition of English vocabulary development by Iranian EFL intermediate learners. In addition, it explored what type of theses strategies was more effective. In such doing, utilizing an Oxford Placement Test (OPT), 45 out of 77 Iranian EFL…