Music surrounds us and students have plenty of experience in passive listening. However, they need to be deliberately taught how to deeply and critically listen to music. The National Core Arts Standards do not specifically measure listening as a skill but to evaluate musical works, critical listening skills are essential. This article outlines…

The link between vocabulary knowledge acquisition and its effect on reading comprehension has been well established over years of research; however, students from low income backgrounds may have less access to the opportunities that allow for the building of this vocabulary knowledge prior to and including entry into formal schooling. Therefore,…

Purpose: Converging evidence demonstrates that robust academic vocabulary and morphology instruction improves literacy outcomes of multilingual adolescents. However, few interventions have focused on teaching word analysis using bound Latin roots, the major meaning-carrying constituents of academic words (e.g. voc meaning "speak" in…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

This exploratory, mixed methods study proposes that pedagogical translation be implemented for biliteracy acquisition in mixed heritage language (HL)-second language (L2) secondary Spanish classrooms. It investigates the mediation of pedagogical translation for reading comprehension in two mixed HL-L2 secondary Spanish classrooms at a suburban…

Digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) integrates key game elements such as Challenges, Rewards, Human-Computer Interactions (HCI), Multimedia, and Fantasy. Although the overall effectiveness of digital games in enhancing English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) vocabulary knowledge development is well-established, the specific roles of…

A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Knowledge of derivational affixes makes an important contribution to second language learners' success when reading. Yet while the effects of some learner variables (L2 proficiency, L1 background) have been investigated, there has been little research addressing the effects of varying characteristics of affixes on their acquisition. The goal of…

This literature review examines the effectiveness of explicit morphological instruction in improving vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension for middle and high school students. Socioeconomic disparities in early language exposure contribute to a significant word gap, limiting students' ability to access complex academic texts.…

Introduction: The current study examined the extent to which static and dynamic measures of vocabulary and word learning predicted response and identified poor responders to a vocabulary intervention. Methods: Participants were 46 preschool children in classrooms randomly assigned to complete the Story Friends intervention in two…

In recent decades there has been renewed interest in the teaching of grammar as part of primary pedagogical practice. It is now well over a decade since the Australian Curriculum: English was released incorporating a model of language requiring the explicit teaching and understanding of grammar from both a traditional and functional perspective.…

The positive turn in SLA (MacIntyre at al., 2016) has sparked growing interest in the relationship between positive affective variables and language learning outcomes. Foreign language enjoyment has garnered particular attention as a positive emotion supporting language learning behaviors and achievement. However, within psychology and cognition,…

Mobile apps have surged in popularity, enhancing the effectiveness of more traditional second or foreign language (L2) teaching and enabling independent L2 learning. Drawing on control-value theory, the present research examined the role of students' control-value appraisals in enhancing behavioral engagement via enjoyment and boredom in specific…

The current study investigates whether vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, and vocabulary fluency contribute differentially to L2 reading and listening comprehension. One hundred and thirty-eight EFL learners first took three vocabulary knowledge tests that measured vocabulary fluency, vocabulary breadth, and vocabulary depth. Subsequently, they…