The teacher's dilemma presents various strategies for teaching content area reading. Teachers the content subject area should be willing to accept the fact that their role as teachers is vital to the success of his students. Students cannot be expected to read the textbook as they would the local newspaper or a novel. Students need to be taught…

Background: This study examined the developmental relationship between Chinese children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge following a 4-year longitudinal design. Methods: A test battery that included measures of vocabulary knowledge, compounding awareness, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic…

The present research was carried out to study the cognitive and metacognitive vocabulary learning strategies of 36 ESL learners'. Schmitt's Vocabulary Learning Strategies questionnaire was used to conduct the study. The study revealed the subsequent array of cognitive and metacognitive strategies employed by ESL learners. Additionally,…

Educators are increasingly aware of the role of classroom talk in cultivating students' language knowledge, which in turn supports their skilled reading comprehension. The result has been greater attention to teacher talk moves that transform class discussions into opportunities for language learning. However, less focus has been placed on the…

Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and case markers following…

Objective: Of current interest in aphasia research is the relevance of what we can learn from studying word learning ability in aphasia. In a preliminary study, we addressed 2 issues related to the novel word learning ability of individuals with aphasia. First, as word learning engages large-scale cognitive-linguistic systems (language skills,…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer deictic gestures, accompanied by delays/deviations in speech development, compared to typically-developing (TD) children. We ask whether children with ASD--like TD children--show right-hand preference in gesturing and whether right-handed gestures predict their vocabulary size in speech.…

The overall pattern of vocabulary development is relatively similar across children learning different languages. However, there are considerable differences in the words known to individual children. Historically, this variability has been explained in terms of differences in the input. Here, we examine the alternate possibility that children's…

This study investigated the relation between Dual Language Learners' (N = 90) vocabulary and grammar comprehension and word learning processes in preschool (aged 3-through-5 years). Of interest was whether: (1) performance in Spanish correlated with performance in English within each domain; and (2) comprehension predicted novel word learning…

While word cards are a widely supported method of deliberately studying foreign language vocabulary, there is a surprising lack of research-based evidence supporting them. This paper first reviews some of the key literature on word cards and then briefly describes two experiments concerning word card methodology. The first experiment described in…

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal…

This study aimed to examine language at the teacher/classroom level among second-grade classrooms that differ in socioeconomic backgrounds. Measures of teachers' vocabulary input across the school day throughout the school year were examined. There was a significant difference in the proportion of academic word use between classes that differed in…

The study investigates the impact of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) on players' application of vocabulary learning strategies. The participants are experienced online gamers aged between 24 and 25 years old. Apart from identifying the vocabulary learning strategies used by the ESL players during online gaming, in order to…

This paper reports on findings from a doctoral study that explored the efficacy of a home-based literacy intervention in advancing preschool children's foundational literacy skills. Two key cognitive skills critical for early literacy success were examined in particular, those being phonological awareness, and elements of oral language, including…

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…