This study examined the effects of the accumulation of family risk factors on children's literacy skills, both in preschool and in first grade. Children's (N = 106) vocabulary, conventions of print, phonological awareness, knowledge of letters, reading decoding, and reading comprehension were assessed. Family risk factors, consisting of household…

Children's literature is a primary source for introducing young children to new words at home and at school, and children's early vocabulary knowledge is a key component of oral language, which is essential for comprehension. This column is focused on children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who frequently find themselves in a vocabulary…

This article reports a reliability study of two versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test at the 5000 word level. This study was motivated by a finding from an ongoing longitudinal study of vocabulary acquisition that Version A and Version B of Vocabulary Levels Test at the 5000 word level were not parallel. In order to investigate this issue,…

To what extent do children with autism (AD) versus typically developing children (TD) rely on attentional and intentional cues to learn words? Four experiments compared 17 AD children (M age = 5.08 years) with 17 language- and 17 mental-age-matched TD children (M ages = 2.57 and 3.12 years, respectively) on nonverbal enactment and word-learning…

During a yearlong collaborative effort to enhance vocabulary instruction in secondary classrooms, high school teachers and university faculty developed and implemented a variety of approaches to support students in building rich representations of word meanings as well as an understanding of word features such as roots, affixes, and parts of…

In this strategy, students individually select and record 10 important words on self-adhesive notes as they read a text. Then students build a group bar graph displaying their choices, write a sentence that summarizes the content, and then respond to prompts that ask them to think about words in powerful ways. Several prompts are suggested, each…

Michael Graves points out that it is only in the last 40 years that a rich base of theory and research about teaching and learning vocabulary has come into being. Grounding his article in this research, he lists some of the factors testifying to the importance of vocabulary and discusses what may be the most crucial fact about the task of teaching…

Word Links, an effective strategy for developing students' vocabulary, is based on four principles. It provides contextual and definitional information; offers repeated exposure to words and opportunities to practice them; encourages students to think about relationships among word meanings; and involves active engagement in learning tasks. Yopp…

This study investigates developmental trends in acquiring knowledge of radicals, radical perception skills, and skills in applying knowledge of radicals among nonnative learners of Chinese across learning levels. It also examines the relationship between the acquisition of radical knowledge and the development of radical perception and radical…

This empirical study was undertaken to test the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer and Hulstijn, 2001) by examining the impact of three tasks on vocabulary acquisition. It was designed to test and develop the involvement load hypothesis by examining the impact of different reading tasks on the L2 vocabulary acquisition. The results show that…

This study was intended to determine whether or not the genre of a reading text affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of L2 learners while reading. To this aim, 40 Iranian EFL students whose vocabulary knowledge was within a limited range (already determined by Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test) were divided into two groups of 20 each for…

This publication explores issues and makes recommendations related to meeting the needs of English learners with limited language proficiency or learning disabilities, or both. The authors begin by noting the current federal policy context in which this discussion of reading instruction and interventions for English language learners (ELLs)…

The current study examined the effects of watching a closed-captioned movie clip on incidental vocabulary learning in a pre-test post-test experimental design. 120 college students from a college preparatory class, who were learning English as a foreign language (EFL), participated in the study. Two weeks before the treatment, all of the…

While teaching and learning English as an international language is flourishing throughout the world, it seems that this process has encountered breakdowns in Iran. Despite the fact that there is a strong relationship between age and language learning, this has escaped notice in practice in our country. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate two…

This empirical study investigates the effect of online textual, pictorial, and textual pictorial glosses on the incidental vocabulary learning of 90 adult elementary Iranian EFL learners. The participants were selected from a pool of 140 volunteers based on their performance on an English placement test as well as a knowledge test of the target…