One potential contributor to student achievement that has garnered recent attention is students' mindset. A recent review of the literature on the effect of a growth mindset intervention on students' academic achievement has shown small effects, but limited research has been conducted with young students. This study investigated whether students…

How do learners gather new information during word learning? One possibility is that learners selectively sample items that help them reduce uncertainty about new word meanings. In a series of cross-situational word learning tasks with adults and children, we manipulated the referential ambiguity of label-object pairs experienced during training…

Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with…

The present study investigates the writing strategies used by 135 Indonesian English Foreign Language undergraduate students with different English proficiency and the relationship between their English proficiency, indicated by students' receptive vocabulary knowledge, and the quality of text they produced. The writing strategies questionnaire by…

This study attempted to compare the effectiveness of employing Facebook and traditional instruction in improving Iraqi EFL secondary school students' vocabulary knowledge. The factors that positively and negatively affect the EFL students' vocabulary learning were also investigated. The study employed a quasiexperimental design with two groups;…

Game-based vocabulary learning that is well documented to improve students' vocabulary learning outcomes is gaining increasing attention. However, no consensus has been reached regarding the impact of game-based vocabulary learning application (APP) on the vocabulary learning achievement, motivation, and self-confidence among Chinese EFL (English…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) often exhibit delays in cognitive and linguistic development. In response to the increasing number of culturally and linguistically diverse populations with disabilities in the United States and need for evidence-based interventions with cultural adaptations, this study examined the effects of enhanced milieu…

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can…

The present study aims to examine how listening comprehension processes (top-down and bottom-up) differ by second language proficiency. To investigate such differences, experiments (listening tasks) followed by questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Participants included 18 lower intermediate learners, 19 upper intermediate…

Early oral language development lays an essential foundation for academic and socioemotional competencies but is vulnerable to the impact of family stress. Despite robust evidence that family stress affects early oral language development in monolingual samples, little is known about whether the family stress processes affecting language…

The present study examines the concurrent relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary breadth and depth after accounting for the effect of other potential contributors. A sample of French-speaking fourth-grade children who spoke either French at home (L1) (n = 55) or another language (L2) (n = 85) completed a number of tests…

The popularity of using textbooks in second language programs in universities around the world continues to grow. Textbooks support teachers in their teaching by providing accessible materials and clear instruction. In addition, learners are guided by familiar lesson frameworks (e.g., beginning, middle, end) to guide their independent study…

This study explores the effects of receptive derivational affix knowledge, derivative frequency, part of speech, and vocabulary breadth on production of derivatives. Twenty-one speakers of English as a first language and 107 learners of English as a second language were asked to produce derivatives for 90 prompt words on a decontextualized…

Learning academic vocabulary is a crucial task for all students, but especially challenging for students with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN) and those who are multilingual. Following a participatory research strategy, we analyze whether iconic gestures can be integrated in teaching routines in an inclusive elementary school and…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…