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When memorizing mechanical materials such as words or numbers, people have shown the tendency to overestimate their future memory due to their insensitivity to memory loss. The experiments in this paper investigate whether the same bias applies to conceptual learning and, if so, how the magnitude of this bias compares to that of mechanical learning. In our experiment, participants were divided into four groups. Two groups of participants studied a word list and took free-recall tests either two minutes or one week after learning; they also made predictions of how well they would do on the test right after learning the material. The other two groups were designed the same way except that the learning material was a concept. Our results indicate that the stability bias illusions not only applied to conceptual learning but were also more significant than in mechanical learning.

Teachers of English as a second or foreign language often state that they lack an understanding of how to teach vocabulary in a principled, evidence-based way sensitive to students' needs. Vocabulary teaching is typically unsystematic, not adequately supported by curricula and teaching materials, and shaped by beliefs based in opinion or myth. A large amount of research on L2 vocabulary learning and processing is now available, and most of this work is on English vocabulary. The present article synthesizes this body of knowledge to achieve the following: (a) establish how many words learners need to know for different purposes; (b) discuss the scientific evidence for commonly held beliefs about vocabulary teaching; (c) recommend sound, research-informed teaching practices; and (d) refer the audience to a range of freely available high-quality tools that can facilitate lexical instruction in English.

Fluency in reading is crucial for comprehension of the written word. Traditionally we concentrate on fluency once a child is a proficient reader. However, fluency is a skill that can be successfully addressed with beginning readers. This article presents practical strategies to help beginning readers become fluent readers. Of course, these strategies are effective with proficient readers, however, the earlier we begin to use them, the sooner children will internalize the concept of fluency and practice it. These strategies are also effective with second language learners.

This study aims to identify technical words in research articles across sub-disciplines in computer science field. A corpus of research articles in computer science was constructed, comprised of 10,450,035 running words from 1045 research articles across ten sub-disciplines of computer science. The technical word List for research articles in computer science was created by the methods of computer-based analysis and the rating scales. 769 technical word types were identified and listed in Appendix A. The computer science field-oriented technical words list is expected to meet the needs of learners in this field.

Since students are increasingly expected to use academic vocabulary while at university, this study was conducted to determine whether a statistical correlation existed between the use of academic vocabulary in assignments and the marks obtained by graduate students, using a purposive sample of graduate students (n = 11). The students were asked to provide some of their assignments and to take part in an interview. Twenty-three assignments were collected, and five students were interviewed. Textual analyses and interviews were conducted to measure correlations between variables and address other questions. To determine words that could be identified as being academic, I used the academic word list (AWL) created by Coxhead in 2000. No significant correlation was found between the use of the academic vocabulary in the assignments and the marks the students received. Additionally, this study investigated certain other variables, such as: the importance of academic vocabulary from the students' perspective, their understanding of academic vocabulary, and their attitudes towards the choice of academic vocabulary.

Educational media is ubiquitous in the lives of young children, promising high-quality programming to equip them with vocabulary knowledge and school readiness. To meet the needs of preschool-aged dual-language learners (DLLs), many educational programs are marketed to promote vocabulary learning in two languages. In this study, we use a content analysis to examine (1) the extent to which these programs focus on vocabulary in two languages, (2) dual-language instructional supports used in media; and (3) the quality of words taught on screen. We analyzed 50 episodes from five leading dual-language educational programs. Using a flow chart and an iteratively-developed codebook, we identified vocabulary clips and screen-based pedagogical supports used in these programs. Results indicate there were strikingly few vocabulary clips in the videos analyzed. Moreover, most of the clips were of simple vocabulary words taught primarily in English rather than Spanish or Mandarin. The most prevalent screen-based pedagogical supports included repetitions, visual supports, and demonstrations. However, there were noteworthy differences in the types of supports by program and language. Findings suggest that the dual-language appeal of programs may serve more as a marketing tool than an instructional tool for vocabulary development. Implications for research in dual-language vocabulary instruction are discussed. [This article was published in "Bilingual Research Journal" (EJ1214856).]

Children are spending an increasing amount of time in front of screens. However, little is known about the content of educational media, particularly in relation to vocabulary instruction. Since vocabulary is an important predictor of later reading comprehension, it warrants a thorough investigation on how it is taught in educational media. This study presents a content analysis of vocabulary instruction in a weighted sample of all educational programs on the media marketplace for young children. We examine the time spent on vocabulary in educational media, the words selected, and the screen-based pedagogical supports (SBPS) that facilitate vocabulary learning in videos. We found that few sophisticated words were selected for instruction, and identified 11 SBPSs used during vocabulary instruction in our weighted sample. These findings provide a more holistic understanding of the content of vocabulary instruction in educational media for young children.

The purpose of the report is to explore some of the mechanisms involved in the writing process. In particular, we examine students' process data (keystroke log analysis) to uncover how students approach a knowledge-telling task using 2 different task types. In the first task, students were asked to list as many words as possible related to a particular topic (word listing). In a second task, students were asked to write to a specific prompt that was designed to elicit their background knowledge of a topic using connected text (knowledge elicitation). Using a matrix incomplete block design, 1,592 high school students completed the 2 writing tasks in addition to a multiple-choice test of their background knowledge in 2 of 5 possible topics in the domain of U.S. history. An array of process data including students' typing and associated timing features was used to predict the writing scores on the 2 different types of tasks. The analyses revealed several distinct patterns that were associated with processing at the task knowledge productivity level, the editing effort level, and the keyboarding effort level. The robustness of the features was reflected in a set of hierarchical regressions that demonstrated that the process features were predictive of the writing score even when students' knowledge scores on the associated multiple-choice test were considered. In sum, the results indicate that process data in the form of log file analysis are useful for both understanding the writing process and exploring potential differences between students with high and low knowledge. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED586324.]

This study investigates the phonotactics of English obstruent clusters in the word-final position from a markedness theory perspective among Iraqi EFL College Students whose native language, Arabic, prefers only two-member word-final obstruent cluster as a maximum. The markedness of clusters is measured depending on Iraqi EFL College Students' utilization of the simplification strategies. This study tries to answer whether or not word-final obstruent clusters are marked or unmarked for Iraqi EFL College Students, and whether or not the markedness of the obstruent cluster increases as to its length. In order to answer these questions, a test has been distributed among 60 Iraqi EFL Fourth-Year College students, Department of English, College of ArtsUniversity of Baghdad for the academic year 2017-2018 involving a list of words and sentences containing word-final obstruent clusters. The study concludes that word-final obstruent clusters are marked due to the fact that the obstruents are universally marked in the coda. The fourmember obstruent clusters are more marked than the three-member obstruent clusters which are in turn more marked than the two-member obstruent clusters.

This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade reading teachers and 105 students (treatment n = 62; control n = 43) and in Year 2, one seventh-grade reading teacher and 87 students (treatment n = 44; control n = 43) from the same public school. In both years, results favored instructed students in word knowledge, lexical access, and morphological awareness on researcher-designed measures. In Year 2, small advances were also found for comprehension. Transcripts of lessons shed light on processes of developing representations of unfamiliar words.

The road to second language competence is a long and arduous one, and much of its effort involves learning to recognize and use vocabulary. Fortunately, anytime-anywhere learning with smart phones and smart apps offer a means to lessen the burden and make vocabulary learning more efficient. Accordingly, this study investigated 134 students across four months and evaluated the effectiveness of their individual vocabulary learning strategies (only flashcard app; paper-based notes and wordlists; both notes and flashcard app) in terms of three different vocabulary test scores. The Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test and pairwise comparisons revealed that the Only App Group had significantly higher test scores than both the Only Notes Group and the blended Notes/App Group with medium and small effect sizes (r = 0.49 and 0.27, respectively). A Fixed Effects model was run to determine the extent study strategies in addition to gender, (TOEIC) proficiency, time spent studying, time spent using the app, and frequency of studying, were correlated with test scores. In this moderator analysis, the Only App Group strategy was no longer statistically significant and was replaced by the factor "total time using the app" (p = 0.005) which was positively correlated with test scores.

This paper computes estimates of the potential for Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Viewing (EV) to support the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary needs of students. While research into ER/EV for general vocabulary is well-established, only recently has academic vocabulary begun to be researched. Given curriculum time constraints, information on which academic vocabulary items might be learnable incidentally is useful, and this study provides teachers with information on which specific academic vocabulary items from multiple academic wordlists have a reasonable chance of being learned incidentally. It operationalizes ER/EV through corpora representing general fiction, television programs, and movies. It estimates the pedagogical time it would take to meet target vocabulary at different possible thresholds for incidental learning (6, 12, 20 times) with estimates for each computed for multiple possible reading rates (100, 260, 350 wpm) and viewing rates (80, 140, 200 wpm). Results report individual curriculum time/input estimates for over 2000 academic vocabulary targets across multiple subjects. Findings indicate ER/EV are pedagogies that could substantially support academic vocabulary development. A tool is released for teachers to compute personalized estimates using the reading rates of their students.

The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children's (11 to 12 years of age) and adults' spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of the false memory effect and a demonstration of a DRM word list and an associated recognition task. It was hypothesized that children would have fewer false memories than adults using the DRM paradigm and that forewarning would reduce the number of critical lures remembered by children and adults. We found a developmental reversal effect in that children had lower false memory levels than adults and that forewarning reduced, but did not eliminate, false memory propensity in both children and adults. Our findings further indicated that forewarning was more effective in reducing false memory levels in 11- to 12-year-old children than in adults. Finally, analyses revealed that participants were more accurate when they received a forewarning as compared to when they did not.

Wakeful resting and listening to music are powerful means to modulate memory. How these activities affect memory when directly compared has not been tested so far. In two experiments, participants encoded and immediately recalled two word lists followed by either 6 min wakefully resting or 6 min listening to music. The results of Experiment 1 show that both post-encoding conditions have a similar effect on memory after 1 day. In Experiment 2, we explored the possibility that less concrete words, i.e. lower in imageability than in Experiment 1, are differently affected by the two post-encoding conditions. The results of Experiment 2 show that, when words are less concrete, more words are retained after 1 day when encoding is followed by wakeful resting rather than listening to music. These findings indicate that the effects of wakeful resting and listening to music on memory consolidation are moderated by the concreteness of the encoded material.

The vocabulary content of the French MFL curriculum in England has received criticism (Häcker, M. 2008. Eleven pets and 20 ways to express one's opinion: the vocabulary learners of German acquire at English secondary schools. "The Language Learning Journal" 36, no. 2: 215-26; Tschichold, C. 2012. French vocabulary in Encore "Tricolore": do learners have a chance? "The Language Learning Journal" 40, no. 1: 7-19) for its small size, lack of thematic variety, and poor pedagogical exploitation in textbooks. Studies also note the small vocabulary knowledge of learners in UK compared with other French learners, ostensibly at the same CEFR B1 level (David, A. 2008. Vocabulary breadth in French L2 learners. "The Language Learning Journal" 36, no. 2: 167-80; Milton, J. 2006b. Language lite: learning French vocabulary in school. "Journal of French Language Studies" 16, no. 2: 187-205). This study examines the vocabulary content of the Studio series of French textbooks, first published in 2010, to see whether this situation has improved. Analysis shows the vocabulary loading of the textbooks has fallen over 40% compared with the previous books analysed by Tschichold (2012. French vocabulary in Encore Tricolore: do learners have a chance? "The Language Learning Journal" 40, no. 1: 7-19). This indicates a significant decline in the standard of learning for GCSE French since the vocabulary size of learners is so closely associated with their overall language proficiency. There are problems too with the thematic variety of teaching, the regularity of input, and the recycling of the lexical content. We argue this results from the guidance of advisory bodies such as the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (NCELP) and the latest curriculum design (Department for Education. 2015. "Modern Foreign Languages GCSE Subject Content." https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485567/GCSE_subject_content_modern_foreign_langs.pdf (accessed 30 August, 2020)) MFL subject content so there is no clear standard for textbook writers to work to. Further, the guidance of advisory bodies such as the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (NCELP) and the latest curriculum design (Department for Education. 2021. "GCSE MFL Subject Content Review." https://consult.education.gov.uk/ebacc-and-arts-and-humanities-team/gcse-mfl-subject-content-review/supporting_documents/GCSE%20MFL%20subject%20content%20document.pdf (accessed 14 March, 2021)), which damage standards of attainment in MFL by advocating minimal vocabulary content and a departure from thematic input.

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children, and adults were instructed to study four lists of unrelated words, then either restudied or were tested following studying each of Lists 1-3, and took an interim test on List 4. Results demonstrated that interim testing on Lists 1-3 enhanced learning of List 4 for younger children, older children, and adults. Importantly, this enhancement varies with items' serial list position in both younger children and older children. Early List 4 items at list primacy positions benefited more from interim testing than later ones at non-primacy positions. Overall, this is the first study demonstrating that (1) the FTE generalizes to younger children, older children, and adults, suggesting the FTE emerges quite early in human life; (2) the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE in both younger and older children.

Growing research suggests that digital flashcards may facilitate students' technical vocabulary learning efforts. The primary purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to compare the effect of digital flashcards (DFs) and wordlists on learning technical vocabulary as well as to explore students' perceptions regarding the use of DFs. Using convenience sampling method, the study was conducted with a total of 57 undergraduate pharmacy students. Data were collected using a pre-treatment survey, two technical vocabulary tests, and a post-treatment survey. The results indicated that (1) the students learned more technical vocabulary through DFs; (2) their perceptions about the use of DFs to study technical vocabulary were positive; (3) their perceptions of the usefulness of the Quizlet app was a predictor of their success in DF condition; and (4) practicing through digital apps positively predicted their intention to use the Quizlet application. Based on the findings, we concluded that teacher-prepared DFs result in better technical vocabulary learning.

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional language) orthography. We tested this prediction by teaching 6- to 9-year-old Italian children to use multiletter spelling units to spell words in Italian and English. The children were trained on the spelling of Italian words containing orthographic difficulties that required switching from phoneme-grapheme spelling correspondences to larger grain size (multiletter) spelling units. In a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial, 108 Italian children (ages 6-9 years) were assigned to the experimental spelling training or a waiting list condition. Their ability to spell the trained (Italian and English) word lists and to generalize the acquired knowledge to new (untrained) words was assessed. Similar learning effects were found in the two languages for the trained word lists. However, generalization of the acquired spelling knowledge to new words occurred only in English. The influence of language-specific factors on learning to spell could account for these findings.

The purpose of this article is to synthesize and analyse the most frequently occurring, widely dispersed and pedagogically useful lexical bundles in mathematical texts. Drawing on a five-million-word corpus of graduate-level textbooks, a total of 65 academic sequences meeting a predefined set of length, frequency and distribution criteria are obtained for functional and structural analyses. Results indicate that the structural forms of the sequences are clausal and that the dominant function is research-oriented. Sequences are rank-ordered according to a composite score obtained as a result of triangulating frequency profiles, distribution proportions and expert judgements. This article concludes by highlighting the pedagogical implications of the study for both language educators and mathematics practitioners.

Considerable research has been conducted on the advancement of mobile technologies to facilitate vocabulary learning and acquisition in a second language (L2). However, whether mobile platforms lead to a comprehensive mastery of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge has seldom been addressed in previous literature. This study investigated English vocabulary learning from engagement with mobile-based word cards and paper word cards in the context of the Chinese university classroom. A total of 85 undergraduate students were recruited to take part in the study. The students were divided into two groups, a mobile learning group and a paper-based learning group, and tested on two word knowledge components: receptive knowledge of the form-meaning connection and productive knowledge of collocations. Both the digital and non-digital word cards enhanced L2 vocabulary learning, and the results showed that the mobile application (app) promoted greater gains than physical word cards.

This comparative, descriptive study examined the relationship between text-type use and early literacy outcomes of English language decoding ability. The representative sample was 80 grade 1 students receiving reading instruction using English language materials with a focus on the Spanish speaking, Hispanic English Language Learner (ELL) using scaffolded text when learning to read. The research aims were about specific pairwise comparisons. The comparisons were analyzed with t tests, noting the mean differences in correct number of English words decoded from a list of 253 words. Words correctly decoded were tallied for each student. There were three groups and two comparisons. Group 1: Hispanic, ELL receiving reading instruction using scaffolded text (ST)*. Group 2: Hispanic, ELL using non-scaffolded text (NST)*. Group 3: English only (EO) students using NST. Comparison 1: Group 1 and Group 2. Comparison 2: Group 1 and Group 3. Results show that Group 1 correctly decoded significantly more words than Group 2. Group 1 correctly decoded more words than Group 3; this difference was not statistically significant. Results of this study provide preliminary support for the use of scaffolded text in helping Hispanic ELL decode English text.

People are more likely to recall animate (living) concepts than they are to recall inanimate (non- living) concepts. This finding is known as the animacy advantage in memory. Despite the frequent occurrence of this effect, we do not know if people are metacognitively aware of it, or how such knowledge relates to memory judgments such as judgments of learning (JOLs) for animate and inanimate memory materials. Across multiple experiments, participants studied and made JOLs for lists containing either animate and inanimate words for a free-recall test or for animate and inanimate word pairs for a cued-recall test. They also indicated their beliefs regarding whether they thought that animate items were more, less, or equally as memorable as inanimate items. Although we consistently obtained the animacy advantage for both free-recall and cued-recall tests, this advantage occurred regardless of participants' stated beliefs about the effect. More important, participants mostly judged animate items to be more memorable than inanimate items, regardless of their beliefs. These results suggest that, in this context, participants do not use their beliefs as a determinant for their JOLs. Rather, some factor(s) related to the memory advantage for animate over inanimate items might have affected participants' JOLs to produce this pattern. The results also demonstrate that researchers cannot infer people's metacognitive beliefs directly from JOLs. Instead, we argue that in order to conclude that beliefs about a cognitive factor are a major basis of metacognitive judgments, those beliefs must moderate the effect of that factor on the judgments.

Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaite-Lozdiene & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word families) needs to be considered when developing wordlists, vocabulary tests, and vocabulary learning programs. It is also central to the lexical profiles of text and corpora, which indicate the vocabulary learning targets associated with understanding different types of discourse. Perhaps most importantly, the lexical unit of words found in vocabulary learning resources such as word lists and tests may affect their pedagogical value. The aim of this article is to highlight aspects of research and pedagogy that are affected by lexical units and describe issues that should be considered when operationalizing words in studies of vocabulary and learning resources.

Long-term memory knowledge is considered to impact short-term maintenance of item information in working memory, as opposed to short-term maintenance of serial order information. Evidence supporting an impact of semantic knowledge on serial order maintenance remains weak. In the present study, we demonstrate that semantic knowledge can impact the processing of serial order information in a robust manner. Experiment 1 manipulated semantic relatedness effect by using semantic categories presented in subgroups of items ("leaf"--"tree"--"branch"--cloud--sky--rain). This semantic grouping manipulation was compared to a temporal grouping manipulation whose impact on the processing of serial order information is well-established. Both the semantic and temporal grouping manipulations constrained the occurrence of serial order errors in a robust manner: when migrating to a nontarget serial position, items tended to do so most of the time toward the position of a semantically related item or within the same temporal group. Critically, this impact of semantic knowledge on the pattern of migration errors was not observed anymore in Experiment 2, in which we broke-up the semantic groups, by presenting the semantically related items an interleaved fashion ("leaf"--cloud--"tree"--sky--"branch"--rain). Both semantic and temporal grouping factors may reflect a general mechanism through which information is represented hierarchically. Alternatively, both factors could result from the syntactic and/or semantic regularities that naturally structures linguistic information. These results support models considering direct interactions between serial order and linguistic components of WM.

The last three decades have seen an increase of tests aimed at measuring an individual's vocabulary level or size. The target words used in these tests are typically sampled from word frequency lists, which are in turn based on language corpora. Conventionally, test developers sample items from frequency bands of 1000 words; different tests employ different sampling ratios. Some have as few as 5 or 10 items representing the underlying population of words, whereas other tests feature a larger number of items, such as 24, 30, or 40. However, very rarely are the sampling size choices supported by clear empirical evidence. Here, using a bootstrapping approach, we illustrate the effect that a sample-size increase has on confidence intervals of individual learner vocabulary knowledge estimates, and on the inferences that can safely be made from test scores. We draw on a unique dataset consisting of adult L1 Japanese test takers' performance on two English vocabulary test formats, each featuring 1000 words. Our analysis shows that there are few purposes and settings where as few as 5 to 10 sampled items from a 1000-word frequency band (1K) are sufficient. The use of 30 or more items per 1000-word frequency band and tests consisting of fewer bands is recommended.

English teachers at junior middle schools often employ traditional vocabulary teaching techniques such as L1 equivalents, word lists, pictures, and word formation rules. They reinforce the students' retention of vocabulary by asking them to read aloud the words repeatedly and copy the new words as homework. In this study, suggestions are given to improve English vocabulary teaching techniques at junior middle schools.

The article suggests a method of foreign language lexical competence development on the basis of a Learner's terminological thesaurus and dictionary of software terms which includes four main components: classification part demonstrating the inner logic of the subject area, glossary with definitions of key terms, thesaurus demonstrating logical and associative relations of the key terms, and bilingual alphabetical dictionary. The thesaurus and dictionary has an extended context part supplemented with an encyclopedic part on the main topics of the thesaurus. The stages of the development and the structure of the Thesaurus and dictionary are described. Pedagogical experiment was conducted and proved high efficiency of the method proposed.

Corporate mission, a core part of corporate culture, plays an important role in the development and competition of companies. The study of mission statements is beneficial to both companies and stakeholders. This paper explores corporate mission from the perspective of linguistics on the basis of speech act theory and adaptation theory and reveals that assertives account for a large proportion with a small proportion of commissives and zero proportion of directives, expressives and declarations. Some skills can be used to polish the language of mission statements, like pun, personification and parallel structures. And some high frequency words are summarized. Several characteristics and writing skills are summarized about mission statements. The criteria of judging whether the mission statements are good or not are given in this paper.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of contexts in the memory of meaning in foreign vocabularies. The study was based on the cognitive processing hierarchy theory of Craik and Lockhart (1972), the memory trace theory of McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) and the memory trace theory of cognitive psychology. The subjects were non-English majors freshmen. The contexts used in the study were list, sentence and text. Through timely test and delay test, it was found that sentence performed better than text, which was different from expectation. After analysis and interview, some problems were found in this study.

Vocabulary acquisition is central to language learning, and many instructors believe that technology can facilitate this core activity. While numerous websites and apps offer language-learning activities and games, not all provide evidence that their content and techniques are effective. VocabularySpellingCity (VSC), however, commissioned a study in 2016 to document its effectiveness. Researchers at McREL, a nonprofit education research and development organization, found favorable results among mostly native English-speaking primary school students, including a 43% increase in vocabulary retention scores as measured by pre- and post-tests of 143 students in a southeastern U.S. elementary school (Arens & Mace, 2017). VSC is a website and app that provide users with activities to learn vocabulary, spelling, phonics, and writing. Instructors create study lists by specifying words, definitions, and sample sentences before assigning activities. They can also monitor individual student progress (scores) as well as participation (time spent and number of activities completed). Although designed for K-12 students, VSC is popular among the author's community college colleagues, and the author of this article was interested in learning if findings by McREL hold true for adult ESOL students. Therefore, in fall 2017, Tim Krause conducted a study similar to Arens & Mace (2017) that involved 22 intermediate writing students and 18 academic reading students at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. Krause wanted to know if students who chose to use VSC would demonstrate greater improvement in vocabulary retention compared to those who chose other study methods. The results indicate that if community college instructors identify best practices and carefully curate the experience, then the data suggest their adult ESOL students are likely to benefit from using VSC.

The present study aims to explore English as a Foreign Language (hereafter EFL) instructors? recognition of count-mass distinction regarding the concept of individuation and judgment of quantity. Accordingly, fifteen EFL instructors recruited from different public universities in Turkey were asked to write the plural forms of a sum of fifty count and mass nouns given in a list. Participants, then, were asked to rate the elements of aggregates (either count or mass) in order to identify their semantic mappings. Following these, the participants were also given a self-rating form to check post-experiment familiarity of those fifty nouns in a random order, and they rated how familiar they were with the items given on a basis of very familiar, "somewhat familiar" and "not familiar". Descriptive statistics were applied as a part of quantitative data analysis. Demographic information was given on gender and year(s) of teaching experience. As a result, it was reported that EFL instructors conceptualized count nouns as distinct individuals whereas mass nouns were regarded as nonindividuals. Familiarity had a probable positive linear effect on success, though. To mention, participants did better at aggregate terms for count nouns than those of mass nouns. Besides, aggregate terms for count nouns were judged to be more familiar than those of mass nouns. The principle of cognitive individuation was confirmed with no external interference of gender and years of teaching experience.

This study is a corpus-driven study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) and West's General Service List (GSL) and also non- GSL and non- AWL in journal articles in the field of physical education and sport science. A 1.1 million-word corpus called the Physical Education and Sport Science Research Articles Corpus is created for this study. The corpus consists of 280 research articles that have been published in seven international journals in the field of physical education and sport science. The result suggests that both GSL and AWL can help students focus on the right vocabulary when learning Technical English. The corpus helps students to directly focus on the words that they will see the most in the text they have to study. Moreover field specific word list is conducted in this research. Field specific word lists can help students learn necessary words which are also important for their field of study.

The purpose of this study is to find out the improvement of students' vocabulary between those who were taught through WTB (Word Tree Branch) or IWW (Interactive Word Wall). This study used quantitative research method and comparative design by using pre-test and post-test. This study was designed to find out the answer to the following question: Is there any significant difference on the students' vocabulary improvement between those who were taught through Word Tree Branch method and those who were taught through Interactive Word Wall method? The sample of this study are, two classes in grade VIII of SMPN 1 Parongpong, Bandung. They were divided into two classes, grade VIII H experienced Interactive word Wall and grade VIII J experienced Word Tree Branch. The instrument used for this study is vocabulary test, which contain 40 questions. The result of this study shows that the students who acquire WTB or IWW method were improved for their vocabulary, vocabulary categorized as "moderate" but there is no significant difference between those two groups of students 'vocabulary improvement. [Note: The page range (120-142) shown on the table of contents is incorrect. The correct page range for this article is p120-131.]

In a test-driven educational environment, teachers see a great need for more engaging resources that produce the literacy results needed for students to thrive academically. In 2015, The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 36% of fourth graders scored at or above the Proficient level of reading. This statistic was concerning because reading is an essential skill and has been shown to correlate with overall academic success. First Words Fast (FWF), an innovative reading program for beginning readers, provides a research-based curriculum that teaches sounds and sight words systematically and joyfully. The purpose of this paper was to provide an overview of FWF, which aims to provide a solid foundation of early reading skills among students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade.

The present exploration aimed to assess a reading level of a young Thai student by using the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI), and to plan reading intervention instruction targeted on the identified needs based on the assessment results. In this study, a single case study approach was employed. A seven-year old Thai learner was the focal participant. The research questions are threefold as follows: (1) What was the student's diagnostic assessment result measured by the Qualitative Reading Inventory?, (2) Did the designed QRI-based reading intervention instruction lead to student's literacy growth?, and (3) What was the student' attitude towards the self as a reader, reading, and school before the diagnostic assessment took place, and after the reading intervention? The research instruments used in this study included the QRI tests, semi-structured interviews and observations. The diagnostic assessment results revealed that the student's instructional reading level was at the pre-primer, and the QRI-based intervention instruction proved to assist the student in literacy growth. Moreover, the results from the interviews and observations showed that the student had a better attitude towards reading.

This longitudinal case study explored Iranian EFL learners' lexical complexity (LC) through the lenses of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST). Fifty independent essays written by five intermediate to advanced female EFL learners in a TOEFL iBT preparation course over six months constituted the corpus of this study. Three Coh-Metrix indices (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004; McNamara & Graesser, 2012), three Lexical Complexity Analyzer indices (Lu, 2010, 2012; Lu & Ai, 2011), and four Vocabprofile indices (Cobb, 2000) were selected to measure different dimensions of LC. Results of repeated measures analysis of variance (RM ANOVA) indicated an improvement with regard to only lexical sophistication. Positive and significant relationships were found between time and mean values in Academic Word List and Beyond-2000 as indicators of lexical sophistication. The remaining seven indices of LC, falling short of significance, tended to flatten over the course of this writing program. Correlation analyses among LC indices indicated that lexical density enjoyed positive correlations with lexical sophistication. However, lexical diversity revealed no significant correlations with both lexical density and lexical sophistication. This study suggests that DST perspective specifies a viable foundation for analyzing lexical complexity.

It is difficult for most of the second language learners in Malaysia to function proficiently in English language due to limited vocabulary knowledge. It has also been challenging for TESL graduates to fit in as ENP teachers due to the lack of specialized vocabulary knowledge in nursing field. Thus, a course books has always been a highly dependable aid in facilitating the teaching and learning in an ENP classroom. The objective of this research is to identify the possible pedagogical aspects of two ENP commercial course books (Oxford English for Careers Nursing 1" (OEFCN1) written by Tony Grice and "Nursing Your English Second Edition" (NYE) by Siti Salina Salim and Mazura Mastura Muhammad) in socializing learners into their discourse communities. The present research looks at the extent of vocabulary coverage in comparison with General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), Nursing Education Word List (NEWL) and the 2,000 most frequent nursing words. These course books were photocopied, scanned and converted into computer text files before they were analyzed using WordSmith 4.0 as it is able to provide elemental knowledge on the vocabulary coverage in both course books. The results indicated that both books showed significant result in terms of their coverage based on the three word lists. On the other hand, it is proven that the 2000 most frequent nursing words wordlist is not able to cover as much tokens as compared to GSL, AWL and NEWL combined.

This article introduces the NFL7 (Nuclear Family List 7), a list of the 2,887 most frequent "nuclear" word families, that is, families that include just the most frequent family members and exclude those that constitute less than 7% of family occurrences. The NFL7 was developed by using a dedicated computer program, the Nuclear List Builder (freely available to users). To construct the list, we used that tool to reduce the complete BNC/COCA lists of the 3,000 most frequent word families from 19,062 to 7,293 word types and from 9,132 to 5,610 lemmas. Despite this reduction, the NFL7 compares favorably with other lists in terms of text coverage, and it includes a small number of the most frequent derivational affixes. We argue that the nuclearization of the list makes it suitable for nonadvanced learners, for teaching and testing both receptive and productive knowledge, and for instruction in basic morphology.

Hey Siri, Alexa, Google, can you help me learn to read? Speech recognition apps can take dictation. Elementary, middle, high school students, and adults, who struggle to read can dictate to speech recognition apps and see their oral vernacular become written words. However, at the time of this study, speech recognition apps remained notoriously inaccurate. The purpose of this study was to examine whether first-graders who struggled to read would develop sight vocabulary for the words they dictated to speech recognition apps. If so, how did their speech recognition-generated words compare with words they might encounter in other texts? Conversely, did they use vocabulary represented on high-frequency word lists? Derived from a broader ethnographic study, for 4 months, students attended a classroom writing centre and used speech recognition apps to compose. Findings indicated that speech recognition inaccuracies were inconsequential to participants' development of corresponding sight vocabulary. Within the timeframe and writing process used in the study, the students spontaneously generated a relatively low percentage of words they might encounter in other texts. However, speech recognition appeared to support students' abilities to embrace personally meaningful oral language and transfer their linguistic and culturally diverse oral vernacular to sight vocabulary. Findings raise issues of ecological validity and the origins of sight vocabulary curricula.

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of those associations during recall. If these processes are automatic, the TCE should not be dependent on any encoding strategy and should, in fact, be present regardless of encoding intentionality. Here, we ask whether this theory is compatible with recent findings that the TCE is dramatically reduced under incidental encoding, even though memory accuracy is only modestly reduced. We begin by attempting to replicate this finding in a new large-scale study with over 5,000 participants in which we manipulated encoding intentionality between participants in both delayed free recall and continual distractor free recall. A small, but reliable, TCE was observed in all conditions, although the effect was dramatically reduced in incidental encoding. In a simulation study, we demonstrated that retrieved context theory can simultaneously account for both overall recall and the strength of the TCE in incidental encoding conditions. Additional analyses revealed that the incidental TCE is not an artifact of theoretically uninteresting factors, such as recency, and is consistent with being generated by the core contextual dynamics of retrieved context theory.

The purpose of this study was to provide high frequency word lists for Mandarin-speaking children between 3 and 6 years of age and to explore the differences between each part of speech (POS) category among different age groups. Participants were 209 typically developing native Mandarin speakers aged between 3 and 6 years, born in Taiwan, and recruited from Mandarin-language preschools in Taipei, New Taipei City, and Miaoli. Language samples were collected through conversations, free play, and story retelling. The researchers then transcribed the samples, segment utterances, and words, tagging the POS corresponding to each word. The frequencies of word occurrences were then analyzed and ranked to generate a high frequency word list. The mean frequency of each POS category was calculated to identify significant differences between age groups. The results showed high frequency word lists, including the corresponding POS tagging. Significant differences were found in 10 of the 11 POS categories among age groups. The results of this study presented preliminary information concerning high frequency words produced by Mandarin-speaking children aged between 3 and 6 years and the development of their use of each POS category.

Monolingual studies contrasting memory for positive versus negative emotion-laden words have generally used single-trial paradigms and have produced inconsistent results (no difference or an advantage for either positive or negative valence). However, monolingual studies with multiple presentations of stimuli have consistently found a positivity advantage in recall. No bilingual study has examined whether L2 testing, using a multi-trial procedure, will also produce a positivity advantage. We report two experiments in which L1 and L2 participants performed three learning trials (aural exposure, oral recall), followed by multiple delayed oral recall trials and a recognition trial, using lists of English words from ad-hoc semantic categories, with equal numbers of positive versus negative valence words. Results, including an overall positivity advantage, a greater positivity advantage in L2 than L1, and greater valence-based clustering in L2 than L1, were discussed in terms of the effects of stimulus exposure and gist consolidation.

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of understanding of Chinese L2 readers' word segmentation, the present study investigated 100 L2 learners' word segmentation performance, the relationships between word segmentation and reading fluency and comprehension, and the differences in the aforementioned relationships among learners with different context-free word recognition abilities. Results demonstrated that L2 learners generally conducted word segmentation well and word segmentation contributed to reading fluency and comprehension beyond context-free word recognition. Word segmentation was the major predictor of reading fluency and comprehension among weak wordlist readers, whereas context-free word recognition made a larger contribution when learners have achieved stronger context-free word recognition ability. The findings suggested the importance of developing word segmentation skills and establishing high quality word representations in Chinese L2 reading instruction.

For more than a half-century, lists of words have served as the memoranda of choice in studies of human memory. To better understand why some words and lists are easier to recall than others, we estimated multivariate models of word and list recall. In each of the 23 sessions, subjects (N = 98) studied and recalled the same set of 576 words, presented in 24 study-test lists. Fitting a statistical model to these data revealed positive effects of animacy, contextual diversity, valence, arousal, concreteness, and semantic structure on recall of individual words. We next asked whether a similar approach would allow us to account for list-level variability in recall performance. Here we hypothesized that semantically coherent lists would be most memorable. Consistent with this prediction, we found that semantic similarity, weighted by temporal distance, was a strong positive predictor of list-level recall. Additionally, we found significant effects of average contextual diversity, valence, animacy, and concreteness on list-level recall. Our findings extend previous models of item-level recall and show that aggregate measures of item recallability also account for variability in list-level performance.

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun combinations were embedded in sentential contexts, with control conditions created by substituting the verb with a synonym. L1 and L2 speakers rated sentence acceptability. In Study 2, the original verb was removed from sentences. Participants chose the verb from the list provided they felt was most acceptable. Computational measures were used to measure compositionality of word combinations. Mixed-effects modelling revealed that L1 and L2 speakers judged target word combinations differently in terms of lexical fixedness. In line with phraseological models, L1 speakers judged the use of a synonym as less acceptable in collocations than free combinations. On the contrary, L2 learners judged the use of a synonym as more acceptable in collocations than free combinations. However, all participants perceived idioms as least flexible of the three combination types. Results further showed an interesting effect of compositionality on the speakers' intuitions about the use of word combinations. Taken together, the findings provide new insights into how L1 and L2 speakers perceive word combinations that vary along the continua of lexical fixedness and compositionality.