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In EFL countries where English is rarely practiced outside the classroom, textbooks have become the major input source for learners. Particularly in Vietnam, multiple textbook series are available simultaneously for the same grade. Thus, it is important to examine if their vocabulary is appropriate and of similar difficulty. This study aims to investigate and compare the lexical demands, sophistication, diversity, and lengths of reading passages in the eight latest series for Vietnamese 10th graders with 53,360 tokens in total. The results revealed that the most frequent 1,000, 2,000-3,000, and roughly 4,000-word families in the BNC/COCA wordlist, plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms, were respectively needed for 85%, 95%, and 98% coverage. Additionally, pairwise comparisons uncovered that the passages differ significantly in length yet insignificantly in lexical sophistication and diversity. Therefore, the series appear to be well-suited to co-implementation and facilitative to vocabulary development despite not being optimized for independent learning. The study still calls for simplifying the eight textbook series to promote meaning-focused output. Finally, implications for exploiting and revising these textbook series are discussed.

This study aimed to develop a Vietnamese word recognition test for Taiwanese undergraduate students and to investigate students' performances at different learning stages. The formal test consists of 100 words as test items. With each word, test takers were asked to select the correct Vietnamese word form corresponding to the pronunciation they heard, and its corresponding Chinese meaning. We compiled a pre-test word list first, then after using ITEMAN to analyze the pre-test results, the inappropriate items were filtered out, and left us the final 100 words. 341 students recruited from 14 universities of Taiwan participated in the final test. The results showed that this test can effectively differentiate Vietnamese word recognition ability of students at different learning stages. Students' performance in word sound discrimination is mainly affected by the following factors: 1. knowledge of the correspondence between form and sound; 2. the complexity of the final structure; 3. word frequency; 4. relation to life experience or learning experience; 5. phoneme confusion. Students' performance in word meaning is generally affected by the knowledge of the form sound-meaning correspondence, word familiarity, and part of speech.

This study explored words in materials science research articles using New Academic Word List (NAWL) and New General Service List (NGSL) created by Browne at al. (2013) as reference lists. The objectives of this research were to explore the frequency and coverage of the NAWL and the NGSL in materials science research articles and identify frequently occurring academic words in materials science research articles that were not included in the NAWL and the NGSL. The corpus used for the analysis was compiled from 115 research articles published in five international journals related to the field of materials science. The findings revealed that the coverage of the NAWL words in the corpus of the present study was at 6.18 percent, together with the NGSL, the cumulative coverage of both word lists in the corpus of the present study was at 75.97 percent, and that there were 356 content words which did not appear in both the NAWL and the NGSL but did occur frequently in the corpus of materials science research articles. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to teaching academic vocabulary to EFL learners of materials science who read and publish academic articles in English.

The study explored the impact of proficiency, frequency, L1-L2 congruency, and semantic transparency on the knowledge of multi-word units (MWUs) among Iranian L2 learners (N = 256). A gap-filling test was used to assess learners' productive knowledge, employing a high-frequency MWU list created with the lemmatised concgramming method. The list, which included 11,212 MWUs across four frequency levels, was ranked by L1-L2 congruency and semantic transparency. As revealed by regression models with bootstrapping, the results showed a significant positive correlation between MWU knowledge and proficiency (IELTS scores). It was observed that knowledge of MWUs decreased with lower frequency, and participants scored higher on congruent and transparent items. The study also found that frequency and semantic transparency influenced IELTS scores, with a significant interaction between congruency and incongruent items. These findings underscore the crucial role of L1-L2 congruency in learning MWUs and provide hope for educators, as they offer insights to enhance learning by prioritising L1-L2 congruency in English MWU resources. This study's findings can potentially lead to improved language teaching methodologies and curriculum design, offering a pathway to optimise learning outcomes.

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently updated its course of study in 2019 to increase the target vocabulary for junior high school students from 1,200 words to a range between 1,600 and 1,800 words, in addition to the 600 to 700 words taught in elementary school. To analyze the content of the increased vocabulary for Japanese junior high school students, this study examined a corpus of six EFL textbooks from the "New Horizon" series: three elementary texts and three junior high school texts, (published between 2020 and 2021) using the new JACET8000 wordlist (2016), generating data pertaining to lexical coverage, in-corpus frequency, and in-corpus dispersion. It was found that 42.9% of the first 3,000 words from the JACET list were not found in the corpus, and 50.4% of the high-frequency words studied by junior high school students occurred less than two times within the corpus. Additionally, 35% of analyzed words were found to have a dispersion value of zero, indicating that several items were isolated into single units of study. Lastly, factors contributing to lexical difficulty of the textbooks were also examined.

The Khotons, in the west of Mongolia, were originally Turkic people who spoke the Khoton language, until the 19th century, which is currently considered extinct. This study aimed to prove that the Khoton language belonged to the Turkic languages; and to standardize the Swadesh inventory in relation to the Khoton words. The Swadesh inventory of words was the primary source of this research, which was sampled to examine the basic characteristics like semantic (meaning) acoustic (sound-based), pronunciation and spellings. This study adopted a comparative-historical research design with a qualitative approach, which involved an in-depth content analysis of the data. A data classification process was used to analyze the data by dividing them into categories (3-tiers) to enable retrieving, sorting and storing information. The Swadesh list of words also acted as the instrument of the study as this list was used to target the Khoton vocabulary and determine their equivalence. Such a data classification also helped to manipulate, track and analyze individual specimens in data. The findings of the study reveal that a majority of the linguistic combinations (lexemes) sampled for this study were found in the Khoton language, fully corresponding to the meaning of the English words in the Swadesh list. It was also evident that the basic vocabulary of the Khoton language had the elements of a Turkic language; and that there was an opportunity to reproduce the Khoton language. It is recommended that future studies should examine other versions of Swadesh inventory and compare them with the words in Turkic languages.

This research explored the effectiveness of using the word network technique to teach English vocabulary to first graders in Thai Primary schools. The 150 top-frequency words used in three nationally-used textbooks were inventoried. The list of the words then was compared with the list proposed by the Ministry of Education, Thailand. The combined words based on semantic categories found in two sources of wordlists were then derived to form word networks as the models for the participating teachers. To carry out the study, both quantitative and qualitative research designs were used. In choosing the representative sample of the participants, 48 teachers who taught the English subject for first grade level and 206 first graders in Songkhla Primary Educational Service Area Office 1 participated voluntarily in this study. Most of the teachers had no degree in English or any related fields, but they were assigned to teach English courses. The research instruments were the students' scores from the pre-test and post-test, the word network diagrams, classroom observations, and the teachers' semi-structured interview. Results showed that there were significant differences between the students' mean scores of the pre-test and post-test. The participating teachers were able to adapt the ideas of using word network technique to create the diagrams to teach vocabulary and related structure to their students after training.

The development of subject-specific word lists to assist EFL learners is becoming popular, as is the utilization of CLIL to teach English in academic areas of science. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of the instruction of English Science Textbooks Word Lists (ESTWL) and the CLIL approach on the Science Vocabulary Knowledge and Science Content Knowledge of Thai EFL students. A mixed-methods research design was employed to gather both quantitative and qualitative data using ESTWL-CLIL lesson plans, a Science Vocabulary Knowledge test, and a Science Content Knowledge test. All research instruments were validated by both content and language experts. The target groups were 3 levels of secondary school students studying at a large secondary school in Bangkok. The research findings were as follows: 1) the mean scores of the students in the three groups increased by a statistical significance of 0.05 for both vocabulary knowledge and science content knowledge after the implementation of the intervention, and 2) the qualitative results indicated that all students perceived the instruction of ESTWL and the CLIL approach to be positive. The study suggested a vocabulary pedagogy for science and language teachers for use in CLIL environments.

This study aimed to investigate the lexical competence of English-major EFL students. The learner corpus comprised 552 pieces of writing by sophomore English majors during five academic years between 2017 and 2021, containing 190,506words in total. The results from Vocab Profile program showed that these students used words contained in the academic wordlist (AWL) at lower rates than what has been suggested by experts. This is probably because they were in their second year studying their first writing course. With less exposure to higher level English, they might not have developed an advanced vocabulary repertoire. However, when considering the AWL words used in each type of paragraph, it was found that the students used AWL words to a higher degree in comparison contrast, cause-effect, and problem-solution paragraphs, suggesting that the type of paragraphs can affect the lexical level of the students. When considering the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English(BNC/COCA) lexical level, the words used were mostly in Base List 1, Base List 2, and Base List 3, respectively. The results from Vocab Profile program indicated that they used vocabulary at a very typical level compared to non-English majors, suggesting that they needed more input to stimulate them to use higher vocabulary levels in other advanced writing courses to attain an effective vocabulary level upon completion of the program of studies

This research aimed to scrutinize and delineate the figures of speech manifesting in English hit songs. A selection of songs from Spotify's Top 30 Hit Songs List was chosen as the study material. The study employed a qualitative content analysis approach to classify the type and calculate the frequency of the figures of speech within the corpus of English hit songs. The results of this study revealed 200 figurative speech examples in our small-scale corpus, which comprised 8352 words. This suggests a prevalence of figurative language use within English-language songs. While metaphors and hyperboles were the most frequently used figures of speech, apostrophes, and understatements were the least common. The results underscore the linguistic richness of hit songs, advocating their inclusion in English language teaching (ELT) classrooms, particularly for vocabulary instruction.

This paper presents a unified Arabic version of the English action verbs mentioned in Bloom's taxonomy (1956) that has been checked for validity and reliability by a panel of education experts. Methodologically, the Bloom's list of action verbs was first translated into Arabic by an expert professor of translation. Then, using a mixed-method approach the Arabic list was validated by three bilingual education experts working at universities in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. As part of the process, the paper established a single Bloom's taxonomy list of action verbs, based on the data provided by two reputable educational institutions that were cross-checked with a well-referenced textbook. A contextualized Arabic translation of the list was then produced and was subjected to rigorous checks by a panel of reviewers who were the education experts. The paper presents the challenges faced in translating the list into Arabic and the solutions we have adopted as well as the validity and reliability checks. The implication of this paper is in offering teacher preparation programs across the Arab world an Arabic Bloom's taxonomy list that can be used by in-service and pre-service teachers. Moreover, it contributes to teacher literacy in the correct use of Bloom's action verbs in the Arabic language.

Language plays a crucial role in interpersonal communication, especially in social situations. To communicate effectively, learners need to expand their vocabulary, as vocabulary is the foundation for the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Teaching English as a foreign language can be challenging, especially when it comes to teaching vocabulary, and thus, the teacher needs to find ways to make the learning process more engaging. This study is a meta-analysis that utilizes a literature review to examine the effectiveness of using the Word Wall in enhancing students' English vocabulary. The sample consists of English foreign language learners who used the Word Wall, predominantly from Junior High School levels. The researcher utilized effect size calculation, based on various journal articles and research studies, to determine the effectiveness of the Word Wall strategy. The results of this study, derived from the discussion and conclusion, suggest that the use of the Word Wall has a significant effect in improving English vocabulary, particularly among Junior High School students. Effect sizes, calculated from multiple studies across different regions such as Bandar Lampung, Purworejo, Jakarta, Bandung, Tarakan, and Jakarta, indicate substantial improvements in vocabulary outcomes. Specifically, the Word Wall strategy demonstrated effect sizes of 1.183 and 1.18 at Junior High School and High School levels respectively, with an overall effect size of 3.0 across various regions in Indonesia.

Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality and collocations. The COCA-informed findings revealed that both near-synonyms are most prevalent in academic genres, sharing an equally high level of formality, and exhibit six overlapping groups of noun collocates. Interestingly, the target synonyms, along with their left- and right-sided noun collocates, form context-specific clusters. The verb "restrict" is associated with terms related to governance and rights (i.e., "laws and regulations restrict liberties") while "constrain" with governance and commerce (i.e., "rules constrain spending"). The two are also characterized by unique patterns of collocating with nouns that have opposite morphological meanings: "restrict" pairs with noun collocates containing morphemes representing inbound activities (e.g., "acc"- in "access," as in "restrict access"), while "constrain" with those indicating outbound directions (e.g., "ex"- in "expansion," as in "constrain expansion").

Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the vocabulary. In contrast, other languages have smaller lists making large-scale analyses difficult. Given the usefulness of AoA scores, methods have been developed to leverage the use of Machine Learning models to estimate AoA scores automatically through Age of Exposure (AoE) scores for the entire vocabulary of a language. These generated AoE scores use simulated learning trajectories to evaluate properties similar to AoA. In this work, we propose a method that leverages the greater size of existing English AoA lists to improve the performance of AoE prediction models for other languages. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we introduce a novel AoE regression architecture that uses a Recurrent Neural Network applied to the simulated word exposure trajectories. Second, we consider word embeddings projected into a unified multilingual space. Third, we apply transfer learning on the English AoE regressor to improve the performance of non-English AoE regressors. We show that AoA lists across languages share inherent similarities that enable Machine Learning models to transfer insights from one language to another, thus diminishing the effect of the smaller sample sizes for non-English languages.

Word frequency has a long history of being considered the most important predictor of word difficulty and has served as a guideline for several aspects of second language vocabulary teaching, learning, and assessment. However, recent empirical research has challenged the supremacy of frequency as a predictor of word difficulty. Accordingly, applied linguists have questioned the use of frequency as the principal criterion in the development of wordlists and vocabulary tests. Despite being informative, previous studies on the topic have been limited in the way the researchers measured word difficulty and the statistical techniques they employed for exploratory data analysis. In the current study, meaning recall was used as a measure of word difficulty, and random forest was employed to examine the importance of various lexical sophistication metrics in predicting word difficulty. The results showed that frequency was not the most important predictor of word difficulty. Due to the limited scope, research findings are only generalizable to Vietnamese learners of English.

Toddlers with smaller vocabulary than expected for their age are considered late talkers (LT). This study explored the effects of characteristics of words on vocabulary acquisition of 12- to 24-month-old LT children compared with an age matched (AM) and a vocabulary matched (VM) group of typically developing peers. Using the Hebrew-MacArthur-Bates-Communicative Development Inventory questionnaire, words were rated by adults for babiness, concreteness and iconicity and scored for phonological complexity. The effects of the characteristics of the words on their acquisition were examined. Results showed that the vocabulary of the toddlers from all three groups consisted of words that are more relevant to a child's world and experience (babiness), more concrete, more phonologically simple, and more iconic. When LT children were compared to AM children, the characteristics of their vocabulary were different in terms of structure (e.g., iconicity) and meaning (e.g., concreteness), but similar in phonological complexity and babiness. When they were compared to VM peers, the vocabulary characteristics of LT children were similar, though they used words that were less related to babies' world. The parallel patterns found for LT and VM children versus AM children suggest that LT children's vocabularies differ from those of their age-matched peers due to their smaller size and not due to structural differences. The implications for theory and clinic are discussed.

Previous studies report that exposure to the Maori language on a regular basis allows New Zealand adults who cannot speak Maori to build a proto-lexicon of Maori -- an implicit memory of word forms without detailed knowledge of meaning. How might this knowledge feed into explicit language learning? Is it possible to "awaken" the proto-lexicon in the context of overt language learning? We investigate whether implicit linguistic knowledge represented in a proto-lexicon gives any advantages for intentional language learning in a tertiary educational environment. We conducted a three-task experiment which: (a) assessed participants' Maori proto-lexicon; (b) assessed their phonotactic knowledge; and (c) tested them on Maori vocabulary that they had been exposed to during the course at two time points. The results show that students with larger Maori proto-lexicons learn more words in a classroom setting. This study shows that proto-lexicon acquired from ambient exposure can lead to significant benefits in language learning.

This study presents a list of 2022 Bulgarian-Turkish cognate words that can be used to facilitate vocabulary acquisition and cross-linguistic awareness. The list was created manually through a multi-step process that involved scanning the database of an online dictionary to identify Bulgarian words that had the same or similar forms in Turkish. For each cognate word identified, its Bulgarian and Turkish forms and English meanings were recorded, and their accuracy was checked through additional sources and expert consultation. The final list of cognate words includes only those confirmed based on linguistic criteria and expert judgement. The use of cognate words in language teaching methods such as total physical response and teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling can enhance the effectiveness of these methods by helping students understand and remember new vocabulary and building their confidence in language learning. Additionally, this study highlights the potential of cognate awareness to promote peace in the world by emphasizing the commonalities among languages and cultures. By recognizing the abundance of cognates across different languages, we can reinforce the idea that we are all part of the same human family and share a common linguistic heritage. Moreover, the study demonstrates how a new and innovative multilingual education can be achieved through cognates, showing that language education does not necessarily have to be limited to bilingual instruction. The use of cognates as a tool for vocabulary acquisition and cross-linguistic awareness can open up opportunities for multilingualism and facilitate communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Future research could explore the use of cognate words in other language teaching contexts and investigate the potential benefits and limitations of using cognates in language learning.

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused primarily on university level learners, with young L2 learners being almost entirely disregarded. The present study sought to address these gaps with 148 high school students who were randomly assigned one of three fill-in-the-gap exercises: (1) word-format, where participants selected the appropriate verb from a list provided; (2) letter-format, where the first-letter of the missing verb was provided as a clue; and (3) phrase-format, where participants chose an appropriate intact phrase from a list. Participants did the exercise once, twice or three times. The study investigated the effects of exercise format and repetition on the learning of 20 verb-noun collocations, one and eight weeks following the treatment. Results from generalized linear mixed-effects modeling showed that both exercise and repetition had significant impact on the learnability of the target MWEs, but the format had a smaller effect size than repetition. Rasch analysis was also used to examine the potential difference in the difficulty of MWEs, and how this difficulty may interact with the exercise format. The findings largely support previous research, but also underline the importance of repetition and suggest that exercise format does not uniformly interact with the learnability of MWEs.

Color has been investigated as a signaling cue in multimedia learning environments, guiding the learner's attention and as an emotional design element, increasing the learner's motivation and, thus, improving learning outcomes. Retrieval cues (e.g., visual cues, odor, sound) facilitating memory retrieval have been primarily investigated in learning simple word lists. Contrary to additional retrieval cues, the background color is a component that is always present in multimedia learning environments. This study investigates if the background color of learning texts as retrieval cue can enhance learning and affect cognitive load and motivation. Hypotheses are formulated according to the "Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning with Multimedia" (CATLM) and in the setting of context-dependent memory, specifically the "Information, associated Context, and Ensemble Theory" (ICE). A 2 (related vs. unrelated background color) × 2 (with vs. without colors in the learning test) -factorial between-subjects design with an additional control group was utilized. For the control group, the background of the learning texts and learning questions was white. In total, 191 native German speakers were randomly assigned to the five groups. The findings indicate that relying solely on the background color as a retrieval cue is insufficient. Instead of facilitating memory retrieval, the background color remains context information stored separately from the item information. However, the results should be approached carefully as learning outcomes may be subject to ceiling and floor effects.

Rehearsal is a form of self-talk used to support short-term memory. Historically, the study of rehearsal development has diverged from the study of self-talk more generally. The current experiment examines whether two characteristics of self-talk (impact of task difficulty and self-talk's narrative vs. planning purpose) are also observed in rehearsal. Eighty children, ages 4-7, were tasked with remembering the three-item and six-item lists over a 15-s delay. Children's spontaneous use of fixed rehearsal (i.e., immediate repetition of a just-presented item) and cumulative rehearsal (i.e., cycling through multiple items at a time) was documented from video recordings. Four-year-olds narrated item presentations using fixed rehearsal. Six- and seven-year-olds proactively planned for recall by engaging cumulative rehearsal. Five-year-olds used both forms of rehearsal, but their frequency of cumulative rehearsal was dependent on list length. Therefore, rehearsal is susceptible to task manipulations that affect other forms of self-talk.

This research was prompted by the phenomenon of binge-watching Korean television series (K-drama) amongst college students in Taiwan, where English as a foreign language (EFL) is a required course. The researcher-teacher sought to create a pedagogically useful list of the frequent semantically non-compositional multi-word expressions (MWEs) for EFL learners with K-drama fever who often binge-watch K-dramas. A corpus of 25+ million English subtitled words derived from 240 K-dramas across different genres was compiled. Based upon a set of criteria (frequency, range, meaningfulness, well-formedness, non-decomposability and semantic non-compositionality), a total of 326 MWEs of 2 to 6 words were selected. The 326 phrasal expressions are mostly composed of the first 3000 word families. As with other individual word lists, it is hoped that the listing of the non-compositional MWEs may serve as a reference for General English teachers.

Since written assignments often constitute the main form of assessment in tertiary education, academic writing skills are of paramount importance to university students. The role of academic writing in turn emphasises two aspects vital for successful written production at universities: genre awareness as students are assessed on the production of relevant genres and the use of academic vocabulary regarded as a key element of academic writing style. This study employs a corpus-based approach to explore the usage of academic vocabulary in four genres of assessed academic writing produced by multilingual foundation-level students (N=193) at a UK university. The findings show that in all writing genres there was a small set of core academic vocabulary used by the majority of students in their written assignments, accounting on average for approximately 3.6%-9% of academic vocabulary types across the genres under investigation. In addition, differences were found in the distribution and function of the core academic vocabulary items across genres. These findings have potentially important pedagogical implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts catering for novice student writers.

In second language learning research, L1-L2 congruency refers to the similarity in form and meaning of the way a word or phrase is said between two languages. If there is low L1-L2 congruency, the learning burden of a word or phrase can be higher, and thus, such items should be focused on more in teaching to help learners avoid errors. For example, an unacceptable structure could be produced when second language learners use direct or literal translation to formulate multiword units (MWUs) in the target language. This study used L1-L2 congruency as a criterion to identify English MWUs with low congruency with their Persian equivalents to create a resource for Persian-speaking English learners. An L1-L2 contrastive analysis was conducted on a list of approximately 11,000 high-frequency MWUs. This list was translated, and the items were given ratings regarding their congruency in Persian. The results revealed that more than 65% of the items examined were incongruent with their word-for-word translations, demonstrating that L1-L2 congruency is a significant factor in selecting MWUs for Persian-speaking English learners. Since focusing on incongruent items may help learners avoid errors, the results of this study can help improve the efficacy of English acquisition by Persian-speaking learners through its identification of particular MWUs that have low congruency between the two languages.

The current study explored the vocabulary use and examined the rhetorical move structure of World Health Organization Emergencies Press Conferences on the Coronavirus Disease. Vocabulary use was described using a corpus of 140 press conferences containing 1,139,248 running words that was analysed based on three indicator variables: vocabulary level, lexical coverage, and lexical profiling. The move structure was analysed based on 70 press conferences randomly selected from the corpus to identify shared moves and steps throughout the selected press conferences. The vocabulary level and lexical coverage analysis identified that 95 per cent of the vocabulary used in the corpus came from the first 3,000 high-frequency words based on the frequency rates of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Harmoniously, non-medical terms were extensively used across the press conferences covering 93.56 per cent of the corpus. Therefore, L2 users of English would understand most of the language used in the press conferences. According to the corpus-based move analysis, the frequency findings revealed 11 moves and their respective 32 steps. The study also established the move sequence prototypes for each stage comprising an opening stage, opening remarks, stage engagement, and closure. These results could be implemented for assisting learners in public speaking or English for business courses.

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words as our corpus. Using the "Sketch Engine" Tool, we examined their frequency, subject and object noun collocations, adverb collocations, and syntactic behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that both words collocate with subject and object nouns. However, on their top ten subject collocation lists, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns related to finance and economy, whereas "rise" collocates with three different kinds of abstract nouns related to finance/economy, the human entity, and the natural environment, and one concrete noun related to natural environment. In addition, they only have two collocates in common on their top subject noun collocates list. In terms of object noun collocations, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns connected to finance/economy and the natural environment, but "rise" collocates with abstract and concrete nouns on their top list. They also only have three adverb collocations in common on the top list. "Rise" has 17 distinct syntactic patterns, whereas "increase" has 15 different syntactic patterns. In teaching near-synonyms, we propose using corpus-based reference resources.

Following Richards's (2015) ideas of using movie clips, videos, and games as valuable technological tools for language learning, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using novel extracts and computer game cutscenes based on the same story to develop the vocabulary knowledge of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study employed a quasi-experimental design with a control group and an experimental group. Initially, both groups studied a target vocabulary list of 20 words and their definitions. The participants were asked to complete a multiple-choice definition matching test after studying the list to find out whether their levels of vocabulary knowledge were comparable prior to the applications. For the experimental group, a second vocabulary test equivalent to the first one was conducted after they read a novel extract including the target vocabulary items, and a third test was carried out after they watched two computer game cutscenes that were based on the same events as the novel extract to understand whether seeing the target vocabulary items in these contexts repetitively would result in a significant increase in their target vocabulary knowledge. For the control group, the second and the third vocabulary tests were undertaken immediately after the first one to investigate whether mere exposure to equivalent vocabulary tests without the interventions would lead to a significant increase in their target vocabulary knowledge. The findings of the study indicated that the scores of the participants in the experimental group increased descriptively on the second test and significantly on the third test, whereas the scores of the participants in the control group decreased significantly on the second test and descriptively on the third test. The study provides practical and academic implications based on the findings.

This paper reports on the creation of specialized word lists in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is a discipline using vocabulary across languages (i.e., Chinese and English) and involves learners with different L1 backgrounds. First, a TCM Word List of 2,778 specialized words was established from corpora of TCM textbooks and journal articles. Selection criteria included specialized meaning, keyness in a corpus of general written English compared to the TCM Corpora, and frequency. The resulting TCM list covered 36.65% of the TCM Corpora but had low coverage over corpora of general written English and medical English. The TCM Word List was then divided into three sub-lists based on frequency, and graded into three levels. Level 1 contains high-frequency lexical items in English (e.g., "organ," "coating"); Level 2 contains items that are mid-, low-frequency, or beyond any frequency levels (e.g., "pericarpium," "metabolism"); and Level 3 contains Chinese loan words (e.g., "qi," "yang"). Last, there is an overlap of 309 word families between this list and an earlier TCM list by Hsu (2018), which excludes words from the 1st-3rd 1,000 word families in English. Suggestions for teachers and future research are provided.

The study aimed to investigate the effect of the course content developed based on Turkic World literary texts on students' academic achievement and attitudes towards Turkic World texts in the 8th-grade Turkish course. Gender and age differences in attitudes toward Turkic World texts were also examined. A quantitative research approach with a weak experimental design was used. Fifteen students studying in a public school in Bursa, Turkey, participated in the study. The experimental procedure applied "Course Content Prepared with Turkic World Literary Texts (CCPTWLT)" for six weeks, while the researcher used the "Turkic World Literary Texts Achievement Test (TWLTAT)" and "Attitude Scale for Turkic World Literary Texts (ASTWLT)" as pre-test and post-test to reveal the effect of the experimental procedure were developed by the researcher. Mann-Whitney U and T-Test were used to analyze the data. The study results show a significant increase in students' academic achievement by implementing CCPTWLT (p=0.003). However, no significant difference was found between the pre-test and the post-test, although students' attitudes increased in the Interest sub-dimension (p>0.05), Turkic World sub-dimension (p>0.05), Language of Texts sub-dimension (p>0.05), Pronunciation dimension (p>0.05) of the Attitude Scale after CCPTWLT practices. Finally, the study revealed that the ASTWLT scores did not differ significantly according to age and gender.

The selection of an appropriate word counting unit (WCU) for the purpose of second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) in the last decade has become a very important and relevant topic in academic circles. However, few studies address on-the-ground teaching practices and perspectives. This mixed-approach study, conducted through an online questionnaire, collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 30 ESL/EFL teachers in Japan. The questionnaire surveyed their vocabulary teaching experience and views regarding five categories of WCUs: all word tokens (i.e., All Forms and Meanings (AFM)), plemma, lemma, flemma, and Word Family (WF). The online survey revealed that most participants (i.e., those who were not aware of SLVA research and recent teaching practices) had limited experience and knowledge regarding WCUs and their impact. Another important finding is that although the WCU category participants were most experienced with is the WF (i.e., root/basic word lists), the WCU they have the highest pedagogical regard for is the lemma which considers parts of speech (POS) in vocabulary instruction and learning, followed closely by the plemma which additionally considers the various meanings words can take on, and also irregular inflectional patterns (e.g., irregular verb past tenses and past participles), and to a lesser extent the flemma which does not consider POS nor the various meanings and irregular inflectional patterns of words in vocabulary instruction.

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai native speakers perceived these Chinese-accented nasals. The production experiment compared the acoustic features of Thai final nasal consonants (i.e. /m/, /n/, and /[eng]/) produced by Chinese students and native Thai speakers (n = 5 in each group), who provided speech samples from a wordlist reading task, consisting of 28 words (840 tokens). Nasal acoustic properties of 840 tokens (duration, nasal murmurs, and formant transitions) were examined. The findings showed that the Chinese students produced significantly longer nasal duration and more drastic formant transitions compared to the native speakers. The perception experiment analyzed how native Thai raters (n = 10) rated speech samples concerning degrees of accentedness by using a 5-point Likert scale with 5 as the most native level. Based on this, the native Thai raters rated the Chinese students' speech as 3.22 on average, while native Thai speech was judged with an average score of 4.65, which demonstrated that native Thai raters could distinguish foreign speech from those pronounced by native speakers. To find out to what extent nasal acoustic characteristics in Chinese students' interlanguage phonology contributed to the degree of accentedness, stepwise regression analyses were utilized to discover that nasal duration was particularly important in accurately predicting accentedness in Thai with Chinese accents.

Vocabulary knowledge has been recognized as a crucial component in learning and teaching of both native and non-native learners, text understanding, and educational success (Coxhead, 2018; Saeedi et al., 2023; Schmitt et al., 2021), leading to the development of word lists for different purposes. Hence, this study aimed at developing a newspaper word list including the most frequent words which are highly applicable and useful for understanding different sections of English newspapers. In doing so, a corpus of 1,221,970 words was compiled and analyzed. Based on the three criteria, i.e., frequency, range, and specialization, a word list containing 858-word families was obtained. A combination of the current word list and the general words accounted for 94.64% of tokens (the total number of running words) in the corpus. The results have practical applications for EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign Language/ English as a Second Language) learners as well as readers and writers of English newspapers.

Academic vocabulary is regarded as an important vocabulary set for students at the tertiary to master's levels. Besides academic vocabulary, field-specific vocabulary is another important set that students in different fields of study should be required to explore. The physical education and sports science English word list was created to assist physical education and sports science students in their English courses. This field-specific word list was constructed using the lexical profile, frequency, range, and expert verification as criteria. The final step provides a physical education and sports science English word list with 466 word families, which are later categorized into three groups by consulting dictionaries. This word list could be beneficial to teachers and curriculum designers aiming to create useful materials for courses concerning English for specific purposes, especially English for physical education and sports science.

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a multivariate motor speech disorder that requires a motor-based intervention approach. There is limited treatment research on young children with CAS, reflecting a critical gap in the literature given that features of CAS are often in full expression early in development. Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC) is a treatment approach designed for children with severe CAS, yet the use of DTTC with children younger than 3 years of age has not been examined. Method: A multiple single-case design was employed to examine the use of DTTC in seven children with CAS (aged 2.5-5 years) over the course of 6 weeks of intervention. Changes in word accuracy were measured in treated words from baseline to posttreatment and from baseline to maintenance (6 weeks posttreatment). Generalization of word accuracy changes to matched untreated words was also examined. A linear mixed-effects model was used to estimate the change in word accuracy for treated and untreated words across all children from baseline to posttreatment and to maintenance. A quasi-Poisson regression model was used to estimate mean change and calculate effect sizes for treated and untreated words. Results: Group-level analyses revealed significant changes in word accuracy for treated and untreated words at posttreatment and maintenance. At the child level, six of seven children displayed medium-to-large effect sizes where word accuracy increased in an average of 3.4/5 words across all children. Each child displayed some degree of generalization to untreated targets, specifically for words with the same syllable shape as the treated words. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that DTTC can yield positive change in some young children with CAS. Key differences in each child's performance are highlighted.

This study expands arguments calling for a more rigorous approach to high-frequency vocabulary list-based learning in EFL learning environments. Test and flashcard item designs were validated through quantitative (midterm and final test) and qualitative (survey) results to explore the impact of digital flashcards designed to build recall-level comprehension on both timed gap-fill and traditional multiple-choice posttests. Quizlet was chosen as the platform due to the affordance it provides teachers to create flashcard content and monitor practice. The results showed that multiple-choice, recognition-level test items result in a 20% overestimation of knowledge relative to gap-fill posttests. Additionally, a post-semester survey of 138 Japanese, pre-intermediate students of English showed a highly positive response to the recall-focused practice and testing system. The results demonstrate that for high-frequency L2 vocabulary, a paradigm shift from form-meaning recognition to form-meaning recall is an important direction for high-frequency vocabulary instruction and testing.

Pronouncing English clusters may be challenging for Arab English learners. Technology-based strategies can be used to improve their pronunciation of English consonant clusters. This study examined how high variability phonetic training (HVPT) can be used to improve the pronunciation of consonant clusters among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The current study examined 58 Saudi undergraduate students. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The control group was provided with a list of words in the consonant clusters. Participants in this group viewed a video in which all these words were pronounced in isolation (decontextualized group). The use of HVPT as a platform for contextualized pronunciation led to considerable improvement in the participants' ability to pronounce words with consonant clusters. Moreover, using HVPT helped the students remember the correct pronunciation of the relevant words with consonant clusters.

With the increase in linguistic and cultural diversity in South Korea, the landscape of English education in Korean classrooms has been changing. This has led to an increased need to explore the language and literacy practices of the emergent multilingual youth in Korea where one (official) language (Korean) has been predominantly used as the medium of instruction for English teaching and learning. Addressing this need for more research on how emerging multilingual children learn English in the diverse Korean classrooms of today, this four-year longitudinal case study explored out-of-classroom English language learning experiences of three Uzbek students in South Korea. Drawing upon the conceptual framework of "translanguaging" and "agency," data were collected from various sources. I found that the actions taken by these students to learn English depended on their interlocutors, practical and academic purposes, and language ideologies embedded in contexts, which in turn influenced learners' agency and translanguaging practices. More specifically, the findings show the students exercised agency over their choice of linguistic and non-linguistic resources in order to expand their linguistic repertoires on their own accord. These findings provide implications for EFL research and pedagogy, particularly within the context of the transition from monolingual to multilingual.

Recent scholarship has called for deeper communications and collaborations between writing studies and language studies because such interdisciplinary connections can facilitate the growth of both fields. While research has explored the potential exchanges between writing studies and language-related fields (such as applied linguistics, second language writing, and sociolinguistics), few studies have focused on the intersections between English historical linguistics and writing studies. This article partially fills the gap by demonstrating how a diachronic corpus-based approach from history of the English language research can be an effective methodological tool for historical research in writing studies, which has been of great interest to writing studies scholars. This article first offers three reasons why a diachronic corpus-based approach can methodologically contribute to historical research in writing studies, and then it illustrates the practice of such an approach by studying the changing disciplinary trends in writing studies from 1997 to 2022 in a self-built, diachronic corpus. To identify the disciplinary trends, word frequency lists and keyness analysis (TF-IDF as procedure) were used. The results indicate both perennial interests and five-year, periodical activities in writing studies over the past 26 years.

The selection of appropriate vocabulary is a crucial and challenging aspect of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention. Core vocabulary lists are frequently used to support vocabulary selection for children who require AAC. A vocabulary domain that has garnered limited attention within the AAC literature is relational basic concepts (RBCs). RBCs describe relationships between objects, persons, or situations, and play a pivotal role in language development, communication, and academic success. For the present study, we created a list of 156 RBCs, drawing primarily from assessments that measure basic concept knowledge in preschool and early elementary school students. We examined the overlap of these words on nine core vocabulary lists. We found that most concepts were not represented on any core lists. Additionally, there was relatively little overlap of RBCs between the core lists. These findings suggest that vocabulary selection resources created using exclusively a core vocabulary approach may have limited utility for identifying many concepts that preschool and early elementary students are expected to know and use. Implications for AAC research and practice are discussed with emphasis on the need for further consideration of RBCs within vocabulary selection practice and the field of AAC at large.

High frequency words, commonly referred to as sight words, are often a focus of emergent reading instruction. Instructional practices abound that require emergent readers to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of the words without drawing attention to grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the words. These approaches ignore a critical aspect of Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping. This article reviews the literature on storing words in memory, in general, and the research on learning high frequency words, more specifically. Analyses of high frequency words on the widely used, Dolch list, are included that show the overwhelming regularity of the GPCs in these words. The analyses provide insight into the most common GPCs in these high frequency words, and they provide examples of GPCs that if taught, unlock the regularity of several other high frequency words. Discussion focuses practitioners gaining more advanced phonetic knowledge in order to better understand the orthographic regularity of high frequency words. Recommendations include supplementing traditional phonics programs for students with at least some advanced phonetic knowledge, ensuring practitioners have this level of knowledge in order to capitalize on teachable moments with high frequency words, and/or organizing classroom lists of high frequency more strategically.

Vocabulary research provides valuable information on the construct of word knowledge (WK), and suggests ways to develop language learners' lexicon, arguably, the backbone of communication. The present study explores EFL students' vocabulary learning behavior; more specifically, the aspects of WK components they intentionally focus on when learning new words. Data was collected from 536 undergraduate students in an EFL context. Our findings revealed that EFL students' vocabulary size was roughly 5,000 word families, considerably less than the number advocated for academic studies. Regarding the various aspects of WK, the top three components that the participants with larger vocabulary sizes primarily focus on were a word's meaning in L2, spelling, and pronunciation, whereas for those students with a smaller vocabulary size, the top three choices were meaning in L1, spelling and meaning in L2. This intentional focus on separate aspects of WK, especially the meaning-form link in L2, might instigate further progress for the former group, and the lack thereof may inhibit learning opportunities for the latter. Exploration of the processes of vocabulary learning will guide teaching practice, and materials design. It may also call for adjustments in curricula as our understanding of vocabulary acquisition processes evolves.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning applications. This article examines the word cloud, a toolkit often used to scaffold teaching and learning for reflection, critical thinking, and content learning. Addressing the issues in traditional word clouds, semantic word clouds have been developed but they are technically challenging to develop and still problematic. However, generative AI has the potential to develop efficient, accurate, creative, and accessible word clouds. Three different methods representing three major approaches of word cloud generation were developed, implemented, and user evaluated--traditional (baseline), semantic (natural language processing enhanced), and generative AI (generative pretrained transformer based)--in two different language contexts--Chinese (China case) and English (Singapore case). The findings of the study show the technical robustness of the methods, as well as provide key pedagogical insights from the user perspective of instructors of higher education courses in China and Singapore. Implications to the design of word clouds and their application in teaching and learning are discussed.

This research reviews 56 robots in science education (RSE) research articles published in SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) journals in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The analysis results showed that there were three clusters of RSE studies: robots in elementary science education, robot-based STEM activities, and robot-facilitated computational thinking. In terms of the research issues, more studies were conducted across-disciplines. Regarding thematic classifications, "general benefits of educational robots" was the most frequently investigated issue, while "diversity and broadening participation," and "creativity and motivation" were less frequently discussed. The most adopted research methods were quantitative and mixed methods, focusing on measuring learners' cognition and affect. Most of the interventions in the empirical studies adopted pedagogical interventions. In terms of the interaction issue, LEGO was adopted the most, followed by self-made robots; moreover, robots frequently played the role of tools in science education. From the perspective of specific robotics content knowledge, "control" (e.g. programming) comprised the majority. The most adopted learning strategy was project-based learning, followed by issue-based discussion. Regarding assessment issues, the most adopted evaluation approaches to evaluating students' performance were questionnaires, observation, verbal interviews, and artifacts to assess the quality of learning activities.

The current study investigated 29 first-year Japanese university students' usage of an online vocabulary notebook that automatically searched eight different word and phrase lists to provide students with reference information about their self-selected vocabulary. Over the course of a 14-week period, participants read English books and articles and added self-selected vocabulary that they wanted to learn to individual online vocabulary notebooks. The notebooks immediately and automatically showed whether the vocabulary appeared on any of eight different reference vocabulary lists. The distribution of participant vocabulary across lists was examined and participant surveys and interviews were conducted to understand usage of the system. Analysis of participant vocabulary, learner surveys, and interviews indicated that participants selected relatively high percentages of standardized-test related vocabulary (i.e. TOEIC and TOEFL), chose individual vocabulary items over multi-word expressions, and studied vocabulary items even when they did not appear on any reference lists. Learner surveys and interview results suggested that use of the system directly or indirectly influenced half of the participants' decisions about which vocabulary to include in their notebooks, though participants reported that it did not affect their choice of reading material.

While gamified technology integration in vocabulary instruction within a flipped classroom has yielded beneficial teaching outcomes, specific studies have raised concerns about potential adverse effects linked to this approach. As a result, conducting a comparative analysis between gamified technology and conventional paper-based methods within the flipped classroom framework has become essential. This analysis aims to foster the development of a targeted teaching approach that adeptly addresses the unique needs of students. This study employed a sequential explanatory research design to examine the effectiveness of flipped classroom with gamified technology and paper-based method in teaching vocabulary to students with different proficiency levels. Quantitative data was gathered from a pretest and a posttest, whilst qualitative data was collected through teachers' guided reflection. Using Academic Word List (300 target words), control groups employed a paper-based, while experimental groups applied gamified technology ("Quizlet," "Kahoot!," "Quizizz," "Socrative," and "Google Form"), which lasted 10 weeks. The participants were 144 non-English major students who took a general English course in the 2nd semester of 2023. Quantitative data analysis ran in SPSS 25 using "Paired Sample t-Test" and "One-way ANOVA." The qualitative data were analyzed using thematic progression. The results showed that gamified technology did not affect students' learning outcomes, while the paper-based method resulted conversely. It revealed that the paper-based method is more effective than gamified technology for students in general, with low proficiency and high-proficiency level. Further, teachers' beliefs admitted distinctive issues that gamified technology was more effective for high-proficiency learners, whereas paper-based was more effective for low-proficiency learners. The difference analysis of quantitative and qualitative data sheds light on discussing threats while implementing gamified technology and possible solutions.

Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent relationships of word features across three established word lists--the General Service List, Academic Word List, and discipline-specific word lists from the Academic Vocabulary List. We fit exploratory factor models using 22 non-behavioral, empirical measures to three sets of vocabulary words: 2,060 high-frequency words, 1,051 general academic words, and 3,413 domain-specific words. Results: We found Frequency, Complexity, Proximity, Polysemy, and Diversity were largely stable factors across the sets of high-frequency and general academic words, but that the challenge facing learners is structurally different for domain-specific words. Conclusion: Despite substantial stability, there are important differences in the latent lexical features that learners encounter. We discuss these results and provide our latent factor estimates for words in our sample.

Core vocabulary lists and vocabulary inventories vary according to language. Lists from one language cannot and should not be assumed to be translatable, as words represent language-specific concepts and grammar. In this manuscript, we (a) present the results of a vocabulary overlap analysis between different published core vocabulary lists in English, Korean, Spanish, and Sepedi; (b) discuss the concept of universal semantic primes as a set of universal concepts that are posited to be language-independent; and (c) provide a list of common words shared across all four languages as exemplars of their semantic primes. The resulting common core words and their corresponding semantic primes can assist families and professionals in thinking about the initial steps in the development of AAC systems for their bilingual/multilingual clients.

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly designed for the needs of L2 learners, might help students reach text coverage that could result in reasonable comprehension of science texts. The findings of this study show that: (a) the top 570 word families in the newer Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) provide 75% more lexical coverage in the corpus than the 570 word families in the older Academic Word List (AWL), (b) a series of lists designed for second language learners, such as General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science List (about 2,900 word families) offer 88.33% coverage, and (c) the GSL and the Middle School Vocabulary List (MSVL) for Science (fewer than 2,500 word families) provide 87.77% coverage.

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language). Design/methodology/approach: This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study. Findings: The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach. Originality/value: Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.