Vocabulary learning is central to reading ability and academic achievement. Vocabulary researchers and educators have viewed its essence as a process of associating the pronunciations and meanings of words in memory, and they have paid little attention to the contribution that spellings might make to vocabulary learning. We review theory and evidence showing that this is a serious oversight. On...

Using behavioral, structural, and functional imaging techniques, we demonstrate contrasting effects of vocabulary knowledge on temporal and parietal brain structure in 47 healthy volunteers who ranged in age from 7 to 73 years. In the left posterior supramarginal gyrus, vocabulary knowledge was positively correlated with gray matter density in teenagers but not adults. This region was not activ...

The problem of collaborative work in open environment has become a center of academic and industrial attention. Creating, sharing, using, and storing knowledge in both tacit and explicit terms are essential to maintain competitive advantages in a highly competitive open market. This paper discusses the problem of work in collaborative and open environment where language is the main component of...

The Reading Teacher, 62(5), pp. 384–392 © 2009 International Reading Association DOI:10.1598/RT.62.5.2 ISSN: 0034-0561 print / 1936-2714 online The most plausible explanation for vocabulary’s connection to better reading ability is that vocabulary is more than words. It is knowledge. To know a word’s meaning is to know what a word represents and to begin to understand the network of concepts th...

linguistic stimuli in reading. Available prior knowledge about the language and about the world facilitates not only comprehension of the explicit information in the text, but also the generation of inferences about implicit information (e.g., McNamara & Kintsch, 1996). Vocabulary or word knowledge is a major component of prior knowledge that has been found to be related to inferences in readin...

Differences in literacy growth over the summer versus the school year were examined in order to isolate how schooling affects children's literacy development from preschool through second grade across four literacy skills. Children (n = 383) were tested individually twice each year for up to four years on measures of phonological awareness, decoding, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Growt...

Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from moderately large samples of healthy adults confirmed prior findings of age-related declines in measures of the quantity of word knowledge beginning around age 65. Additional analyses were carried out to investigate the interrelations of different types of vocabulary knowledge at various periods in adulthood. Although the organizational structures were ...

The emphasis on testing in curricular content areas has left little room in most U.S. schools for education in the arts. Yet research supports the pedagogical value of aesthetic education, particularly for English learners (ELs), who are increasingly numerous in U.S. schools. This paper presents a qualitative research study focused on incorporating aesthetic education into instruction for ELs. ...

Deaf children generally are found to have smaller English vocabularies than hearing peers, although studies involving children with cochlear implants have suggested that the gap may decrease or disappear with age. Less is known about the vocabularies of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) postsecondary students or how their vocabulary knowledge relates to other aspects of academic achievement. This ...

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effect of bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches on English as a foreign language (EFL) vocabulary recall and retention. To this end, 44 high school students from two intact classes were assigned to bottom-up (n = 21) and top-down (n = 23) groups. The participants were exposed to 20 hours of explicit vocabulary instruction during 10 weeks ...