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 ...

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the Netherlands. Mothers reported on their language use...

The paper introduces SVALex, a lexical resource primarily aimed at learners and teachers of Swedish as a foreign and second language that describes the distribution of 15,681 words and expressions across the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The resource is based on a corpus of coursebook texts, and thus describes receptive vocabulary learners are exposed to during reading activiti...

Vocabulary is an essential part of every language not only foreign language. The way teachers teach new vocabulary is vocabulary presentation mode, which influence students’ vocabulary retention greatly. According to the cognitive psychology, the way to understand new information varies with the presentation modes of information, which means only with the appropriate presentation modes, the voc...

Assessing vocabulary difficulty is useful for finding and creating texts at low reading levels. Prior work has focused on characteristics such as word length and word frequency. In this work, we explore whether other cues might be useful, using features extracted from Wiktionary entries. Comparing words in comparable articles in Standard and Simple English Wikipedia, we find that words that app...

The purpose of the present study was to identify any significant relationship between critical thinking ability, L2 vocabulary knowledge, and L2 vocabulary learning strategies of Iranian EFL learners. To this aim, the productive vocabulary levels test was administered to measure the learner’s L2 vocabulary knowledge and observe homogeneity in terms of vocabulary knowledge. At the second stage, ...

A time-varying Wiener filter extracts a speech signal from a mixture using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio in a local time-frequency unit. We estimate this ratio using a binaural processor and derive a ratio time-frequency mask. This mask is used to extract the speech, which is then fed to a conventional speech recognizer operating in the cepstral domain. We compare the performance of this s...

A time-varying Weiner filter extracts the speech signal from a noisy mixture using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio in a local time-frequency unit. We estimate this ratio using a binaural processor and derive a ratio time-frequency mask. This mask is used to extract the speech signal, which is then fed to a conventional speech recognizer operating in the cepstral domain. We compare the perfor...

In genomic and molecular biology domains, controlled vocabularies and ontologies are becoming of paramount importance to integrate and correlate the massive amount of information increasingly accumulating in heterogeneous and distributed databanks. Although at present they are still few and present some issues, they can effectively be used also to biologically annotate genes on a genomic scale ...