Vocabulary Learning and Instruction

Generating Knowledge of Academic Language Among Urban Middle School Students

“…Fortunately, the field of vocabulary instruction has been well researched. Dozens of small-scale experimental studies provide evidence about instructional factors that promote successful vocabulary learning (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002;Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982;Graves, 2006;McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Perfetti, 1983;McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985;National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000;Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986;Stahl & Nagy, 2006). Those factors include the following:…”

The Prediction of Gre Reading Comprehension Item Difficulty for Expository Prose Passages for Each of Three Item Types: Main Ideas, Inferences and Explicit Statements

“…Other variables that one can hypothesize will be of importance in affecting comprehension difficulty for multiple~choice tests are vocabulakY level (Graves, 1986), various measures of sentence complexity, such as sentence length (Klare, 1974(Klare, -1975, paragraph length (Hites, 1950), number of paragraphs (Freedle, Fine, & Fellbaum, 1981) and abstractness of text (Paivio, 1986). In particular, less frequently occurring words and longer sentence structures tend to make texts more difficult to understand, as can be inferred from their use in traditional readability formulas (Graves, 1986); in addition, longer paragraphs, and abstractness of texts also make passages more difficult to comprehend (see Hites, 1950, andPaivio, 1986, respectively).…”

“…In particular, less frequently occurring words and longer sentence structures tend to make texts more difficult to understand, as can be inferred from their use in traditional readability formulas (Graves, 1986); in addition, longer paragraphs, and abstractness of texts also make passages more difficult to comprehend (see Hites, 1950, andPaivio, 1986, respectively). Use of more paragraphs was found to be positively correlated with the quality of written essays (Freedle, Fine, & Fellbaum, 1981); it remains to be seen whether number of paragraphs itself contributes to reading comprehension difficulty in a multiple-choice testing context.…”

Effectiveness of Morphemic Analysis of Graeco-Latin Word Parts as a Vocabulary Learning Strategy among ESL Learners

“…Vocabulary knowledge in English is deemed the strongest factor that could distinguish learners who could read and understand what they have read, from those who have difficulty reading even though they may have a colossal vocabulary stock in their native language (Blachowicz, Fisher, Ogle & Watts-Taffe 2006, Graves 2006.…”

“…Wong & Anie Attan 2014;Naginder Kaur 2013;Rasinski, Padak, Newton & Newton 2008;Graves 2006). There are many factors that need to be considered which make the learning environment conducive for second language vocabulary learning (Antonacci & O'Callaghan 2012).…”