Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
17,093
result(s) for
"Vocabulary Development"
Sort by:
The garden crew
Develops reading skills through games and a fictional story about a group of students who plant and tend a garden, with the help of their teacher, and finally have a big feast with all the food they have grown.
Book
The Development of Abstract Word Meanings
Extensive research has shown that children’s early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with children in grade 2 to college age. Earlier-acquired meanings were rated as more concrete while later-acquired meanings as more abstract, particularly for words typically considered to be concrete. The results suggest that sensorimotor experiences are important to early-acquired word meanings, and other experiences (e.g., linguistic) are important to later-acquired meanings, consistent with a multi-representational view of lexical semantics.
Journal Article
Out-of-the-classroom learning of English vocabulary by EFL learners: investigating the effectiveness of mobile assisted learning with digital flashcards
The importance of vocabulary knowledge as one of the most challenging aspects of foreign language learning has been widely acknowledged. In order to facilitate learning vocabulary items in English by language learners, mobile assisted vocabulary learning attracted considerable attention in recent years. Nevertheless, the application of mobile devices for learning the most frequently used vocabulary items in core vocabulary lists received far less attention. To address this gap, the current study investigated the contribution of a digital flashcard application (i.e. NGSL builder) designed for smartphone devices in out-of-the-classroom learning of essential vocabulary in English among EFL learners. The participants were 86 university students in experimental and control groups. In addition to formal language education during a semester, the experimental group used the mobile application for studying vocabulary items outside the classroom, while the control group used traditional materials (i.e. word list) to study the same content. The participants’ vocabulary knowledge was measured in three times (pre, post, and delayed posttest), and the results revealed that the use of mobile applications contributed significantly to vocabulary knowledge development, and those in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in the control group. The findings also provided empirical evidence for the long-term impacts of mobile-assisted vocabulary learning. The study highlights the significance of mobile technologies in helping L2 learners to acquire essential vocabulary in English and discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings.
Journal Article
Engaged learners, enhanced vocabulary? A qualitative analysis of Indonesian L2 engagement through self-made video projects
This study investigates what L2 learners perceive as the impacts of their engagement through self-made video (SMV) creation on their vocabulary development (VD). Employing a qualitative inquiry, this study involved 12 Indonesian L2 learners attending an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Vocabulary in Context course at a private university in Indonesia. A semi-structured interview was used to collect the data. The study found that L2 engagement in SMV creation led to repeated-driven retention, contextualisation, and vocabulary comprehension, promoting VD. The findings suggest that L2 engagement in SMV creation promotes high exposure to new vocabulary through planning, researching, scripting, filming, and editing. The findings also indicate the importance of L2 learners’ engagement in the vocabulary learning process, as it fosters the ownership of learning, leading to improved learning motivation and vocabulary knowledge. The study provides implications for L2 instructors and educators, suggesting incorporating SMV creation into language instruction to promote VD, improve long-term retention, and enhance learner engagement and motivation.
Journal Article
Technology-Mediated Second Language Vocabulary Development
Technology-mediated vocabulary development (TMVD) in a second language (L2) covers a wide range of instructional and learning treatments, contexts, and technologies and is situated in a broader field of second language vocabulary learning. Vocabulary knowledge is a complex, multidimensional construct that has been interpreted and categorized in second language research in many different ways. This review identifies methodological practices in research into L2 TMVD and provides a synthesis of learning and instructional approaches, aspects of vocabulary knowledge being investigated, and measures of vocabulary development used in this research. A sample of 82 primary studies from 2010 to 2017 was selected and coded for target methodological features. The results of the review show that TMVD research has achieved a certain degree of methodological maturity, while a number of issues have also been identified. These issues include: the practice of comparing technology-mediated instruction with “traditional” instruction without technology, insufficient reporting of participants’ L2 proficiency, and a dearth of treatments targeting fluency development. The review also showed a preference for evaluating the knowledge of individual vocabulary items rather than the development of the L2 lexicon, and insufficient use of online and implicit measures of vocabulary knowledge. Recommendations for future TMVD research are provided.
Journal Article
Task-induced involvement load and working memory: Effects on active and passive vocabulary knowledge of EFL learners in a multimedia learning environment
This study aims at comparing the effect of single- and dual-annotation modes, working memory (WM), and three tasks of different involvement loads (sentence writing, close deletion, and paragraph writing) on passive and active vocabulary development of proficient English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. While listening to an expository text, participants (n = 204) were presented with annotations for twenty lexical items. Paribakht and Wesche’s (1997) Vocabulary Knowledge Scale was employed as the pre and posttests and via a listening span task, the learners’ WM capacities were measured. The results pointed to the efficacy of dual-mode over single-mode annotations concerning both passive and active vocabulary learning. The participants with higher WM capacities significantly performed better regarding active vocabulary learning for both textually and visually annotated words, thus no interaction between WM and input mode was found. The sentence writing task produced the highest scores in the vocabulary tests, whereas the cloze deletion and paragraph writing tasks did not significantly differ. Hence, the results only partially confirmed the Involvement Load Hypothesis. The current study corroborates other studies verifying the modality effect on vocabulary learning and suggests that both WM and task type are significant factors in EFL vocabulary learning.
Journal Article
The Development of Academic Vocabulary in International Foundation Students’ Assessed Academic Writing
Despite extensive research into academic vocabulary in university student writing, little is known about academic vocabulary in international foundation-level students’ assessed academic writing. Considering that academic vocabulary is regarded as a key element of academic writing style and written assignments are one of the main forms of assessment in university contexts, this is an important omission. This study addresses this gap by employing a corpus-based approach to investigate the development of academic vocabulary in assessed academic writing produced by international students (N=193) in a foundation(gateway) programme over an academic year in the context of a British university based in England and its overseas campuses in the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius. The findings show an increase in the usage of academic vocabulary over the course of the foundation programme and highlight the impact of the assignment topic and brief.
Journal Article
0096 Future-Relevant Information is Enhanced After Sleep Despite Emotional Salience of Stimuli
Abstract
Introduction
A substantial literature supports that sleep biases memory consolidation and retrieval for emotionally-salient stimuli. A smaller, yet growing, literature supports that information deemed relevant to future events may also be favored by sleep consolidation processes. However, it is unclear whether both emotion and predictability would act together to bias sleep-dependent memory formation. Here, we utilized a directed forgetting paradigm with negative and neutral word pairs to examine this open question.
Methods
Sixty young and healthy adults were exposed to word pair stimuli before a polysomnographically-recorded nap. Before the nap, participants were instructed to remember half of the word pairs presented for a later test, and for the other half of word pairs, participants were told to forget them as there would not be a test on them later. Additionally, during encoding, half of the subjects in the sample were exposed to negative valenced, high arousal word pairs while the other half were exposed to neutral, low arousal word pairs. After the nap, subjects were tested on all word pairs presented, regardless of previous instruction. This also included a set of novel word pairs to which participants had not been previously exposed.
Results
A series of 2x2 mixed measures ANOVAs revealed that individuals had better accuracy (p<.001) and fewer misses (p<.001) for the words they were told to remember compared to those they were instructed to forget. Additionally, participants had relatively few false alarms to novel stimuli, 7.14 times, on average (SD=6.10), out of a possible 50 word pairs. Importantly, contrary to predictions, post-nap performance was not dependent on the word pair valence (interaction p’s>.70). No correlations between sleep stages and memory emerged.
Conclusion
These findings suggest that predictability of future events may be a relevant catalyst for sleep-related memory processing.
Support
This work was supported by an Office of Naval Research Young Investigators Award to Sara Mednick and a National Institutes of Mental Health Training grant to Lauren Whitehurst T32MH019391.
Journal Article
Phonological memory training and its effect on second language vocabulary development
Recent studies highlight the important contribution of phonological working memory (PM) in the early stages of both native and foreign language development. However, research on the effects of PM training on language development is very limited. This study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of a PM training educational intervention as a means of fostering vocabulary development in beginner-level young learners of English as a second/foreign language (L2). A double-blind pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design was adopted, with an experimental group (n = 50) and a matched active control group (n = 47). All participants were initially assessed with an English-sounding nonword repetition test and an English language vocabulary test (receptive and productive). In addition, the experimental group students participated in the PM training (33 sessions of 15-minutes length within 12 weeks), while the control students participated in non-phonological-memory related English language activities. After the conclusion of the intervention, PM and L2 vocabulary were reassessed in both groups. Results confirm previous findings on the significant relationship between PM and L2 vocabulary size and provide evidence for PM trainability, as well as on resultant L2 productive vocabulary gains. No effect of PM training was detected on receptive vocabulary development. Results are discussed with regard to their theoretical implications, and to possible applications of PM training as a method for supporting vocabulary development in the L2 classroom.
Journal Article