Thirty- nine students at a four-year university participated in this two-part study. One part investigated the relationship between maternal education and vocabulary while also looking at the relationship between vocabulary and academic success. The second portion looked at the relationship between vocabulary and word learning. Results from the…

We have developed a program called Content Integrated Language Instruction for Adults, incorporating research-based practices in vocabulary and language instruction to facilitate a deep and broad understanding of complex content. A subset of words critical to comprehension of the subject matter is covered in each lesson, using group discussion and…

The current study focused mainly on the role of the linguistic complexity of IELTS writing Task 2. In other words, it investigated the differential effects of two interrelated linguistic complexities of writing Task 2 on the three levels of discourse representation and what IELTS candidates perceived through analyzing IELTS writing topics both at…

A review of the literature on English second language (L2) writing skills reveals a need for more research on the workplace writing experiences of L2 professionals employed in English as an additional language (EAL) contexts. Through a semi-structured interview and a think-aloud activity, this study gathered qualitative data with the aim of…

Thomas Cobb's 2007 applied linguistics paper, "Computing the Vocabulary Demands of L2 Reading" dealt with whether reading alone can build an adequate reading lexicon in a second language, or whether some sort of extra vocabulary training will normally be required. In the article, Cobb proposed that in the case of adult academic ESL…

Although, a lot has been said about the good language learners, not much is known about the adult learners and the strategies they use in order to further improve and acquire their second language learning skills. Thus, this study aims to identify language learning strategies employed by successful language learner among adult learners of Teaching…

This paper considers the importance of teachers' beliefs and pedagogical awareness in relation to their teaching practices. The paper draws on findings from an in-depth qualitative study of ten teachers of adult learners over a period of eight months. The study examined the potential of learning in practice and explored how teachers reflect on…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

Understanding how language modality (i.e., signed vs. spoken) affects second language outcomes in hearing adults is important both theoretically and pedagogically, as it can determine the specificity of second language (L2) theory and inform how best to teach a language that uses a new modality. The present study investigated which…

Adult Basic Education programs are under pressure to develop and deliver instruction that promotes rapid and sustained literacy development. We describe a novel approach to a literacy intervention that focuses on morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units contained in words. We argue that if you teach learners that big words are comprised…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in children. However, little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults.…

This study examines how Chinese ESL learners recognize English words while responding to a multiple-choice reading test as compared to Romance-language-speaking ESL learners. Four adult Chinese ESL learners and three adult Romance-language-speaking ESL learners participated in a think-aloud study with the Michigan English Language Assessment…

This study examined the extent to which graded readers vis-à-vis scaffolded silent reading (ScSR) resulted in increased vocabulary, reading comprehension, and a positive attitude toward reading. A mixed-methods study was administered to two upper-intermediate adult ESL classes at a community college in southwestern Arizona. Both groups took The…

Previous studies show that deaf children have deficits in false belief understanding due to their language impairment. However, it is not clear whether deaf adults still have problems in advanced theory of mind (ToM). The present study examined deaf adults' performance on three aspects of advanced ToM. All of the deaf groups lacking mental state…