Prior research demonstrates that primary and secondary school teachers often find teaching young learners to write in a second language a slow and effortful process. Moreover, students in this age range lack the motivation to write. Therefore, it is important to explore the EFL writing pedagogy suitable for young learners. The present study…

Inclusion starts at the top, and when the deep commitment of school and districts leaders is absent, individual teachers' efforts to create and sustain inclusive learning environments where students with disabilities can soar risk being little more than exercises in frustration. With this premise in mind, this brief shares the voices of…

Scaffolding has been shown to facilitate students' text comprehension and task performance. Yet less is known about the necessity of scaffolding for competent students reading unfamiliar content. To explore that question, we investigated the effects of two knowledge scaffolding techniques (i.e., mobilization and concept mapping) versus control on…

Glosses have been assumed to be effective for developing vocabulary. This article discusses a within-subject quasi-experiment which investigated the relative effectiveness of four vocabulary gloss types: L1 gloss, L1 gloss with phonological guidance, L2 gloss, and L2 gloss with phonological guidance. The participants were 63 Iranian undergraduate…

As immigrants enter a new country, their arrival generally results in demographic shifts that may challenge the perceptions of native-born members of the resident population. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between awareness of racism and privilege awareness in native-born students at a university located in a Southern…

Children who rapidly recognize and interpret familiar words typically have accelerated lexical growth, providing indirect evidence that lexical processing efficiency (LPE) is related to word-learning ability. Here we directly tested whether children with better LPE are better able to learn novel words. In Experiment 1, 17- and 30-month-olds were…

Research shows that when semantic context makes it feel easier for people to bring related thoughts and images to mind, people can misinterpret that feeling of ease as evidence that information is positive. But research also shows that semantic context does more than help people bring known concepts to mind--it also teaches people new concepts. In…

A number of theories exist to explain why people gesture when speaking, when they produce gesture, and the origin of their gestures. This dissertation focuses on four individual variables that can influence gesture: (i) familiarity, (ii) imageability, (iii) codability, and (iv) motor experience. Four experiments were designed to determine how each…

The degree to which meanings are related in memory affects ambiguous word processing. We examined irregular polysemes, which have related senses based on similar or shared features rather than a relational rule, like regular polysemy. We tested to what degree the related meanings of irregular polysemes ("wire") are represented with…

The purpose of this article is to describe a tested teaching idea that can be implemented in elementary schools to introduce young children to fruits and vegetables that they may not be familiar with.

The roles of visual sonority and handshape markedness in sign language acquisition and production were investigated. In Experiment 1, learners were taught sign-nonobject correspondences that varied in sign movement sonority and handshape markedness. Results from a sign-picture matching task revealed that high sonority signs were more accurately…

This study assessed whether olfactory familiarization can render food odors more pleasant, and consequently food more attractive, to children with autism spectrum disorder. Participants were first presented with a series of food odors (session 1). Then, they were familiarized on four occasions (time window: 5 weeks) with one of the two most…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report student attitudes and beliefs towards climate change adaptation and sustainability-related behaviours. Design/methodology/approach: A paper-based questionnaire was completed by 247 first-year (students in their first semester of study) and third-year (students in their final semester of study)…

This paper reports on an approximate or partial replication of a study by Salsbury, Crossley & McNamara (2011) that examined the longitudinal developmental of a number of core lexical features related to word imageability, concreteness, familiarity, and meaningfulness in a spoken corpus of English second language (L2) learners. Salsbury et al.…

The 'Sawtooth Effect' is where cohort performance on high-stakes assessments drops after assessment reform, and then improves over time as test familiarity increases. Despite its importance, limited research has been conducted to date. In this study, we took a novel approach of using changes in grade boundaries (cut scores) over time as a proxy…