Many U.S. adult schools currently aim to create academic and career pathways by implementing higher order thinking and metalinguistic application in their ESL curriculum. However, this 'ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language' poses a significant hurdle to adult ESL learners newly learning to read and write, as…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

We expect that word knowledge accumulates gradually. This article draws on earlier approaches to assessing depth, but focuses on one dimension: richness of semantic knowledge. We present results from a study in which three distinct item types were developed at three levels of depth: knowledge of common usage patterns, knowledge of broad topical…