Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some -- like "red," "round," "rough," or "rectangular" -- map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others -- like "ready," "reasonable," or "required" -- express abstract…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…

The development of corpus linguistics has laid theoretical foundation and provided technical support for breaking the bottleneck in traditional vocabulary instruction in China. Corpora allow access to authentic data and show frequency patterns of words and grammar construction. Such patterns can be used to improve language materials or to directly…

Shakespeare molded language to meet his needs. Can students learn from his example? In this article, the author suggests studying Shakespeare's creative use of functional shift, spelling, and vocabulary to help students develop greater control of their own writing. The author is advocating that teachers approach Shakespeare as descriptive…

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form…

During a yearlong collaborative effort to enhance vocabulary instruction in secondary classrooms, high school teachers and university faculty developed and implemented a variety of approaches to support students in building rich representations of word meanings as well as an understanding of word features such as roots, affixes, and parts of…

This article focuses on the development of vocabulary among English language learners. The author first defines what a "word" means, then discusses five aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Drawing on Swain (1993), the author identifies three main goals of vocabulary learning. The rest of the article is devoted to the description of six…

Numbers 1 through 5 of the 1982 TECFORS newsletter include these articles: "A Comprehensive ESL Reading Program" (Carol Qazi); "The Purpose of the Passive" (Virginia French Allen); "'Standards' Seconded" (Timothy H. Robinson); "Vocabulary and the College-Bound International Student" (Parts 1-3) (Kerry Segel); "Using Invention Heuristics to Teach…