This paper examines the development and effectiveness of a strategy that promotes rapid vocabulary retention among university students who are learning English as a second language. This approach to vocabulary acquisition is based on research that shows that activating implicit memory has a stronger effect than simply activating intentional…

Since the late '60s, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has grown enormously. Throughout its development, SLA researchers have investigated a wide range of issues including the processes involved in second language learning, as well as the psycholinguistic, affective and social factors that influence its success or failure (Spada,…

This article focuses on informal learning and its implications for instructional design and performance improvement. The authors begin by sharing a story of how a novice instructional designer employs informal learning strategies in her professional and personal life. Next, they offer a definition of informal learning that encompasses both…

This study investigates the effect of two attention-enhancing techniques on L2 students' learning and processing of novel French words (i.e., target words) through video with L2 subtitles or captions. A combination of eye-movement data and vocabulary tests was gathered to study the effects of Type of Captioning (full or keyword captioning) and…

There is converging evidence that the feeling of conscious recollection is usually accompanied by the bound retrieval of context features of the encoding episode (e.g., Meiser, Sattler, & Weiber, 2008). Recently, however, important limiting conditions have been identified for the binding between context features in memory. For example, focusing on…

The following article examines the issues of open, distance and technology-based informal learning and non-formal education for individual and community development. It argues that these two modes of education, which are estimated to constitute 70-90% of lifelong learning, are insufficiently represented in the literature of open and distance…

The present review explores the meaning of the term 'incidental' in light of how incidental learning is framed, conceptualized, and operationalized in second language (L2) vocabulary research. Three interpretations of incidental vocabulary learning that seem to appear recurrently in the literature are presented and discussed along with examples of…

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental…

The existence of handedness differences in the retrieval of episodic memories is well-documented, but virtually all have been obtained under conditions of intentional learning. Two experiments are reported that extend the presence of such handedness differences to memory retrieval under conditions of incidental learning. Experiment 1 used Craik…

Exemplar sequencing effects in incidental and intentional unsupervised category learning were investigated to illuminate how people form categories without an external teacher. Stimuli were perfectly separable into 2 categories based on 1 of 2 dimensions of variation. Sequencing of the first 20 training stimuli was manipulated. In the blocked…

Most studies that have investigated the effects of instruction on the SLA of specific grammatical features have focused on intentional learning. This study investigated incidental acquisition by comparing the relative effects of two types of instruction--comprehension-based instruction (CBI) and production-based instruction (PBI)--on young…

Professor John Rice, a pioneer of the Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS), recognized that schools' curricula were at odds with the kind of science and mathematics driving the new economy. In addition to curriculum that lacked relevance to contemporary life, negative student attitudes and a shortage of qualified science and…

Lexical competence constitutes a crucial aspect in L2 learning, since building a rich repository of words is considered indispensable for successful communication. CALL practitioners have experimented with various kinds of computer-mediated glosses to facilitate L2 vocabulary building in the context of incidental vocabulary learning. Intentional…

This study examined effects of synonym generation on second language (L2) vocabulary learning during reading in both incidental and intentional vocabulary learning contexts. Spanish-speaking adult learners of L2 English (N = 114) at low- and high-intermediate proficiency levels read an English passage containing 10 target words translated in the…

This article overviews current research on second language vocabulary learning. It concludes that a large vocabulary is necessary to function in English: 8000-9000 word families for reading, and perhaps as many as 5000-7000 families for oral discourse. In addition, a number of word knowledge aspects need to be learned about each lexical item.…