Dee Gardner

Children's Immediate Understanding of Vocabulary: Contexts and Dictionary Definitions.

This study investigates childrens ability to utilize context cues (forward or backward), dictionary definitions (original or revised), or combinations of the two to understand unfamiliar words. Significant word gains were found for all treatments and reading skill levels. Revised definitions produced significantly greater gains than forward context cues, backward context cues, and original definitions. Combined treatments produced significantly greater gains than backward context cues. Advanced readers demonstrated significantly greater gains than average or below-average readers. Implications for reading research and instruction are forwarded and the construct of Immediate Understanding is defined and explored.

Creating and using A frequency dictionary of Contemporary American English: word sketches, collocates, and thematic lists

A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English is an invaluable tool for all learners of American English, providing a list of the 5,000 most frequently used words in the language. The dictionary is based on data from a 385 million word corpus - evenly balanced between spoken English (unscripted conversation from radio and TV shows); fiction (books, short stories, movie scripts); more than 100 popular magazines; ten newspapers; and 100 academic journals - for a total of nearly 150,000 texts. All entries in the rank frequency list also feature the top 20-30 collocates (nearby words) for that word, which provide valuable insight into the meaning and usage. Alphabetical and part-of speech indexes are provided for ease of use. The dictionary also contains 31 thematically organised and frequency-ranked lists of words on a variety of topics, such as family, sports, and food. New words in the language, differences between American and British English, and grammar topics like the most frequent phrasal verbs are also covered. A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English is an engaging and efficient resource enabling students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary. It is also a rich resource for language teaching , research, curriculum design, and materials development. A CD version is available to purchase separately. Designed for use by corpus and computational linguists it provides the full text in a format that researchers can process and turn into suitable lists for their own research work.

Creativity and Innovation in Content Area Teaching

Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Ellen Vogt (Eds.). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 2000