L2 Vocabulary Learning From Context: Strategies, Knowledge Sources, and Their Relationship With Success in L2 Lexical Inferencing

Nassaji
1. Because the author uses the think-aloud technique and appears to consider the research subjects as individual processing machines unconnected to their surroundings, I believe this article fits within the cognitive approach.
2. The author addresses transition theory by studying how second language readers guess at the meanings of unknown words.
3. I found it very interesting that Nassaji did not advocate any one strategy, but recognized that no one strategy was successful. Nassaji goes on to recognize that the strategy of using contextual clues has been overused in ESL classrooms. I too am guilty of overteaching using context. I believe any teaching strategy can be overemphasized, and none is the correct answer. I liked how Nassaji did not call for a radical anti-context overhaul, but suggested that less emphasis be placed on using contextual clues. This moderation reflects well on the field; more researchers should exercise this much restraint when criticizing a teaching method.

processing measures of cognitive-linguistic interactions for children with language impairment and reading disabilities

by windsor and kohnert
in brain, behavior, and learning

cognitive-linguistic processing emphasizes that lang. is part of a broader cognitive system and that processing proficiency is a better measure of capability than performance measures.

"Language performance measures are heavily experience-dependent"

the authors found tasks that seperated bilingual kids from normal readers from RD kids.

Rapid Automatic Naming tasks "tap into a common cognitive skills setthat underlies performance across languages."

these tasks de-emphasize experience.

Atypical neurodevelopmental variation as a basis for learning disorders

gilger & wilkins

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

Atypical Brain development (ABD) = genetic developmental disorders

About 10% o our population is dyslexic, and "progenitors of today's population with dslexia may have had better interpersonal skills or spatial orientation abilities that gave them some sort of procreative edge () e.g., West 1999)."

"The RD concept was created by societal demands and were it not for the written alphabet would not otherwise exist. Reading itself was not instrumental to our development and survival as a species, although correlated traits may have been..."

NOte 1: "In other linguistic populations in which written language is more phonetically consistent, such as Italian, the frequency of RD may be significantly lower."

Prediction of children's reading skills using behavioral, functional, and structural neuroimaging measures

by Hoeft et al. 2007 in Behavioral Neuroscience


Neuroimaging methods combined with behavioral tests predicts children's future reading skills better than either method in isolation.