Improving Elementary Grade Students’ Science and Social Studies Vocabulary Knowledge Depth, Reading Comprehension, and Argumentative Writing: a Conceptual Replication

A dataset of subjective frequency estimates of the words of the peabody vocabulary test by Arabic-English bilingual speakers

A data set was developed for research on word recognition and comprehension as well as for vocabulary knowledge estimation of Arabic-English bilingual speakers (i.e., an understudied population). Subjective frequency (i.e., familiarity) ratings, which reflect language exposure, were collected from 1000 Arabic-English speakers (age range: 18-25) for the printed words of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). They were obtained from speakers who had received at least a score of 6 (i.e., competent user of the English language) on the International English Language Testing System (i.e., IELTS). Reading comprehension scores were also obtained from 61 speakers from the same population. In the developed data set, printed words are displayed with their subjective frequency ratings and comprehension scores alongside objective word properties.

The impact of COVID-19 and its terminology learning strategies on EFL learners' vocabulary repertoire

COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented crisis worldwide posing many linguistic challenges including understanding and learning new related terminology. This study explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its terminology learning strategies on EFL learners' vocabulary acquisition, particularly in Jordan. A triangulated approach was employed for collecting data including interviews, tests and a questionnaire distributed to 100 EFL learners at a Jordanian university. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data showed a positive influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its terminology strategies on EFL learners' knowledge of vocabulary. It also revealed that the participants were "medium" users of cognitive, determination, and social strategies and "high" users of metacognitive and memory vocabulary learning strategies for acquiring COVID-19 associated terminology. The analysis of the tests demonstrated that the COVID-19 and its Vocabulary Language Strategies (VLSs) have a significant positive impact on students' vocabulary knowledge size. Thus, it verified the effectiveness of the reported strategies for acquiring COVID-19 terminology. The learners' vocabulary repertoire has been enriched with new COVID-19 related vocabulary such as quarantine, lockdown, incubation, pandemic, contagious, outbreak, epidemic, pathology, infectious, asymptomatic, covidiot, pneumonia, anorexia, etc. The findings highlighted the importance of employing efficient strategies for investing newly emerging contexts to cultivate learners' vocabulary repertoire. This study contributes to the area of language acquisition through extensive illustrations of COVID-19 associated lexicon and the intensified-in use associated vocabulary learning strategies. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research.