Premium
Adolescent Learning of Academic Vocabulary in Iceland
Author(s) -
Ólafsdóttir Sigríður,
Laster Barbara,
K. Stefánsson Kristján
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of adolescent and adult literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.73
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1936-2706
pISSN - 1081-3004
DOI - 10.1002/jaal.1055
Subject(s) - vocabulary , reading comprehension , psychology , vocabulary development , mathematics education , literacy , test (biology) , reading (process) , comprehension , situated , professional development , intervention (counseling) , control (management) , pedagogy , teaching method , linguistics , computer science , paleontology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , biology
The fields of vocabulary instruction, literacy professional development, and global language issues framed this research. Situated in Iceland, the intervention consisted of professional development for 10th‐grade teachers focused on academic words in various subject materials, increasing the learners’ proficiency in using explicit strategies to detect word meanings, and offering learners multimodal ways of working with the vocabulary. There were no significant differences between the participants in the experimental schools ( n = 157) and in the control schools ( n = 88). There were gains from pretest to posttest in vocabulary and in comprehension, and there were some promising trends that distinguished the experimental group from the control group on the reading comprehension test. The nature, intensity, and length of the professional development offered to the high school teachers and the relatively short time of measurement of student outcomes are suggested explanations of the results.