For James Milton Roberts, his life falls into three distinct phases: growing up on a tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina; witnessing the horrors in Vietnam with the Marine Corps; and battling the personal aftereffects of the war. In this memoir, My Three Shadows, Roberts recaps his past in order to make sense of his present and future. Roberts recalls growing up on a farm, where he picked tobacco and tended the animals. Although it was a time of hardship, he narrates stories of the carefree hours of fishing and swimming in nearby swamps. But his life changed drastically when he joined the Marine Corps and served in Vietnam. My Three Shadows provides a firsthand look into some of the horrors he witnessed. These horrors would haunt him when he returned to the United States. This memoir tells of how post-traumatic stress disorder and repressed memories of war affected every aspect of his life, causing him to lose his family, businesses, and home. But Roberts also shares a story of survival and redemption-how the love of one woman makes him who he is today.

International scholars and researchers present cutting edge contributions on the significance of vocabulary in current thinking on first and second language acquisition in the school and at home. By pursuing common themes across first and second language and bilingual contexts, the editors offer a collection that tackles the most important issues.

Written by experts in the field, this book explains the principles of effective vocabulary instruction for the modern language classroom. While many language classrooms rely on practices which can be outdated, idiosyncratic or ill-advised, this book overviews the research and background necessary to successfully integrate vocabulary instruction into the curriculum in a systematic way. Starting with the common gaps in vocabulary instruction, Milton and Hopwood demonstrate how students' development of a large, communicative lexicon, with an understanding of word structure and collocations, is an essential component of language instruction. The book addresses goal setting, curriculum design, word selection, how words are learned, learning in and outside of the classroom and more. It also addresses common myths about teaching vocabulary in the United Kingdom and around the world. This comprehensive text fills an important gap in the literature and is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in world language/foreign language methods and language methods courses.

Written by experts in the field, this book explains the principles of effective vocabulary instruction for the modern language classroom. While many language classrooms rely on practices which can be outdated, idiosyncratic or ill-advised, this book overviews the research and background necessary to successfully integrate vocabulary instruction into the curriculum in a systematic way. Starting with the common gaps in vocabulary instruction, Milton and Hopwood demonstrate how students' development of a large, communicative lexicon, with an understanding of word structure and collocations, is an essential component of language instruction. The book addresses goal setting, curriculum design, word selection, how words are learned, learning in and outside of the classroom and more. It also addresses common myths about teaching vocabulary in the United Kingdom and around the world. This comprehensive text fills an important gap in the literature and is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in world language/foreign language methods and language methods courses.

Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition provides an examination of the background to testing vocabulary knowledge in a second language and in particular considers the effect that word frequency and lexical coverage have on learning and communication in a foreign language. It examines the tools we have for assessing the various facets of vocabulary knowledge such as aural and written word recognition, the link with word meaning, and vocabulary depth. These are illustrated and the scores they produce are demonstrated to provide normative data. Vocabulary acquisition from course books and in the classroom in examined, as is vocabulary uptake from informal tasks. This book ties scores on tests of vocabulary breadth to performance on standard foreign language examinations and on hierarchies of communicative performance such as the CEFR.

Over the last 20 years vocabulary research has grown from a Cinderella subject in foreign language teaching and research to a position of some importance. Vocabulary is now considered integral to just about every aspect of language knowledge. With this development have come standard and widely-used tests, such as vocabulary size and lexical richness measures, and very commonly accepted metaphors, such as the mental lexicon as a web of words. Less widely known outside academic circles, however, is the extensive work on learners' lexis and the utility, reliability and validity of the tests we use to measure and investigate it. Vocabulary is a lively and vital area of research and innovation. This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned researchers in this field to explain much of the background to study in this area. It introduces to a wider audience the concerns, the new approaches and the most recent developments in the field of vocabulary research and testing.