Vocabulary learning is often perceived as boring by learners, especially for those who grew up in the digital age. This paper reports a study of the usefulness of online games in vocabulary learning for some undergraduate students. Three teachers and 100 engineering students participated in a quasi-experimental study for approximately nine weeks. The experimental group learnt some vocabulary from two carefully selected web sites with games, while the control group learnt the same vocabulary through activity-based lessons. A pre-test and post-test were conducted in the first and ninth weeks. The findings indicate that the experimental group outperformed the control group statistically in the post-test. The students in the experimental group generally preferred online learning supplemented with digital educational games to conventional activity-based lessons. The teachers thought highly of the online games, but they expressed concern that extra support was required if the online games were adopted as a core part of their teaching.
[Copyright of Educational Media International is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523980600641445]

Reading comprehension can be seen as a process dependent on the interaction of 'topdown' and 'bottom-up' processes. An important, but neglected, feature of this process concerns the effects of rhetorical organization. This article describes an experiment in which four rhetorically different texts, with identical subject matter, were read by 490 Hong Kong Chinese school children (mean age 14.1), studying in English (their L2). Comprehension was measured by a cloze procedure and by recall protocols. One way ANOVA was used to investigate the effects of different texts on the test scores. The results showed a clear difference in comprehension between the text types and suggest that pedagogical support to increase awareness of rhetorical patterns would be beneficial.
[Copyright of Reading in a Foreign Language is the property of Meena Singhal & John I. Liontas.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/]

Employing an ethnographic study approach, the author examined the second-language lecture comprehension of 30 first-year Teaching-English-as a-Second-Language (TESL) Chinese students in Hong Kong.

The author reports that two groups of teachers, one from Hong Kong and the other from Beijing, are compared, focusing on their English vocabulary knowledge based on five tests. The findings indicate that many Hong Kong teachers are inferior in knowing the lexical meaning of the text, but then they perform better in sentence production task.

This paper reports that knowledge structure and graphics are found to be useful in promoting the use of English for teaching vocational subjects by the integrated teaching of English. Then, content is suggested.

The English writing of a group of S.7 students in Hong Kong is analyzed by the author to examine how word frequency is related to language proficiency. Based on Laufer and Nation's Lexical Frequency Profile, the author proposed an evaluation procedure through the use of word families.

The paper reports the findings of a study that examined how Chinese university students, with English as a second language, employed listening comprehension strategies. Twenty students enrolling in different full time undergraduate courses in Hong Kong were studied. Their achievement, gender self-ratings of learning ability, and topic familiarity on vocabulary learning strategy use were analyzed.

This paper reports the findings of a research which aimed to explore how text structures can facilitate the process of recall: the effects of three different text structures - causation, comparison and collection - on recall are studied and compared; the results show that in assisting students in recalling the content, comparison structure is the best among the three.（周麗英整理）

作者調查適切的語境知識對幫助理解文章的重要性。研究的假設是閱讀一篇缺乏相關語境的文章之前提供一正確語境圖畫會較諸之後提供或只提供部份和沒有提供語境的情況下對憶述和理解的影響較佳。受試者為40個上學期考英文成績最好的四份一中二學生。在閱讀後受試者分別評估對他們文章之理解程度和進行一重認測驗。結果顯示，之前獲提供語境者，其理解程度和憶述能力都較其他三組為高。（關之英整理）