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Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Handbook of Early Language Education

Part of the book series: Springer International Handbooks of Education ((SIHE))

Abstract

Building lexical knowledge is one of the most fundamental developments in early childhood; as such development is associated with children’s later academic achievement and other language abilities. Both breadth (e.g., receptive vocabulary size) and depth (e.g., syntagmatic and paradigmatic knowledge) of lexical knowledge are vital, as the former indicates how much children know and the latter indicates how well they know it. Therefore, it would be crucial for any language program to provide qualified teaching for preschoolers to develop their lexical knowledge. The current review has synthesized findings published in recent years on preschoolers’ lexical development in early bilingual education programs, to explore the theoretical frameworks (e.g., the thresholds theory) and the effectiveness of these programs in improving bilingual children’s lexical breadth and depth in both first and second languages. Instructional strategies, such as shared book reading and multimodality, which have been proved to be effective in vocabulary teaching across various types of bilingual language programs, have been summarized. At the end of the chapter, future research directions of vocabulary development in early language programs have been proposed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    He Sun

  2. School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Bin Yin

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  1. He Sun
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  2. Bin Yin
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  1. Department of Research Authority, Oranim Academic College of Education, Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel

    Mila Schwartz

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Sun, H., Yin, B. (2022). Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education. In: Schwartz, M. (eds) Handbook of Early Language Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_3

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