Teaching with Technology

Picking up new words was always a primary concern while I was attending ESL classes, and I, as an ESL teacher, am very interested in how to teach vocabulary in a way that the targeted words are stick to students’ mind.  It is widely believed that reading is a great way to increase one’s vocabulary.  I do believe that reading has a profound impact on L1 vocabulary growth, but I doubt whether people can pick up new words through L2 reading as they do through L1 reading.  Let me explain why I am so skeptical. A couple of days ago I read a novel entitled October Sky, which was a textbook in my ESL reading class seven years ago. While reading the book, I found that some words (such as hunker down, insidious, and mortify) and their definitions were written down in the margin.  I had written these definitions during an earlier reading of the book.   I am disappointed that I still don’t know the definitions of these words, which I probably had made significant efforts to memorize.  In “What Lexical Information Do L2 Learners Select in a Call Dictionary and How Does It Affect Word Retention?” the authors Batia Laufer and Monica Hill suggest that technology can help ESL students to learn vocabularies incidentally as a by-product of reading.

One of the research questions addressed by this study, and my focus in this journal, is the percentage of words that are remembered by students after they look them up in an electronic dictionary during a reading task.  A research tool used in this study was a computer program called Words in Your Year which consists of four parts: (1) a pre-test of the words for investigation, (2) a text in which these words are highlighted, (3) a dictionary entry for each word with five items of information (a recording of a speaker pronouncing the word, a definition of the word (in English), a translation of the word into the student’s L1, a brief discussion of the word root, and “extra” information), and (4) files that record each student’s use of the dictionary.  During the reading task, the student had the option of hearing the recording of the text that they were reading.  The text was a short extract of 120 words from an academic text of fairly general interest.  The study focused on the 12 target words in the text that were most frequently marked by 30 other ESL students as being unfamiliar.

Initially, 97 subjects participated in the study.  However, through a pre-test, 25 students who were familiar with more than one of the target words were eliminated from the sample.  Thus, 72 was the final number of subjects in the study.  Those students who knew only one of the 12 words were later not credited with learning that word.  The subjects included 32 college students from the University of Haifa in Israel and 40 first year ESL students from the University of Hong Kong.  On completion of the reading task, the subjects were given an unexpected vocabulary test in which they were asked to write the meanings of the 12 words in L1 or L2 on paper.  The results of the test showed that the Hebrew students recalled an average of 4 out of 12 target words while the Chinese students recalled an average of 7.  The maximum number of words recalled by one Hebrew student was 10, while the maximum number of words recalled by a Chinese student was 12.

Although the learning outcomes of the two groups were significantly different, the use of a CALL methodology seems to have a positive effect on incidental vocabulary learning.  The study concluded that the novelty of the methodology comes from several options that allow L2 learners to select the lookup strategy that may be most compatible with their learning style, and I agree with it.