Teaching with Technology

The average native speaker of English has a vocabulary of somewhere between 30,000 and 80,000 words.  Thus, ESL learners who wish to acquire native-like fluency should learn at least 30,000 English words.  In my opinion, it is almost impossible for an ESL learner to match the vocabulary of a native speaker of English.  Japanese college students who received 800-1200 hours of EFL instruction were able to learn between 2,000 and 2,300 English word families (groups of words having the same root word or phonic base, etc.).  Indonesian college students who received 900 hours of EFL instruction were able to learn about 1,220 word families.  Given the number of hours of instruction that these students had received and the number of word families that they were able to learn via this instruction, we can calculate the number of hours of instruction needed to acquire an English vocabulary of 30,000 words.  The Japanese learned approximately two words per hour of instruction and the Indonesians learned at a somewhat slower rate.  If we assume that students can learn two words per hour of instruction, the acquisition of a 30,000-word vocabulary would require 15,000 hours of instruction.  This is equivalent to 25 hours of instruction per week, every week, for 13 years.

In his article Computer Assisted Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Peter Groot examined if technology could speed up L2 acquisition process. The software used in this article is a computer assisted word acquisition program (called CAVOCA) which was developed over a trial period of several years.  Its database contains 500 words that were selected on the basis of their difficulty and relevance to the academic reading needs of Dutch university students.  CAVOCA was designed under the assumption that the L2 word acquisition process is the same as that of L1.  The generally accepted theory of the L1 acquisition process is that words are learned incidentally in an incremental way while native speakers of a language come across the words repeatedly in a variety of contexts.  Groot and his associates intended that students work through the various stages in the natural word acquisition process via the CAVOCA program.  The following are the stages that operate in the CAVOCA program:

(1) “Deduction”

This is the stage for learning the various properties of a word and storing the word in  memory. The word to be learned appears on the screen for a few seconds. Then it is used in three sentences in order of contextual richness.

(2) “Usage”

This is the stage for consolidation.  To further secure the word’s position in the mental lexicon, two sentences are presented in which the word is either used correctly or incorrectly.  The computer points out and corrects any mistakes.

(3) “Examples”

This is the stage for reinforcing consolidation.  The learner is presented with a number of authentic L2 passages that contain the word just learned.

(4) “Lexical Retrieval”

This is the final stage of the CAVOCA program.  It is aimed at eliciting the learner’s knowledge of the word.  The learner is presented with 25 sentences, each with one word missing.  Once the 25 sentences have been completed, the learner’s score appears on the screen and any mistakes are pointed out.

In a series of four experiments with Dutch university students learning English, the experimental CAVOCA program and a control program using bilingual lists of words were compared.  An overall conclusion of this study is that the experimental results cannot determine the most efficient method of L2 word learning because there are so many variables in the L2 learning process, such as “degree of L1-L2 equivalence of the words to be learned, the intensity (both qualitative and quantitative) of processing, the age and cognitive level of the learner, the quantity and quality of rehearsal practice, etc.”

Joann