Teaching with Technology

Although various resources for learning L2 vocabulary have become available on the Internet, we know very little about the effectiveness of these resources.  How helpful are these resources for L2 vocabulary learners?  Are these resources are being used in L2 classrooms?  “Expanding Academic Vocabulary with Interactive On-line Database” is one of the few studies of the effectiveness of on-line tools for vocabulary learning.

The authors of this study highlight a quote from an article by Anita J. Sokmen on the desirable features of computerized vocabulary activities: “At present, a good deal of vocabulary software is decidedly lacking in variety of exercise and depth of processing.  There is a need for programs which specialize on a useful corpus, provide the expanded rehearsal, and engage the learner on deeper levels and in a variety of ways as they practice vocabulary.”  These standards mentioned by Sokmen are used by the authors in their evaluations of 50 on-line vocabulary sites.  They found that only a few vocabulary learning sites meet the standards outlined by Sokmen.   Only a few of the sites offered  “activities for learning vocabulary that occurs frequently in a specified corpus” and multiple contextualized examples of target words in use.  The four sites that satisfied the standards were (1) the Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb. 2000), (2) The Virtual Language Centre (Greaves), (3) Haywoods’ Academic Vocabulary site, (4) Mason’s Culture Shock page, and (5) Gerry’s Vocabulary Database (Luton, 2000).  Some of the beneficial features found in these on-line vocabulary learning sites include concordance, dictionary, cloze-builder, hyper text, and a database with an interactive self-quizzing features.

The context of the study was a vocabulary course designed for ESL students at intermediate levels.  The participants were ESL students enrolled at two Canadian universities.  They had a variety of L1 backgrounds but were all viewed as intermediate-level learners. In this experimental course, the researches examined a number of on-line computer resources that had adopted the corpus-based approach, provided a collaborative on-line word bank activity, allowed students to hear the entered words and collocations, and offered a concordancing feature with rich linguistic information about new words in multiple sentence contexts.  The targeted vocabulary to be learned consisted of  high-frequency words in university textbooks (from Coxhead’s Adacemic World List), and low-frequency words in academic texts.  Analyzing the data from the pilot course that was taken for four sessions (fall 2000, fall 2001, summer 2002, and fall 2002), the researchers concluded that the results of their “experimentation are positive and  augur well for the further development of interactive on-line activities that offer rich input and encourage deeper processing.”