How advanced students approach intentional vocabulary study

Abstract

To date, research into vocabulary learning strategies has mainly made use of questionnaires about studying preferences in general or of interviews following a specific study task, focusing on finding out which strategies were most popular. The present investigation attempts to provide more insight into the effects of the parameters of timing and approach on a specific task in the context of the students' regular coursework. Students were given six weeks to study an academic vocabulary of 163 headwords/266 items with the aim of being able to use it productively. Fiftyfive students were divided into groups with different instructions for timing and overall approach with a view to quantitative analyses. Data for qualitative analysis were gathered through study logs. The study used pre-and post-tests consisting of the translation of passages from academic book reviews into English, targeting 25 of the items. The study confirms the potential for large gains of intentional study going beyond immediate effects of form recognition or form recall. Results showed no statistically significant differences for either timing or overall approach. Qualitative study of the logpages confirms the popularity of list learning and provides further indications as to effective and less effective strategies.

Collocational Knowledge Uptake by University Students under Online Learning

“…It could be therefore assumed that in a longer perspective Group 3's recall rate might continue decreasing, while Group 2's prospects appear more hopeful. The learning outcomes attested in this research (55-59% of the target lexis retained in productive recall) are somewhat higher than the results cited in Pauwels (2018) for single words recall rate. Generally, it could be concluded that although the written output did not seem to dramatically increase the group's recall rate, it is still likely to have benefitted retention in a long-term perspective.…”

“…As for the results of intentional vocabulary uptake comparable with our experiment it is worth quoting Paul Pauwels (2018), who cites the outcomes of a number of experiments into intentional word acquisition, according to which the retention rate varies from about 25% on passive recall to about 52% of target lexis on passive recognition (Laufer & Rozovski-Roitblat, 2011), to the retention rates of over 70% in the research by Laufer and Fitzpatrick into intentional (word list) learning (Laufer 2005;Fitzpatrick et al, 2008). The limitations of the above studies in respect to our experiment is that primarily all of them targeted single words rather than collocations, and secondly final posttests to check the amount of retention were administered in various formats and over different time spans from the moment of initial lexis introduction.…”

Effectiveness in L2 Vocabulary Study – A Classroom-based Investigation of Deliberate Learning

“…The receptive pretest (L2-L1) was inspired by the VKS-format (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997) -students indicated whether the L2 word was unfamiliar, familiar or whether they knew its meaning, and in that case, they had to provide a definition or a translation. The format had been trialled in previous studies (Pauwels 2012(Pauwels , 2018, and aimed to provide the participants with an option to indicate partial knowledge and to limit guessing. The productive pre-test (L1-L2) simply asked students to provide English equivalents with 90 Dutch words.…”

Intentional vs Incidental Esp Vocabulary Acquisition by Political Science Students

“…(e.g. Lee & Polido, 2017;Webb, 2008;Ponniah, 2011;Xu, 2010), as well a more modest number of investigations into students' behaviour when faced with the task of learning words in a list format (Pauwels, 2018).…”