The Effects of the Vocabulary Overview Guide on Vocabulary Comprehension and Retention

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of the Vocabulary Overview Guide in improving vocabulary comprehension and retention of terms from connected discourse. The guide incorporates a graphic organizer to relate text information, personal clues to associate terms with background knowledge, and a selfmonitoring checklist to assess understanding. This strategy was compared to a traditional method of listing and studying definitions. Subjects, developmental college readers, were administered pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests. An Analysis of Variance indicated that the Vocabulary Overview Guide group was significantly superior to the traditional group in improving vocabulary comprehension and retention and in increasing metacognitive awareness on post and delayed posttests.

Optimizing Word Learning via Links to Perceptual and Motoric Experience

“…For example, there are many verbal association methods, such as teaching words in semantically related groups. Using semantically related groups to teach new words has been shown to be effective when the semantically related words are graphically displayed with related information (e.g., Carr and Mazur-Stewart 1988). For example, concept wheels (Vacca and Vacca 2002), semantic word maps (Schwartz and Raphael 1985), and semantic feature analysis (Johnson and Pearson 1978) all use graphical displays to aid students in making a link between the word to learn and words they already know.…”

Intentional and incidental second language vocabulary learning: a reappraisal of elaboration, rehearsal and automaticity

“…For the retention of these words it is necessary that learners are made aware of the nature and extent of their formidable word learning task and are taught effective strategies for coding and memorizing new words (e.g., Bogaards, 1994;Carr & Mazur-Stewart, 1988;G. Ellis & B. Sinclair, 1989;Esser & Nowak, 1990;Harley, 1995;Hatch & Brown, 1995, ch.…”

Fostering Positive Transfer through Metalinguistic Awareness: A Case for Parallel Instruction of Synonyms in L1 and L2

“…As for particular strategy of working with synonyms, the results not only reinforced the idea that synonymy-related skills improve vocabulary comprehension and retention in L1 (Carr, 1985) and are crucial for L2 proficiency (Chandler, 2008), but can also serve as a vehicle for teaching for transfer. Implications of the study include the potential use of metalinguistic knowledge related to other language phenomena such as antonymy or polysemy as tools to foster cross-linguistic transfer, which can serve as subjects for future research.…”