Instructional Approaches to Vocabulary Teaching
Teaching Vocabulary: Decisions for the Approach, Method, and Technique
Deciding which lemmas and phrases are appropriate to teach at each level is one task that a curriculum planner must decide on. (The actual lists for the IEP during the research period are provided in Appendix I to this chapter.) However, the question of how to implement vocabulary instruction in a university-based IEP is also a topic that is very important. Although it is clear that extensive reading, or implicit vocabulary learning (Krashen, 1989; Nagy & Herman,1987), must absolutely be the key element in acquiring a larger vocabulary, the question of whether targeted, in-class instruction has an effect at all remains a matter of highly charged debate (Cobb, 2016; Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Questions arise as to whether instruction is even a worthwhile endeavor at all. In a series of publications dating from the 1970s, Krashen has cast doubt on the role of explicit instruction in language learning, maintaining that it has a role only for ‘monitoring’ output when there is time for metalinguistic knowledge to be used. He has extended this position to the teaching of vocabulary, and specifically more advanced vocabulary. For example, Krashen (2012, p. 233) stated ‘I doubt that any member of the human race has ever consciously learned more than very modest amounts of academic language. This claim, of course, is subject to empirical investigation’. In my view, IEP students expect and deserve to be guided in their learning, so the option of no instructional intervention at all is simply indefensible.
Even if one concedes that some explicit instruction is important, however, other questions focus on the type of (written) output practice that might be best for lexical learning. For example, some teachers believe that writing new sentences using the target word is important. Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) have suggested that activities that require deeper processing through involvement from need to know a word, a search for the word, and subsequent evaluation of the word in context lead to improved retention. They have called this approach ‘the involvement load hypothesis’.
However, whether writing sentences and output is worth the time spent on it remains a question for research (Barcroft, 2004,2006; Folse, 2006). Folse (2006) carried out a study that examined the effectiveness of ‘fill-in-the-blank’ versus sentence writing exercises. In a carefully controlled study, he provided three conditions in a design where the students practiced 18 words once with a fill-in-the-blank from a list, three times with
Lexical Development in an I EP 107 fill-in-the-blank from a list, and also a sentence writing task. A modified version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997) was used in the pre- and post-tests: 0 for no knowledge, 1 for a synonym or translation, and 2 for both the translation/synonym and a sentence that included the word. His results suggested an approach in which ‘fill-in-the-blank’ exercises are the most efficient way to practice words.
In a more recent study, Zou (2017) considered Hulstijn and Laufer’s (2001) involvement load hypothesis in greater depth as part of a study on academic writing. Zou (2017) reviewed the recent literature and comes to a somewhat different conclusion than Folse (2006) with regard to fill-in-the-blank type exercises. Zou’s study considered fill-in-the-blank exercises and two kinds of writing exercises in which the involvement load was manipulated by means of creating contexts for vocabulary in sentence writing and compositions that required respectively higher levels of evaluation. The one issue that Zou conceded was a weakness of this study was that time on task could have affected the outcomes, although the 30 minutes for the fill-in-the-blank group vs. 35 minutes for the two writing output groups does not seem particularly different. Perhaps more significant was that the composition group was required to plan a discourse in which to put the words, whereas the sentence writing group was not. The differences in pre-task planning and need to create a discourse seems to have made the composition group process the meanings of the words more deeply; it also explains the differences in the delayed post-test scores out of 20 (10 words, 2 possible points each) of a mean of 5.30 for the fill-in-the-blank group, 9.60 for the sentence writing group, and 13.91 for the composition group. Zou’s study is important for those words that teachers focus on in class - although his study had only 10 words in 30 minutes.
Cobb (2016) pointed out that IEP students often have one year or less to learn many words in the 3000-9000 frequency bands, and so class time must be used judiciously. Ten words in one ‘vocabulary class’ meeting five times per week over three semesters might add up to 750 words being studied intensively, which is not many. Cobb also estimates that the amount of time for ‘extensive reading’ that is available to learners during the time that they have to prepare for academic study will provide learners with fewer than 12 exposures needed to help them learn each new word.5 Although he discusses the large amounts of reading needed, he still concludes that instruction is important. Thus, program coordinators need to decide very carefully indeed which words to practice in any way at all in class. Finally, there is of course a difference between receptive and productive vocabulary, with productive vocabulary requiring much more time and effort.
Nagy and Townsend (2012) refer to Graves (2006), who advocated a four-pronged approach to instruction: (a) rich and varied experience (=extensive reading), (b) teaching individual words, (c) word-learningstrategies, and (d) promoting word consciousness. The second and fourth of these go beyond the ‘immersion only’ approach, but are all adopted in the Pitt IEP in various forms. For the Pitt IEP, promoting word consciousness forms part of an approach to word learning strategies as we focus on different forms of a word.
The subsections that follow describe various ways the IEP has implemented parts of the four-pronged approach. For extensive reading, the IEP maintains a library of readers that students are encouraged to check out and read. We have yet to carry out empirical research on this approach, but the IEP also has a book club to promote the use of the library. The first study to report on is the use of a reading tutor that was used during the portions of the period in which data were collected.
