Reflection 10

The Effects of Repetition on Vocabulary Knowledge

By STUART WEBB

This major finding of this study is that if learners encounter unknown words ten times in context, sizeable learning gains may occur. However, to develop full knowledge of a word more than ten repetitions may be needed. I want to immediately base my reflection on its pedagogical implications - as to how we can make use of this finding to provide effective instruction in vocabulary acquisition, which is one of the main issues in an Armenian EFL classroom where vocabulary instruction is often based on word by word translation. As a result, we have learners who have generally poor comprehension of natural, unedited spoken or written material, even after a year or more of intensive language instruction. Thus, vocabulary is important for communication and it should not be suppressed.

The key of this study to our understanding of vocabulary teaching is the increased importance of cyclical syllabus, as a crucial criterion in designing a course, as it provides recycling of input. This recurrence of the item will allow a continual review of the item studied and an expansion of the item a step further. Regarding the type of instruction, I believe that effective vocabulary learning should focus on both explicit and implicit learning. Initially, we should teach our students at least 2000 high frequency words which account for 80 percent of what we regularly see or hear. We can maximize vocabulary considerably by teaching word families instead of individual word forms. It is important to give our students multiple exposures to items they should learn by providing variety of rich contexts, both written and spoken. Word association techniques and semantic mapping, collocations, lexical phrases, idioms have been proven to be successful ways to learn a large number of words in a short period and retain them over time. Language games have the added advantage of being fun, competitive, and consequently, memorable. As for the implicit or incidental learning, it also requires multiple exposures to a word which can be achieved by providing numerous authentic materials to students.

In my teaching, I use various useful vocabulary learning strategies. For example, I can encourage my students to guess meaning from context, study and practice in peer groups, connect a word to personal experience or previous learning, say a new word aloud when studying, use verbal and written repetition, or review new material at gradually increasing intervals. Finally, I want to emphasize that we should not forget what it means to know a word, which involves not just the translation of a word, but more than that; knowing its spoken and written contexts of use, its collocational patterns, its syntactic, pragmatic and discoursal patterns. It means knowing a word actively, productively, and receptively. Thus, having this understanding at the basis of our teaching, we can enhance the vocabulary learning of our students.