CAMBRIDGE DELTA COURSE

PRACTICAL TEACHING ASSSIGNMENT 2

Language Systems Background Assignment:

“Vocabulary Learning & Storage”

Part 1

Focus on

“Memory Recall / Retrieval”

Candidate’s Name: Paraskevi Andreopoulou

Centre Number: GR 108

Candidate Number:

Number of Words: 2.681

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Index

1. What vocabulary is and how important

It is ..............................................................................3

2. Organisation of the mental lexicon ............................3

3. Vocabulary and Memory Aquisition............................4

4. Problems........................................................................6
Factors.................................................................................6

5. Remedies.......................................................................7.

6. Conclusion.....................................................................9

7. Bibliography..................................................................10

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1. What Vocabulary is and how important it is

Vocabulary has always been an integral part of language acquisition in history and in
pedagogy. All over the world, people have considered lexis to be one of the most
important factors in developing, learning and using a foreign/second language; once
we have used various & tedious techniques to devise and to master vocabulary, like
“word lists with barren translations, footnotes to readings and word exercises
associated with readings, learners are not often directed to any contextual and natural
use of it” (J.W.Fox 1994).

These techniques, indeed, enlarge the student’s passive vocabulary and do not allow
him to feel, to manipulate, to actively understand the meaning of the word in
communication and use it freely in their productive speech, afterwards (ibid).

Therefore, “unless there is some challenge for learners from teachers to get the form,
the meaning of the words and to connect them, the learner will not be interested
enough to learn new vocabulary, to give his full attention & enthusiasm to the task”
call it up and use it appropriately, when need be. (P. Nation 1974).

My personal point of view is that adult students have diverse learning styles and
different ways in which they like to study, therefore, the best teaching plan for them
might be to introduce them to a variety of learning strategies and techniques and let
them decide for themselves which ones they prefer.

2. Organisation of the mental lexicon

Educated adult speakers have knowledge of thousands of words of their own

language (Aitchinson 1987:5-7) and can summon up the appropriate word in
milliseconds; that probably means that the mind must organize words in some way for
the lexicon of the first language, but not in the same way as it does for the second, nor
do the processes of comprehension and production operate on the same mental bases
(Channel 1980 cited in McCarthy 1990).

For native speakers, the general shape of the incoming word is important, sometimes
known as the “bathtub” effect, which is the front and rear ends of words are
prominent and the middle “dips” a bit, so as to speak (Aitchison 1987: 119-21);
speakers recognize the first and last syllables of words and take note of how many
syllables they contain, the general rhythmic structures and where the stress falls, i.e.
im…….ly (immediately) which might assist storage and memorization process.

As language teachers we might also input words in the form of word-lists with
various kinds of definition and explanation, or words and translation equivalents in
the learner’s L1; learners do not get any real grasp of a word until they have
performed some sort of mental contextualization upon it. Our adult learners could
also acquire input unconsciously in the form of radio and television, films, pop music,

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marketed commercial products and the international use of English at the airports and
in other travel contexts.

Native speakers of English seem to store words according to spelling patterns; most
adult native speakers fairly quickly call up sets of words with similar spellings, like
honey & money. The L2 learner will hopefully develop similar cross-references for
spelling.

Word association is also a form of organization for the brain, since it consists of
related words united into larger bundles, i.e. war < World War 1> < World War 2> <
nuclear war > .Other variables which affect storage are word frequency {in which
words that are often met, they are easily recognized and retrieved} and recency of use
in which words that are more recently used being at the top.

3. Vocabulary and Memory Acquisition

According to Schmitt Norbert and Diane (1995) there are quite a few principles
regarding vocabulary & memory acquisition:

1. The best way to remember new words is to incorporate them into language that is
already known, like a “problem-solving exercise in which one attempts to find the
best way of mapping new learning onto old” (Baddeley: 198 cited in Schmitt 1995).

2. Organised material is easy to learn than to remember unrelated elements (ibid

1990); a wide variety of ways can be organized to facilitate learning-in hierarchies
like synonyms and antonyms or parts of speech.

3. Words which are very similar should not be taught at the same time because apart
from learning the meanings of two words, learners have the additional burden of
keeping them separate. Higa (1963) found that words that are strongly associated with
each other like antonyms were more difficult to learn together than words with weak
connections or no relationship at all; one way to avoid interference between two
similar words is to teach the more frequent ones first and introduce less frequent ones
after the first ones have been firmly acquired.

4. Word pairs can be used to learn a great number of words in a short time (thirty four
word pairs per hour in one study Nation 1982:16-18, 22-4 cited in Schmitt 1995). For
adult EFL learners word pairs may be especially useful for quick exposure to the new

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L2 concepts. Nation (1982:20) explains that studying L2 words and recalling L1
meanings is appropriate only for words for recognition in reading, while an L1-L2
order is best for production in speaking or in writing.

5. Knowing a word entails more than just knowing its meaning; it includes knowledge
about a word’s form, its grammatical characteristics, its root form and derivatives, its
frequency, its relationship to other semantic concepts, the words it appears with and
its stylistic qualities (Richards 1976, Nation 1990:30-3).

6. The act of recalling a word makes it more likely that the learners will be able to
recall it again later; if our students are encouraged to do receptive activities to
discover and practice the meaning of new words and after switching to activities with
production of target words, like in written sentences, will improve the chances of
future recall.

7. Learners must pay close attention in order to learn most effectively. According to
Cohen (1990: 143-8) the most efficient learning occurs when students concentrate
their mental resources on the task. Ellis also distinguishes the types of world
knowledge learnt implicitly and explicitly: recognition and speech production
systems are learnt through exposure, but knowledge about semantic meaning needs
attention and elaborative practice to be remembered.

8. Words need to be recycled to be learnt. Learners according to Nation (1990:43-5)

need from five to sixteen or more repetitions to learn a word. If recycling is
neglected, many partially-known words will be forgotten, wasting all effort already
put into learning them (Nation 1990:5).

9. An efficient recycling method: the “expanding rehearsal”; it suggests that learners

should review new material soon the initial meeting and then at gradually increasing
intervals (Pim 1967, Baddeley 1990:156-8). They should test themselves on ways
they have studied; if they can remember them, they should increase interval before
the next review, but if they can’t, they should shorten intervals. Landauer and Bjork
(1978 demonstrate that the greater the interval between presentations of target items,
the greater the chances it would be subsequently recalled .

10. Students are individuals and have different learning styles. When dealing with
vocabulary, Pim (1983:9-10) suggests teachers ought to create needs for new ways
they want them to be learnt; one way of this is to let students learn the words they
want to study (Gairns & Redman 1986:5 McCarthy 1990:90).

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4. Problems

Drawing upon my personal experience as a language teacher of an upper-intermediate

class, I should not forget that adult learners do already own background knowledge
due to their age, educational background and degree of maturity. Other factors include
the time & the amount of contact with English available in class and outside school
hours as well as the teacher’s theory of how language is best learned.

First, there is the widely recognised view that some people’s brain holds information
over brief periods after the original input; this type of memory is known as short-term
memory; therefore, when lexical items are presented to our students, we ought to
work much harder to commit information into our students` brain.
Another theory is the decay theory in which stored information falls into disuse,
unless it is activated fairly regularly; in contrast with this theory, there is the notion of
cue-dependent forgetting, which asserts that information persists in the memory, but,
we seem to be unable to recall it due to bad storage, i.e. memorisation of long word
lists, without appropriate retrieval cues.

Another factor is the rate at which we forget; eighty per cent is lost within twenty –
four hours of initial learning, whereas if they are carried out a week later appear quite
satisfactory (Gairns & Redman 1986). Forgetting is caused by interference from
subsequent learning and by insufficient recycling; most teachers will be familiar with
the symptoms of “overload” , when the price for learning is the forgetting of old ones;
they have the effect of “overwriting” the previously learnt material.

Other factors include:

 Pronunciation of difficult words which contain unfamiliar sounds, i.e. “regular

& lorry” for Japanese, or clusters of consonants, i.e. “strength & thigh, to
groups of learners.

 Spelling and especially sound-spelling mismatches with words that contain

silent letters like foreign & headache

 Length and complexity ; long words seem to be no more difficult to learn

than short ones, but, high frequency ones tend to be short in English,
therefore the learner is likely to meet them more often- stress also in
polysyllabic words, i.e. in word families like necessary, necessity and
necessarily.

 Grammar associated with the word, especially if this differs from that of its
L1 equivalent ,i.e. “he explained me the lesson”; remembering also verbs like

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 enjoy, love, hope followed by an infinitive or a gerund can add to its
difficulty.

 Meaning overlapping two words can likely confuse learners, i.e. make an
appointment and do the housework; words with multiple meanings, like
since, still, can also be troublesome for learners after they have learnt one
meaning of the word, they can find it difficult to accept the second.

 Range, connotation and idiomaticity might also be problematic for adult

learners of EFL context, since some words can be used in a wide range of
contexts, like put, words which have style constraints, such as very informal
words, like swap for exchange and uncertainty to the connotations of some
words, like propaganda with negative connotation in English, while its
equivalent simply is publicity.

7. Remedies

As a remedy against forgetting is recycling; if learners see or use a word in a different

way from the one they met it, then better learning is achieved.

• Simple repetition (rote learning) seems to have little long-term effect unless some
attempt is made to organize the material at the same time. But, one kind of repetition
that is important is repetition of encounters with a word; when reading, words are
remembered if they have been met at least seven times over spaced intervals.

• Retrieval: another kind of crucial repetition is the retrieval practice effect ; the act
of a retrieving a word form memory makes it more likely that the learner will be able
to recall it again later in activities like using the new words in written sentences.

• Spacing: to distribute memory work across a period of time than to mass it

altogether in a single block- known as distributed practice; when teaching a new set
of words, it is best to present the first two or three items, then go back and test these,
then present some more, then backtrack again, and so on

• Pacing: It means the teacher allowing time during vocabulary learning for learners
to do “memory work” – such as organizing or reviewing their vocabulary – silently
and individually.

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• Use: Putting words in use in an interesting way is the best way of ensuring they are
added in the long-term memory known as the principle of Use it or lose it.

• Cognitive depth: The more decisions a learner makes about words, the better the
words are remembered, i.e. matching words that rhyme with others, tango/mango, or
deciding on parts of speech(noun, adjective ,verb, etc) or deeper still is using the
words to complete the sentences.

• Personal organizing: Words are best learnt if they are personalized, like students
reading sentences aloud containing new words or making up their own sentences
containing new words and reading them aloud.

• Imaging: Visualising mental pictures to go with new words and they are more
memorable than words with no pictures at all; even for abstract words it might be
helpful to associate words with mental images.

• Mnemonics: “Tricks” to help retrieve words that are stored in memory and not
automatically retrievable; the most well-attested memory technique is the keyword
technique that involves devising images which connect the pronunciation of second
language word with the meaning of first language word, i.e. “potato = πατατα”
together with its visual image.

• Motivation: A strong motivation is likely for the learner to spend more time on
rehearsal and practice, which in the end will pay off in terms of memory and even
unmotivated learners remember words with tasks requiring them to make decisions to
make about them.

• Attention/arousal: Avery high degree of attention can improve recall and words that
trigger a strong emotional response are more easily retrieved than others that don’t;
that is why many learners seem to have a knack for remembering swear words, even
if they’ve heard them for a couple of times.

• Affective depth: Affective (emotional) information is stored along with cognitive

(intellectual) data and plays an important role on how vocabulary is stored and
recalled.

• Vocabulary Notebooks: A loose-leaf binder in which pages can be taken out and
moved around to facilitate expanding rehearsal, i.e. putting words at the front of the
notebook to be given the most attention; they can be partially memorized at the L2-L1
translation level, but the memorized ones placed behind them should be enriched in a
variety of activities, like semantic maps helping students visualize the associative
network of relationships that exist between new and already known words.. Another
good step is writing word pairs by discovering L1 translations for L2 target words
from a textbook or a dictionary, practicing it by looking at the L2 word and trying to
remember its L1 translation; however, the best way is to integrate vocabulary
activities that use the words in the notebooks, like having students write short stories
with words from their notebooks, having them to listen to stories and list how many

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words they can hear from the notebooks, or giving them alphabet letters and asking
them to match them with the relevant words. Fountain (1980) suggests word card
games in the classroom in the form of solitaire, snap, concentration and bingo.

8. Conclusion

According to Thorn burry Scott (2002) vocabulary learning is item learning and also
network building; it can also be a memory task on the basis that it provides creative
and personalized use and learners will take responsibility for vocabulary expansion
and do not allow the teacher to spoon feed too much information to them(Schmitt N.
& D. 1995), since the more decisions they have to make about a word, the more
chance there is of the words being remembered.

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Bibliography

Gairns, R. & Redman S. “ Working with Words” CUP 1986

James W. Fox ELT Forum July-September 1974

McCarthy M. “ Vocabulary” OUP 1990

Nation I.S.P. “Teaching and Learning Vocabulary” Heinle and Heinle 1990

Nation P. ELT Forum July- September 1974

Schmit N. and D. “Vocabulary Notebooks” ELT Journal Volume 49/2 April 1995
OUP 1995

Thornbury S. “How to teach Vocabulary” Pearson Education Limited 2002

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