Receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition: effectiveness of three types of tasks. Results from French students of Spanish as second language (original) (raw)
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Knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language
2008
This special issue of JFLS focuses on what learners know about French words, on how they use that knowledge and on how it can be investigated and assessed. In many ways, it is a sequel to the special issue on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language edited by Myles and Towell that appeared in JFLS in 2004. While articles on the L2 acquisition of the French lexicon have appeared in a variety of journals, including JFLS, this special issue (SI) is the first volume which specifically focuses on lexical knowledge and use among learners of French as a second language. The issue is timely, because of the growing importance of vocabulary in the SLA research agenda, but also because research into vocabulary acquisition appears at the top of a list of areas in which teachers of Modern Foreign Languages are most interested (Macaro, 2003: 6). Over the past few decades interest in research into Second Language Acquisition has grown exponentially, as can be seen in the number of textbooks and handbooks that have appeared in recent years (Ritchie and Bhatia, 1996; Cook, 1996 et seq.; Doughty and Long, 2001; Myles and Mitchell, 2004), as well as in the formulation of new theories of SLA, such as Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998), Acquisition by Processing Theory (Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2004) and the Extended Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2005), which complement approaches to SLA that are based on Universal Grammar. As Myles and Mitchell (2004: 91) put it, approaches to SLA which are based on Universal Grammar, have mainly focused on describing and explaining morphosyntactic development in learners, and much less on other aspects of the linguistic system. In the Minimalist Program, however, the differences between languages are seen to be mainly lexical in nature. According to Cook (1998), the Minimalist Program is lexically-driven in that the properties 269 The M4 Applied Linguistics Network of lexical items shape the sentence rather than lexical items being slotted into pre-existent structures. As a result, the task the L1 learner faces is mainly one of learning the lexicon (lexical and functional items), which then triggers the setting of universal grammatical parameters. This approach is reflected in the Lexical Learning Hypothesis (Ellis, 1997) according to which vocabulary knowledge is indispensable to acquire grammar (see also Bates and Goodman, 1997). There are many reasons why understanding how words are learned and used and how we can measure that knowledge is also crucially important for researchers working in Applied Linguistics, in particular for those with an interest in Education. As Milton (this volume) points out, vocabulary knowledge can be quantified in ways that other aspects of language knowledge cannot, which makes this area particularly attractive for the development of indices and measures that can be used in a variety of educational (and clinical) contexts to assess learners' or patients' language profiles. The importance of vocabulary has been demonstrated in a wide range of studies. It is widely accepted that lexical knowledge is one of the main prerequisites for academic achievement of monolingual and bilingual children (see Daller, 1999; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001). According to Meara and Bell (2001), teachers' judgements of L2 texts appear to be based to a large extent on the type of vocabulary used by the students. In a similar vein, Malvern and Richards (2002) show that teachers' subjective rating of students' range of vocabulary in oral interviews correlated very highly (all values above 0.97) with their judgements about fluency, complexity, content and accuracy. The language threshold for reading is also largely lexical. Anderson and Freebody (1981) report a high correlation between tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension across a range of studies in first language reading research. Laufer (1992) points to similar results for second language acquisition. She also provides evidence that for text comprehension a vocabulary large enough to provide coverage of 95% of the words in a text is needed. Hu and Nation (2000) even put the boundary for unassisted reading at 98%. A focus on vocabulary can also provide new insights into the distinction between implicit and explicit learning (Ellis, 1994; Hulstijn, 2003). Recent research has focused on incidental vocabulary, i.e. vocabulary that second language learners develop while they are focused on a task other than on learning new words (Gass, 1999). Most scholars agree that except for the first few thousand most common words, L2 vocabulary is predominantly acquired incidentally (cf. Huckin and Coady, 1999). If this is correct, there are important implications for the ways in which vocabulary is offered in language classes and textbooks. The role of explicit versus implicit (or incidental) vocabulary learning is also taken up in two contributions to this special issue (Houten, Bulté, Pierrard and Van Daele; Graham, Richards and Malvern). Much less is known with respect to the pragmatic and sociolinguistic knowledge about individual items, i.e. information about the ways in which particular words are used dependent on the formality of the conversation, the characteristics of the interlocutors and the topic of the conversation. How L2 learners acquire pragmatic 'O' level in the past. This enormous decline is probably due to pressure to increase the numbers taking and passing the examination, as well as to a reduction in the classroom hours available for learning, and a change in the examination format. Milton also reports about the receptive vocabulary of 66 students taking single and joint honours French at a British university using the same testing methodology.
This paper reviews empirical research on vocabulary learning strategies in a second/foreign language. A tetrahedral model of person, task, context, and strategies is first proposed to foreground the review. Next, empirical research along task, person, and contextual dimensions is reviewed. Specifically, the review focuses on task-dependent guessing strategies, dictionary strategies, note-taking strategies, rote rehearsal strategies, and encoding strategies. Instead of searching for the best strategies that produce the best results, the author argues that the choice, use, and effectiveness of vocabulary learning strategies depend on the task, the learner, and the learning context. The paper ends by calling for a diversification of effort in both top-down theory building that provides clearer guidance to future research and more bottom-up empirical research that goes beyond the presentation and retention of words.
Vocabulary Skills of French Immersion Students in their Second Language
1999
Vocabulary knowledge is known to be crucial for reading comprehension and for dealing wit h academic content in a second language (e.g., Garcia, 1991; Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996; Laufer, 1992; Nation, 1993). In French immersion programs, where much of the school curriculum is taught in the second language, an important issue therefore conc erns students' lexical development in French. With the current emphasis in schools on using educationally enriching, authentic French content in regular 'core' French programs as we ll, lexical development is of primary importance in this context too. Indeed, numerous recent publications addressed to language teachers and applied linguists concerned with l arners in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., Coady and Huckin, 1997; Harley, 1995; Hatch and Brown, 1995; Nation, 1990; Huckin, Haynes, and Coady, 1993; Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997; Singleton, 1999) signal growing recognition of the key role of vocabulary knowledge in the development...
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2015
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Factors Predicting Low-Intermediate French Learners’ Vocabulary Use in Speaking Tasks
The Canadian Modern Language Review, 2020
Les auteurs explorent la production orale en français d’apprenants natifs et non natifs dans deux dialogues. L’étude vise plus précisément trois objectifs. Premièrement, celui d’étudier la relation entre la taille du vocabulaire réceptif et productif d’apprenants de français, d’une part, et le vocabulaire utilisé dans deux dialogues, d’autre part. Deuxièmement, les auteurs veulent comparer le vocabulaire produit (c’est-à-dire, le nombre de mots utilisés, le profil lexical de fréquence et la diversité lexicale mesurée à l’aide de D et HD-D) par des locuteurs non natifs avec celui de locuteurs natifs. Troisièmement, les auteurs veulent déterminer lesquelles des mesures mentionnées ci-dessus permettent de prédire l’évaluation holistique des connaissances lexicales d’apprenants de français par des experts. Cinquante apprenants de français de 17 ans ont rempli un test de vocabulaire réceptif et productif et ont participé à deux dialogues. Vingt-sept francophones du même âge ont produit l...
Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 2015
There is general agreement that speed of lexical access is an essential component for successful communication and fluent language use. In vocabulary acquisition research the majority of studies have focused on the acquisition of the form and meaning of new words but research into the teaching conditions leading to the improvement of speed of lexical access is still scarce. This article reports results of two studies which explored the effectiveness of two vocabulary teaching approaches for the development of speed and automaticity of lexical access by learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Participants in Study 1 were exposed to the target vocabulary in reading passages (incidental approach), while participants in Study 2 were exposed to the target words in explicit vocabulary activities (explicit approach). A pre-and post-treatment lexical decision task assessed participants' speed of lexical access. Two indicators of improved lexical access were examined: faster reaction times (RTs) and a decrease in the coefficient of variation (CV), i.e., automaticity measure. Results showed that both types of treatment led to faster speed of lexical access, while only the explicit treatment led to automatic processing. The effect of repetition was also explored and results showed that there was no clear, significant effect of the number of repetitions on the development of speed and automaticity of lexical access. Taken together, the type and amount of vocabulary learning activities in these studies give an initial indication of the minimum amount of vocabulary engagement which may lead to significant improvement in learners' speed and automaticity of lexical access.
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2006
One of the most difficult, complex, and seemingly intractable problems facing second language (L2) educators, especially in the United States, has been the tendency to restrict discussions and interactions to particular areas of specialization: foreign language edu-cation, ...