Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language: Do Learners Really Acquire Most Vocabulary by Reading? Some Empirical Evidence Batia Laufer

1. Reading is the major source of vocabulary acquisition in L2: a. the ‘noticing’ assumption b. the ‘guessing ability’ assumption c. the ‘guessing-retention link’ assumption d. the ‘cumulative gain’ assumption

 Is reading indeed the main source of L2 vocabulary growth, particularly in an instructed language learning context?  Reading as much as possible in and outside the classroom.

1.The noticing assumption:  When encountering an unfamiliar word, the reader notices it as a word s/he doesn’t know.

2. The ‘guessing ability ’ assumption: When noticing an unfamiliar word the learner decides to infer or guess the meaning from context

3. The ‘guessing-retention link’ assumption:  having guessed a new word  the learner may  subsequently retain it

4. The ‘cumulative gain’ assumption: Additional encounters with a word will increase the probability of retaining it. What is the optimal number of encounters needed for retaining a word?

Counter Argument: The noticing assumption:  Do L2 learners understand how much they don’t understand?  L2 learners will not necessarily recognize or notice unfamiliar words as unfamiliar or new.

 Learners who understand the overall message of the text do not need to pay attention to the precise meanings of individual words.  learners’ unawareness of an unfamiliar word because it is confused with another word.  adapt  adopt  comprehensive  comprehensible  counsel  council  embrace  embarrass

Counter Argument: the ‘guessing’ assumption: Can L2 readers infer the meaning of unknown words from context? When the word is noticed as unfamiliar the reader may try to infer the meaning from context…

Yet…  not all contexts provide clues.  some can be misleading.  sometimes clues are ignored  clues may appear in words which themselves are unknown to the learner and therefore unusable

 The ability to infer unfamiliar words from context is not the same for L1 and L2.

Counter argument: the ‘guessing-retention link’ assumption. Do L2 learners retain the words they guess?  quick and easy guessing works against retention of the guessed words.  No correlation between  correct guessing  retention.  The more often a word is correctly guessed the less often it is remembered.  “words guessed with some difficulty will be remembered better since difficulty leads to processing effort …”

 Words which can be guessed with ease, without interfering with reading will indeed be guessed.  The problem is that most of them will not be retained.

Counter argument: the ‘cumulative gain’ assumption How much do learners need to ‘pick up’ a word?  When learning from context occurs, it is usually a cumulative process.  10 exposures to a word are necessary before the learner can recall or recognize the meaning of a word.

 How much reading has to be done to ensure the 10 repetitions of the new vocabulary?  Is it realistic to expect L2 learners to read the necessary amount of text?

For the cumulative effect to take place… …it is not enough to see a new word 10 times. The word should be encountered before it is forgotten.  Conditions need to be fulfilled when encountering.  Understanding 95%-98% of the text.  Noticing the new words 10 times.  Attempting to guess the words –successfully.  Then new words will have the chance to be learnt after 10 exposures

 Nation & Wang (1999 ) Reading needs to be done at an intensive rate of around one to two books per week.  Can such a flood of reading be implemented in a classroom context? …..(unrealistic)

What leads to higher vocabulary gains: Reading or word-focused activities?  Saying that some vocabulary is clearly acquired through reading, is not the same as saying “that reading is the most effective method of vocabulary learning.”  Several studies compared reading with additional tasks to ‘incidental vocabulary acquisition.’

‘ incidental vocabulary acquisition’ and ‘ intentional vocabulary acquisition’  Incidental vocabulary acquisition – learning words ‘by the way,’ rather than through a specific vocabulary learning task.  Intentional acquisition – A vocabulary activity that deliberately aims at lexical items being stored in memory. ( Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001 and Hulstijn 2001.)

Report on studies  Paribakht and Wensche (1997) ‘Reading plus’ and ‘reading only’ conditions. ‘Reading plus’ learners ‘acquired significantly more words.’  Luppescu and Day (1993) – Students who used dictionaries while reading remembered new words better than those who did not use one at all.  Knight (1994) Compared students who read a given text using an electronic dictionary to look up new words to those who read the same text without and ‘tried to guess some words from context.’ The students with the dictionaries learnt more words.

Studies contd….  Laufer (2002) – Retention of ten unknown words One group of students was given a text with ten unknown words glossed in the margin. The second group was given a text with ten unknown words but without a glossary and used electronic dictionaries. Short-term and long-term retention was better among the dictionary users.  Cho and Krashen (1994) Studied four subjects. The two subjects who used dictionaries consistently acquired more vocabulary than the two who just read.

Conclusion of studies.  It seems that reading plus another activity' ‘involving words is more effective than reading only.’  Most experiments compare reading with a ‘word- focused activity.’ (passive output – looking up word) my interpretation.

Three experiments conducted by Laufer.  The following experiments compared reading with a ‘word- focused task.’(active output – doing something with the word) my interpretation.

Three experiments in which…  Vocabulary gains from reading were compared with gains from:  word focused tasks  completing given sentences  writing original sentences  incorporating words in a composition.

Experiment 1. Experiment 1  Involved 60 EFL university students in parallel classes.  Group 1 was given a reading comprehension task with ten target words glossed in Hebrew.  Group 2 was asked to write original sentences with 10 target words.  The results showed that group 2 had significantly higher scores in both immediate and delayed tests.

Experiment 2.  Involved 82 advanced University EFL learners in two parallel classes.  Group 1 was given a reading comprehension as in the first experiment.  Group 2 was asked to write a composition using 10 target words.  The results showed that group 2 ‘recalled significantly more word meanings than the reading group.’

Experiment 3  Involved 90 high school learners in the 10 th grade (aged 16) in three parallel classes. Each class was assigned a different task, but with the same ten target words.  The ‘reading’ group was given a text from a 10 th grade reader. The pupils were allowed to look up unknown words in a bilingual dictionary.

Experiment 3 contd…  The ‘sentence writing’ group received the ten target words written on a piece of paper together with its translation and part of speech.  The ‘sentence completion’ group received ten sentences written by the researcher and a list of the target words. The students looked up the meanings of the words in a bilingual dictionary and had to use one target word to complete each sentence.

Results  There were significant differences between the three groups in the ‘delayed’ test. The ‘reading’ group fared the worse while the ‘sentence completion’ group achieved the highest scores.

Discussion of experiments.  Aim :- Vocabulary learning through reading compared with vocabulary learning through a productive task.  The three experiments showed that if a learner does something with a word, for example write a sentence with it or use it in a composition, s/he has a much better chance of retaining and remembering its meaning – more so than merely noticing it and looking it up in the dictionary.

Discussion contd…  The evidence from the 60 minute word-focused experiments show that the students recalled a similar number of words to those ‘picked up’ by students reading books in studies done on extensive reading.  It seems that ‘word-focused activities may be more effective and less time consuming for vocabulary learning.’  In word-focused tasks the learner has to notice the word and understand it before s/he can use it.

Conclusions  Reading can sometimes be a source for learning new vocabulary.  It can help expand knowledge of known words.  It can reinforce memory of words not yet fixed in learners lexicon.  However it is unlikely to be the ‘best source of vocabulary acquisition.’  Word-focused activities are absolutely essential to building a learner’s lexical knowledge.

Our conclusions.  A need for more dictionary work to be done in class.  Need to be aware of objectives – reading has its place but so does vocabulary. One does not have to be at the expense of the other.  Perhaps in view of the findings there is a place for more semi-extensive reading with word-focused tasks.

More conclusions…  ‘Declarative and procedural knowledge’ – if we want reading to become automatic then we have to provide more opportunities for word-focused tasks.