Issues in teaching

1.It helps you remember if you learn items in lexical sets (e.g. colors, animals). 2.‘Inferencing’ (guessing from context) is the best way to discover the meaning of an item. 3.It helps students remember a word if they first found it out through inferencing from context. 4.Providing bilingual lists helps learners to remember words. 5.We need to review a word four or five times in order to remember it 6.The main source of learning new words is through extensive reading. 7.‘Deep processing’ of a new item helps us to remember it.

Research on learning semantic sets Question: Does it help learners to master a new set of lexical items if they are all members of the same semantic set (e.g. clothes, animals)?

Learners were presented with two sets of items from an artificial language, and told their ‘meanings’; one set all related to the same domain, the other did not. rain =moshee car = blaikel frog = umau shirt = achen jacket = kawvas sweater = nalo shirt = moshee jacket = umau sweater = blaikel rain = achen car = nalo frog = kawvas

RESULT: The learners consistently learned the unrelated items better. The research was replicated by Waring five years later with the same results. Later research (Erten & Tekin, 2008; Papathanasiou, 2009) found the same.

Discussion What can we do about it if the elementary textbooks teach new items in semantic sets? How can semantic sets be used?

Important distinctions … between initial encounter and later review. … between learning a new word based on lexical sets already known, and learning a whole set of new words together. … between syntactic (‘horizontal’) links (e.g. ‘long hair’) and paradigmatic (‘vertical’) links (e.g. hair, head, eyes, nose)

Inferencing: is it the best method to access the meaning of a new item?

Laufer, B. (1997). The lexical plight in second language reading. Words you don’t know, words you think you know, and words you can’t guess. In J. Coady and T. Huckin (Eds.) Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy (pp ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laufer Words you don’t know Words you think you know Words you can’t guess

Words you think you know Deceptive transparency (e.g. shortcomings, infallible Deceptive morphological structure: nevertheless, outline Idioms hit or miss, on the fence, miss the boat, by and large, by the way False friends actual, sympathetic Words with multiple meanings since, abstract, state Synforms – words similar so confused: valuable/available, price/prize.

Words you can’t guess Because there aren’t enough clues, even if you know all the other words. Because you don’t know the other words Misleading clues Suppressed cues

That is the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we renewed our focus on the gormians who threaten our nation. We have made substantial povises in our homeland security ….

That is the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we renewed our focus on the terrorists who threaten our nation. We have made substantial investments in our homeland security …

Nassaji, H. (2003). L2 vocabulary learning from context: Strategies, knowledge sources and their relationship with success in L2 lexical inferencing. TESOL Quarterly, 37(4),

Initial observations L1 learners acquire most vocab from inferring from context in reading L2 – not so clear; uncertainty in the research Many L2 learners read word-by-word

While reading, learners employ various strategies to cope with new words ignoring guessing looking up writing down for later clarification Most common: inferencing

Successful inferencing Various strategies, : information available from text, importance of word for comp of text, how much effort needed, ability to make use of extra-textual clues, word roots and structure,, background knowledge of the topic, background knowledge of type of discourse / genre, vocab knowledge, grammar, wor-association, cognates etc.

The present research 3 questions: (a)how successfully intermediate ESL learners infer word meanings from context in a reading text (b)what strategies and knowledge sources they use to do so and to what extent (c)whether there is any relationship between the range of strategies and knowledge sources they use and their lexical inferencing success.

Present study based on: 21 adult learners from various language backgrounds text: 374 words, 10 of which were target words to guess. (So they knew about 97.5 of the words. ) Based on ‘think-aloud protocols’

Results Inferencing was not very successful (Of the total 199 inferential responses, 51 (25.6%) were successful, 37 (18.6%) were partially successful, and 111 (55.8%) were unsuccessful.) Compare Laufer and Bensoussan’s study (1984): students unable to guess 76% of target words.

Analysis Divided into knowledge sources strategies

Knowledge sources grammatical knowledge morphological knowledge world knowledge L1 knowledge discourse knowledge

Strategies repeating verifying (checking against wider context) self-enquiry analysing monitoring (checking out difficulty or easiness of inference) analogy (checking out through similarity with other words)

Most often used: Knowledge sources: world knowledge > morphological knowledge > grammatical > discourse > L1

Strategies repeating >>analogy>verifying>monitoring>self- inquiry>analyzing

Most influential in successful inferencing: Knowledge sources: morphological knowledge > world knowledge. L1 knowledge lowest Strategies: verifying > self-inquiry > repeating analogy lowest

Summaries and comments No strategy was sufficient alone. Mostly used world knowledge, grammatical knowledge very rarely, and when used not associated with success. (Parry found that they could often deduce the grammatical category without knowing the meaning)

The Changks The changks voz blunging frewly nedeng the brudegan. Some changks vos unred, but the other changks vos unredder. They vos all polket and rather chiglop, so they did not mekle the spuler. A few were unstametick.

Implications (1) Generally inferencing is difficult and ineffective as a way to access meaning Better for the teacher to explain

Implications (2) Important distinction between first encounter and further encounters when word is already known Encountering the new word in context may be an ineffective way to learn it the first time: but effective as a way of providing later encounters, review and enrichment.

Further comments Suggests teaching strategies which may encourage students to use context-based cues more. Multiple use of strategies and knowledge sources Various reservations about this research and suggestions for future research.

Practical implications Don’t insist on learners guessing a new word – just explain, or provide a gloss Don’t make them work out the grammatical part of speech

Another question So learners fail, usually, to guess meanings of words correctly, even if they know more than 95% of the context. But another question arises: If they can successfully guess a word – does the fact that they guessed it themselves help them to remember it later? In other words: should we provide them with the new items in ‘pregnant’ contexts in order for them to inference them, on the basis that this will help learning?