1. Semantic sets

2. 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.

3. 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)?

4. 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

5. 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.

6. Why? The learners said: ‘we were a bit confused’ Probably because if the brain is required to learn similar items, there is a problem of distinguishing between them.

7. Implications So probably not a good idea to teach together as new items: synonyms (wide/broad) antonyms (awful/terrible) homonyms (bear/bear) homophones (accept / except) homographs (close/close, bow/bow)

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

9. Important distinctions … between initial encounter and later review. … between learning a new word based on semantic 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)

10. So… Use synonym etc. links to teach new words if they already know the ‘source’ word. E.g. if they already know ‘wide’, you may want to teach ‘broad’ as a synonym. Use links as basis for practice exercises: e.g. ‘odd one out’, or ‘find an opposite’.