Perfecting Language: Experimenting with Vocabulary Learning

ABSTRACT One of the thorniest aspects of teaching languages is developing students' vocabulary, yet it is impossible to be 'an accurate and highly communicative language user with a very small vocabulary' (Milton, 2009, p. 3). Nation (2006) indicates that more vocabulary than previously thought is required to function well both at spoken and written discourse levels. With the recent spread and uptake of Language Perfect--'used by more than 1,000 schools around the world' (EducationPerfect, 2014), this paper reports on a trial study to explore how different approaches to vocabulary learning might affect vocabulary acquisition. KEY WORDS vocabulary acquisition, Italian, French, computer assisted language learning BACKGROUND Almost 20 years ago, Long and Richards (1997, p. ix) bemoaned the fact that '[t]he relative neglect of studies of vocabulary acquisition and related areas of lexical research in second language acquisition has often been commented on within the fields of language teaching and applied linguistics'. Thankfully, more recently Liz Giltner (2012, p. 169) notes that '[i] n the past two decades, research about learning and teaching second-language (L2) vocabulary has increased greatly'. Of note is the sustained contribution to this area of our understanding by Paul Nation and colleagues. Nonetheless, Nation and Webb (2011, p. 15) note that our knowledge of vocabulary teaching techniques remains 'a surprisingly under-researched area'. Between 2011 and 2013, I was once again confronted with designing and teaching a course for beginning students of Italian which stimulated a reflective approach to dealing with vocabulary teaching--I had been teaching only advanced students of Italian in the six years prior and, thus, the issue of vocabulary learning was of a different order. Turning to the scholarly literature on vocabulary teaching and learning for inspiration I was somewhat taken aback that there were not more experimental studies detailing successful approaches. At the same time, I was aware of the growth of LanguagePerfect, '... Australasia's most popular web-based vocabulary learning tool ...' (LanguagePerfect, 2014), in school language programs in Australia and internationally. Consequently, this consideration led to the design of an experimental comparison of vocabulary learning activities (see Nation and Webb, 2011, pp. 17-20), discussed in this article. A further stimulus behind a targeted approach to vocabulary learning activities relates to the impact of the communicative language orthodoxy in our classrooms. Milton (2009, p.3) notes that due to the prevailing approaches to languages teaching and learning there has been a 'reduction both in the volumes of vocabulary presented to learners and in the volumes of vocabulary learned'. Indeed, with the progressive shift away from explicit teaching and the poor reputation of any learning activities that resemble rote learning or memorisation, approaches to teaching vocabulary need to be reviewed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Experimental design and previous research In their seminal volume, Research and Analyzing Vocabulary, Nation and Webb (2011, p.17) comment that '[w]hen we think of ways of deciding whether one vocabulary learning activity is likely to be more effective than another, our first thought may be to try them both out and see which one works best. If we want to do this in a careful way, then we can design an experiment'. This is the approach that was taken in exploring the impact of LanguagePerfect. As per Nation and Webb's conventional experimental design, utilising an independent variable, two groups were used to test vocabulary learning in different ways, with results for the two groups compared after testing. The experimental design followed very closely that identified by Nation and Webb, differing only in the number of treatments (see figure 1). …