Learning academic vocabulary

Chilton, M. W., & Ehri, L. C. (2015). Vocabulary learning: Sentence contexts linked by events in scenarios facilitate third graders’ memory for verb meanings. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(4), 439-458. doi: 10.1002/rrq.106

Background

The authors asserted that vocabulary was crucial for students’ academic success, and that it was important to understand how children acquired vocabulary knowledge and to determine effective vocabulary instruction. Although educators understood the importance of context in vocabulary instruction, it was not known how pedagogical contexts could be designed to provide the necessary information needed to contribute to student learning of unfamiliar words.

Aims

The study examined whether children learnt unfamiliar words better when they were presented in more semantically connected sentence contexts.

Sample

The participants were 40 third graders in the United States.

Method

The participants were matched based on a word identification pre-test score. The matched pairs were randomly assigned to the experimental and comparison conditions. In the experimental condition, six unfamiliar verbs were embedded in four sets of sentences presenting events related to a familiar scenario. In the comparison condition, the sentences were equally meaningful, but not connected to one another in meaning. During the vocabulary learning session for both conditions, the participants practised the definitions of the new words and their synonyms. They also read the sentences in which the new verbs were embedded. The experimenter read aloud the sentences so that the students did not need to decode the words, as they followed the words in print. The students had to repeat definitions and sentences after hearing and reading them. Their ability to recall the definitions and sentences was scored. After each of the four training sets for both experimental and comparison conditions, the students had to recall the missing verbs in the sentences given to them. The following day, the students were assessed on five post-tests concerning memory for the spelling of the new six verbs, sentence production, sentence completion, definition and knowledge of verb semantic features.

Findings

The results indicated that the students learnt verb meanings better in more semantically connected rather than less semantically connected contexts. The long term recall of the verbs was significantly better for the experimental group students.

Implications

The authors suggested that teaching vocabulary in a semantically connected context was effective for primary school students. They recommended providing definitions and synonyms for new vocabulary and embedding them in sentences that contributed to a scenario and that showed the syntactic and semantic constraints of the new words.

Original article retrieved from Wiley Online Library