Getting students actively involved in acquiring new vocabulary creates more interest and better learning than presenting words from external sources.

No description available.

This study aims to investigate to what extent Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English understand the meanings of polysemous words and whether puns can be used to teach such words. A test and two questionnaires were constructed to retrieve data from both students and teachers. The results of the study show that Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English generally have an acceptable knowledge of polysemous words, but depending on the type of program the students are attending, their understanding differs. Based on these results, it was also concluded that puns can be used in education to teach students about the meanings of polysemous words. The results from the questionnaires display that students in general have a positive attitude towards using puns in the classroom and that they found them entertaining and humorous. In addition, the students also saw this approach as beneficial to their retention and motivation. Lastly, the teachers expressed that using humor can strengthen the learning process, and if the students find the teaching situation enjoyable, they learn faster and it can increase their retention.

This degree project aims to investigate which methods five school teachers, in compulsory education, integrate into their practice when teaching ESL learners vocabulary through reading. Moreover, it aims to find out if the reported teacher practices reflect what is currently viewed as effective vocabulary instructions. The research question that guided this study was, what methods or underlying theories do ESL teachers, in South Sweden, find useful when teaching vocabulary through reading? The research used classroom observations, individual interviews, together with a thorough analysis of relevant research on the subject of SLA. Moreover, despite the vast research in this area regarding effective practices of vocabulary acquisition, teachers tend to use old fashioned, and simple methods when teaching and assessing vocabulary acquisition. Underlying reasoning is said to be lack of time, or knowledge of how to incorporate efficient practices in their teaching. To conclude, we believe that teachers would benefit from receiving further education on how to incorporate potent practices, so that they are able to more efficiently integrate them into their current language learning activities.

This study has investigated how four teachers within the subject Swedish as a second language 1 at upper secondary school talk about their work with vocabulary in the classroom. The study focuses on how these teachers think about and reflect on their own teaching and knowledge of vocabulary teaching. Qualitative interviews were used, and the results show that all four teachers believe vocabulary acquisition to be important. The classroom practices used by the teachers the most are noticing, repetition and learning words through different contexts. The conclusions that could be drawn from this study are that teachers have multiple contextual factors to adapt to in their classroom practices, as well as that motivation is an important part of vocabulary acquisition. / Denna studie har undersökt hur fyra lärare inom Svenska som andraspråk 1 på gymnasiet beskriver sitt arbete med ordinlärning i klassrummet. Denna studie undersöker hur dessa lärare tänker och tycker om sin egen undervisning och sinakunskaper om ordinlärning. Den metod som användes var kvalitativa intervjuer. Resultatet visar att samtliga lärare anser att ordinlärning är viktigt. De klassrumspraktiker som de fyra lärarna använder sig av mest är att uppmärksamma ord, repetition samt att lära sig ord genom olika kontexter. De slutsatser som kan dras från denna studie är att lärare har flera kontextuella faktorer att anpassa sina klassrumspraktiker till, samt att motivation är en viktig faktor för ordinlärning.

This study is a multi-method exploratory quantitative and qualitative examination of the degree to which students produce, share, and learn vocabulary and cooperative skills as they carry out three types of individually and cooperatively structured art-based tasks regarding carefully selected and sequenced artworks. The artwork was selected from, and the tasks were adapted from Visual Thinking Strategies, an approach for teaching art appreciated and critical thinking skills. There has been little research that reports the degree of vocabulary through the use of images in general, very little research on cooperative learning and language learning, and an extremely limited amount of research on cooperative learning carried out in the field of foreign language learning through the use of artwork in the Japanese context. This study aims to fill these gaps. There were five main purposes of this study. The first purpose was to explore the range of vocabulary elicited through the cooperatively structured art-based tasks regarding the artworks. The second purpose was to measure students’ learning and use of two cooperative skills as they carried out the art-based tasks. The third purpose was to examine the implementation of the art-based tasks adapted for language learning in the Japanese college context investigated in this study. The fourth purpose was to explore the degree to which vocabulary is produced, shared, and learned in the adapted art-based tasks. The fifth and final purpose was a qualitative and quantitative examination of students’ attitudes towards the art tasks and towards working cooperatively in groups. To answer questions based on the purposes listed above, AntWordProfiler was used to analyze students’ production of vocabulary as they wrote their individual comments about the artworks and the RANGE feature of AntWordProfiler was used to analyze the frequency of particular vocabulary within and across groups in the group activities. The degree of learning was measured through pretests and posttests adapted from the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale. Finally an ANOVA was used to compare the vocabulary learned in the individual and cooperative drawing tasks following a Latin Square design. The qualitative study involved examination of many sources of data, including the worksheets students filled out as they carried out the art-based tasks, the artwork they drew, and audio recordings. Finally, a combined qualitative and qualitative survey at the end of the semester allowed an exploration of students’ opinions regarding art-based tasks, working and learning in groups, and the class as a whole. The results to the 12 research questions showed very little predictability in the specific vocabulary elicited, but did find patterns in the frequency of vocabulary elicited through the artworks, especially in terms of the percentage of vocabulary elicited. Students showed a significant increase in vocabulary knowledge between the pretests and posttests on all tasks, although there was a significant difference in vocabulary learned by students who did the drawing task individually for one artwork over those who drew that artwork in cooperative groups. A frequency analysis of student self-reports of their use of the cooperative skills they were taught and an examination of audio recordings showed they used and processed their use of the skills in ways that cooperative research suggests are beneficial for learning. Finally, the results of the quantitative and qualitative course-final survey showed that students had generally positive attitudes towards both the learning vocabulary using artwork and working in groups and that students enjoyed interacting and learning from fellow group members. There were some negative views of the cooperative tasks that need to be addressed in future use of these tasks, primarily making students aware of the reasoning behind the way they were being asked to carry out the tasks. The findings showed teachers can use artwork with confidence that students will learn vocabulary and that students are generally positive to the cooperatively structured art-based tasks. Future research needs to be carried out with other artwork, in different contexts, with students at different levels of language ability, and with additional art-based tasks. / Teaching & Learning

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) programs developed earlier for vocabulary acquisition employed mainly word-list pedagogy and could not present information in a real world context. Advancement in computer technology has triggered the development of multimedia CALL programs which can present information in different formats using graphics, sound, text, and video with links to other chunks of information. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two multimedia CALL programs on vocabulary acquisition. Participants were 86 intermediate level English as a second language (ESL) students. They were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups. Students in group one viewed a program with Motion Graphics and text. Students in group two viewed a program that had Still Graphics and text. Their task was to study ten names of hand and power tools. Both groups took the pretest, viewed the video of the tools, had an immediate posttest and a two-week delayed posttest.The results yielded no treatment effects. Further analysis revealed time effects but no interaction between treatment and time. Students who learned through Motion Graphics performed significantly better on the recall tests than those who learned through Still Graphics. Further research in this area involving the use of various graphic formats in a CALL environment is needed. / Ph. D.

This study investigates the efficiency of using children’s literature to support English vocabulary acquisition in a first and second language classroom context. Previous research has established that it is important for children to be given the opportunity to expand their basic vocabulary in English during their years in school, in order to assimilate the teaching in the classroom. The knowledge of words is mentioned in the curriculum, for almost all subject areas. Therefore it is of great importance that teachers are aware of factors that affect vocabulary acquisition to support/enable children’s vocabulary development. Results of this study are based on 7 scientific studies that were found through searches in the ERIC database. The synthesis of our study highlighted several significant factors that can affect children's vocabulary acquisition. Our focus was to examine children's literature as a didactic tool along with different working methods and strategies. Through storybook reading, children encounter many new words which has been shown to have a positive effect on all children's vocabulary development. Teaching target words, repeated reading of the story and discussions about vocabulary appeared to be working methods and strategies that benefited vocabulary acquisition. Research highlights that there is a connection between the development of children's vocabulary and the number of instructions and activities that are completed linked to the target words. Based on these results, our concluding reflections highlights the importance of teachers using interaction and storybook reading to support the acquisition of children’s vocabulary. A rich vocabulary gives students the conditions to succeed in school and to function in a democratic society.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第24301号 / 人博第1057号 / 新制||人||248(附属図書館) / 2022||人博||1057(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)准教授 PETERSON Mark, 准教授 中森 誉之, 教授 勝又 直也, 教授 FIELD Malcolm Henry / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

This thesis considers possible criteria for the selection of example sentences for difficult or unknown words in reading texts for students of German as a Second Language (GSL). The examples are intended to be provided within the context of an Intelligent Computer-Aided Language Learning (ICALL) Vocabulary Learning System, where students can choose among several explanation options for difficult words. Some of these options (e.g. glosses) have received a good deal of attention in the ICALL/Second Language (L2) Acquisition literature; in contrast, literature on examples has been the near exclusive province of lexicographers. The selection of examples is explored from an educational, L2 teaching point of view: the thesis is intended as a first exploration of the question of what makes an example helpful to the L2 student from the perspective of L2 teachers. An important motivation for this work is that selecting examples from a dictionary or randomly from a corpus has several drawbacks: first, the number of available dictionary examples is limited; second, the examples fail to take into account the context in which the word was encountered; and third, the rationale and precise principles behind the selection of dictionary examples is usually less than clear. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that a random selection of example sentences from a suitable corpus can be improved by a guided selection process that takes into account characteristics of helpful examples. This is investigated by an empirical study conducted with teachers of L2 German. The teacher data show that four dimensions are significant criteria amenable to analysis: (a) reduced syntactic complexity, (b) sentence similarity, provision of (c) significant co-occurrences and (d) semantically related words. Models based on these dimensions are developed using logistic regression analysis, and evaluated through two further empirical studies with teachers and students of L2 German. The results of the teacher evaluation are encouraging: for the teacher evaluation, they indicate that, for one of the models, the top-ranked selections perform on the same level as dictionary examples. In addition, the model provides a ranking of potential examples that roughly corresponds to that of experienced teachers of L2 German. The student evaluation confirms and notably improves on the teacher evaluation in that the best-performing model of the teacher evaluation significantly outperforms both random corpus selections and dictionary examples (when a penalty for missing entries is included).