Learning new words and acquiring vocabulary could arguably be the most important thing when learning a new language. Without words, you would not be able to express anything even if you were to have perfect grammar, since you would not have anything to fill the grammatical structures with. Therefore, in general, it is of interest to explore and investigate how learning new words could be done but as a teacher, there is specific interest as to how learning new words could be done in a classroom setting. Previous research shows that there is a need for explicit vocabulary learning where acquiring new vocabulary is treated as an explicit learning criterion in schools in Sweden. Therefore it felt like a suitable topic to delve into as a soon-to-be licensed teacher of English. An experimental pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test-design study was run, in which a test group of English 5-students from an academic program at upper-secondary school, productively practised ten target items. The ten target items were learnt by using digital flashcards in the program Quizlet. The students had two occasions where they practised the words for ten minutes learning with a day in between. The results indicate that using digital flashcards can be an, if not effective, at least a good way of introducing and learning new words since the retention of the words two weeks after the final learning occasion, tested to be over 50% when the students were asked to translate the target items from Swedish to English.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-44521 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Thambert, Sabina |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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