This study investigated the effects of three different approaches to vocabulary instruction on students ability to learn initial meanings of new words: traditional definitions, friendly definitions, and parsing. Fourth and fifth grade students enrolled in a rural elementary school were introduced to new vocabulary terms in traditional, friendly definitions, and parsing conditions. Tasks to assess students understanding of the new terms included sentence generation, and responses to open ended questions about each term.
Results indicated that across all three conditions no significant differences were found for sentence generation tasks. For open ended question tasks differences were found indicating students performed significantly better with traditional and friendly definitions than parsing. Qualitative analysis indicated that parsing was not only inadequate, but detrimental to learning new words from definitions.
It was hypothesized that the design of the study may have influenced results. Implications for instruction and further research were discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04162007-192339 |
| Date | 27 September 2007 |
| Creators | Nichols, Constance Nelson |
| Contributors | Dr. Rita Bean, Dr. Isabel Beck, Dr. Linda Kucan, Dr. Louis Pingel |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04162007-192339/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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