6 1.2 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning .... Aims of the study The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of repetition and recycling on vocabulary learn
Trang 1FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
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PHÙNG THỊ LAM
THE IMPACT OF REPETITION AND RECYCLING ON GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION
IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL
(TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11
Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG HẢI – PHƯỚC TỈNH )
MINOR M.A THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10
HÀ NỘI, 2011
Trang 2FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
****************************************
PHÙNG THỊ LAM
THE IMPACT OF REPETITION AND RECYCLING ON GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION
IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL
(TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11
Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG HẢI – PHƯỚC TỈNH )
MINOR M.A THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10
Supervisor: ĐỖ BÁ QUÝ, M.A
HÀ NỘI, 2011
Trang 3TABLE OF CONTENTS
Certificate of originality……… ………i
Acknowledgements …… ………ii
Abstract……… ……… iii
Table of content ………iv
List of abbreviations ……… v
PART A – INTRODUCTION 1
1 Rationale 1
2 Aims of the study 2
3 Scope of the study 2
4 Research hypotheses and questions 3
5 Method of the study 3
6 Organization of the study 3
PART B – DEVELOPMENT 54
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
1 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary 5
1.1 What is Vocabulary? 5
1.1.1 Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary 5
1.1.2 Active and passive vocabulary 6
1.2 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning 6
1.3 What is involved in knowing a word 7
1.3.1 Form 7
1.3.2 Meaning 7
1.3.3 Grammar 8
1.3.4 Collocation 8
2 Factors affecting the retention of vocabulary 8
2.1 Memory and storage system 8
2.1.1 The Keyword Method 10
2.1.2 The Visual Aids on Vocabulary Learning 10
2.1.3 The Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Learning 10
2.2 Frequency of meeting 11
Trang 42.3 Quality of Processing 11
3 Other factors 11
3.1 Learning styles 11
3.2 Teaching method 12
4 Repetition and Recycling in Language learning 12
4.1 The spacing of repetition 13
4.2 Testing and the Retrieval Practice Effect 14
5 A review of similar studies 14
CHAPTER 2 – METHODOLOGY……….15
1.The setting of study 16
1.1 Context of Study 16
1.2 Why quasi – experimental research 17
2 Participants of the study 18
2.1 Participants 18
2.2 Sampling 18
3 Materials 19
3.1 The course book 19
3.2 The course content 19
3.3 What are relevant activities? 19
4 Data collection instruments 21
4.1 T –Test 21
4.1.1 The purpose of the test 21
4.1.2.What to test 22
4.1.3 Test 22
4.2 Questionnaires 22
4.2.1.Questionnaires for students 22
4.2.1.1.The pre-treatment questionnaire 23
4.2.1.2.The post-treatment questionnaire 23
4.2.2.Questionnaires for teachers 23
5 Procedure of data collection 23
5.1 Schedules 24
5.2 Treatment 24
Trang 55.3 Data collecting and processing procedures 25
CHAPTER 3 - DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 26
3.1 Results of the T – Test 26
3.2 The result of pre-test scores of the two groups 26
3.3 The result of post-test scores of the two groups 28
3.4 Summary of the test scores of the two groups in the pretest and posttest 32
3.5 Survey results 33
3.5.1 The pre-treatment questionnaire for students 33
3.5.2 The Post-treatment Questionnaire for students 34
3.5.2 Questionnaire for teachers 34
PART C CONCLUSION 38
1 Findings and conclusion 38
2 Pedagogical Implications 40
3 Limitations of the study 41
4 Suggestions for further studies 41
REFERENCES……… 42
APPENDIX……… I
Trang 6PART A – INTRODUCTION
1 Rationale
Given its importance to learning, vocabulary has been a prominent concern of many theorists and researchers in the field
In learning English, however, the greatest challenge is likely retaining the words Researchers and teachers now have been drawn to the concern of how to make students enhance vocabulary retention for communicative value Studies have shown that practising things makes us better in learning a language and develops automaticity In other words, language learning proceeds gradually through repeated exposure and practice The course book English 11 (published by Educational Press), however, does not deal with it sufficiently Many students now suffer from considerable difficulties in retaining previously encountered English words They struggle to maintain retention But not many of them are capable of it This matter of fact leads to their poor production both in speaking and writing
2 Aims of the study
The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of repetition and recycling on vocabulary learning and retention, or to put it differently, the extent to which short tailored activities helps
to retain vocabulary for the students at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh High school and some pedagogical implications
3 Scope of the study
In the current study, the author set the limit of investigating possibly – applied activities that can be carried out at beginning or in the middle of 45-minute periods in such large-sized classes at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh High school, vung Tau The activities were related to first three units (which equal to 18 lessons) of the course book English 11
4 Research hypotheses and questions
The study is to get the answers to the following questions:
1) To what extent do EFL teachers encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among
their students?
2) What is the effectiveness of using repetitive and recycling focused activities on enhancing
11 th - graders’ vocabulary retention?
Trang 73) What are the students’ attitudes towards using activities in teaching and learning
vocabulary?
5 Method of the study
The study is a quasi-experimental design involving the three components of experiments: the population (the 11th grade students at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school, Ba Ria Vung Tau), the treatment (repetitive and recycling focused activities), and the measurement of the treatment (T-test)
- Questionnaires were delivered to teachers to investigate the ways they encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among students
- Questionnaires were delivered to the subjects before treatment to get to know their own strategies of memorizing vocabulary
- Questionnaire s were delivered to the subjects after treatment as a supporting tool to obtain their attitude towards the technique applied
- Observation was also employed during the teaching time to recognize the participation of students in the control group and the experimental group
6 Organization of the study
This thesis is organized around three parts:
Part A is the introduction which presents the rationale for the research topic, aims of study,
scope of study, research hypotheses and questions, and method of the study
Part B is the development which consists of three chapters
- Chapter one reviews scholarly theoretical background to teaching and learning vocabulary in
a second language
- Chapter two deals with the methodology of this research in terms of the setting of the study, sampling participants, instruments and procedure of data collection
- Chapter three devotes to the account of the study in terms of data analysis and findings interpreted from the results of the T-test and questionnaires
Part C is the conclusion which discusses the major findings and limitations of the research,
then suggests teaching implications and proposes some suggestions for further research
Trang 8PART B - DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
1 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary
1.1 What is Vocabulary?
1.1.1 Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary
1.1.2 Active and passive vocabulary
1.2 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning 1.3 What is involved in knowing a word
1.3.1 Form
1.3.2 Meaning
1.3.3 Grammar
1.3.4 Collocation
2 Factors affecting the retention of vocabulary
2.1 Memory and storage system
2.1.1 The Keyword Method
2.1.2 The Visual Aids on Vocabulary Learning
2.1.3 The Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Learning 2.2 Frequency of meeting
2.3 Quality of processing
3 Other factors
3 1 Learning styles
3 2 Teaching method
4 Repetition and Recycling in Language learning
4.1 The spacing of repetition
4.2 Testing and the Retrieval Practice Effect
5 A review of similar studies
CHAPTER 2 – METHODOLOGY
1.The setting of study
1.1 Context of Study
Trang 9Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school is a state-run school located in Long Hai town in Ba Ria – Vung Tau The school has a modest educational staff of 71 people who provide education to 1425 students The EFL group consists of 9 teachers
The typical setting of instruction is three 45-minute –long periods of English a week Due to the limited time in a correspondence to a wide range of words to teach and students’ low English proficiency, EFL teachers at Long Hai _ Phuoc Tinh high school often teach vocabulary in the traditional teacher-centered method The teachers normally dominate class to explain words by words They often employ three following steps in teaching vocabulary First, teachers have students read the passage After that, new words are raised and elicited through some games, word maps, or simple presentations Then students try to get Vietnamese equivalents of the words and read them aloud once or twice To help students practice the vocabulary, the teachers have them do some kinds of exercises such as: gap filling, word matching, definitions matching, etc available in the course book
1.2 Why quasi – experimental research
As this study was conducted on the students in two already existing classes which were assigned by the high school where the researcher was working, a quasi-experimental method was naturally chosen
1 Participants of the study
2.1 Participants
The population of the study were 84 ESL students coming from two classes in Long Hai-Phuoc Tinh high school in BR-VT Most of them were born in 1995 and have studied English
as a Foreign Language for five years or more Results of the pre-test showed that their English vocabulary competence differed little All in all, these two groups had a lot of common features in terms of number, gender, English level as well as motivation to learn Moreover, these students’ characteristics were typical of the 11th grade non-major students at Long Hai- Phuoc Tinh high school
2.2 Sampling
In the study the researcher adopted the systematic sampling as a strategy to select subjects from a population list in a systematic Specifically, with the required number of 56 out of the population of 84, the simple statistic should be use: f=N÷ Sn
Trang 10f = frequency interval
N = the total number of the wider population
S n = the required number in the sample
Hence the frequency interval (f) is 84÷56 = 1.5
As a result, the researcher omitted every third name on the list of cases
3.Materials
3.1 The course book
The English 11 is designed basing on the basic principles of Communicative Language Teaching However, the course book do not include sufficient communicative activities for practice This demands more work on the part of the teacher in selecting appropriate activities
to attract students
3.2 The course content
As being stated above, due to the limitation of time and application, the study only deals with three units among sixteen ones appearing in the current course book English 11, namely unit 1 “Friendship”, unit 2 “Personal Experience”, and unit 3 “A Party”
3.3 What are relevant activities?
- Activities that involve brief reading, repetition, making sentences, listing words and so on
are supposed to be relevant to provide background for practicing certain chunks or for
recycling vocabulary, thus aid language processing and ultimately vocabulary retention
- When designing some extra activities, the researcher took into account all the conditions of
the participants and based on the Taxonomy of Vocabulary Learning Strategies which is
adopted from Schmitt 1997:207
4 Data collection instruments
4.1 T -Test
The pre-test and post–test employed in the study were designed to measure the effect of repetitive and recycling-focused activities on students’ ability to retain vocabulary
4.1.1 The purpose of the test
- The pre-test was given to the two groups in the same week with the primary purpose of measuring students’ vocabulary size and their level of vocabulary retention
- The post-test was implemented to assess how effective the tailored activities utilized were
Trang 114.1.2 What to test
The pre-test served as a means to measure students’ vocabulary size and their level of vocabulary retention The target words in the pre-test were drawn from the word list of the course book English 10 ( from unit 9 to unit 16 inclusively) whereas ones in the progress test came from the glossary of three units of the course book and a number of words added by the teacher on assumption of they are unfamiliar to the students
4.1.3 Test
In the study, the test comprised five different types of exercises in the form of an objective test Here in this paper, the test frame included multiple choice, gap-filling, matching and word – formation
4.2 Questionnaires
4.2.1 Questionnaires for students
4.2.1.1 The pre-treatment questionnaire
On completing the study, 20 random subjects in the two groups were sampled out of the 56,
A questionnaire listed 15 memory strategies was used in the survey
4.2.1.2 The post-treatment questionnaire
The post- treatment questionnaire was administered to get students’ feedback about the treatment It was a brief questionnaire with 5 questions
4.2.2 Questionnaires for teachers
The aim of the questionnaire for teachers was to find out teachers' attitude towards enhancing vocabulary retention and approaches they use The questionnaire contains 10 questions where 3 questions require only yes and no responses
5 Procedure of data collection
The practice of study involves the systematic collection of information about the subjects, activities, and outcomes of the experiment measuring the impact of repetition and recycling on students’ vocabulary retention This is a experimentally quantitative research involving a trial
in which the subjects (n=56) are measured before and after treatment with T-test
5.1 Schedules