國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
33
Two groups had the same pairs of near-synonyms and there were totally four pairs of near-synonyms in each lesson. In addition, every student was assigned a specific role, including group leader, timer or answerer, during the vocabulary exercise activity.
Students were able to discuss the role distribution with their group members and decide each person’s role. The students’ language learning history was typical for Chinese. Most had been taught English for 12 years at school prior to entering university. The teacher used the BNC web corpus, a Web-based interface to the 100-million words British National Corpus (BNC), to teach experimental group.BNCweb was developed for internal use at the University of Zurich (Lehmann et al. 2000) but was subsequently released to the general public (non-commercial use only) in the year 2002. None of the students had any prior experience of DDL.
3.4 Experimental instruction Design
3.4.1 Teaching Content
In this research, the researcher adopted participants’ school textbook Four Corners Level 4, which was edited by Jack C. Richards and David Bohlke, published by
Cambridge, as the main teaching content for the both groups. Both groups received instruction fifty minutes a week in this study, from the beginning of March to the end of May, 2013. The teaching schedule was followed by the original English teacher’s syllabus.
The textbooks ‘Four Corners’ offers twelve topic-based units with a variety of different authentic materials. The series of Four Corners are an integrated four-skill course for adults and young adults who want to use English to communicate effectively in daily life.
It combines proven communicative methodology with a practical outcomes-based approach. Four Corners features a clear presentation of vocabulary, a thorough grammar syllabus, and an everyday functional language lesson in every unit together with
‧
systematic practice of all four skills. It places special emphasis on helping students become confident and competent speakers of English. Speaking activities are tied to clearly label measurable outcomes, enabling students to see the results of their learning and help them see their progress.
In this textbook, there are totally twelve lessons. Due to the limited time, the teacher only taught units seven to twelve in this semester. This study covered units seven to nine.
Since the purpose of this research was to improve students’ vocabulary knowledge, data-driven learning approach was designed to focus on prompting near-synonyms learning. In this research, three units were used for the main teaching content. For each unit, there were at least ten pairs of near-synonyms and in total there were 34 pairs of near-synonyms, including 89 words in the experimental teaching. The topic and the pair of near-synonyms are listed in Table 3.5.
Table 3.5 Near-synonyms List of the Study
Unit Topic Paris of near-synonyms
Unit 7 New Ways of thinking
1. human, person, people 2. see, watch, look at 3. spend, take, cost 4. tour, travel, trip
5. eventful, significant, important 6. creative, imaginative
7. advantage, benefit 8. alter, change 9. across, cross 10. date, appointment
11. field, course, court, ground, ring 12. heaven, paradise
1. continue, begin, start 2. regard, consider, think
‧
3. understand, comprehend, realize 4. spell, pronounce
5. diligent, industrious
6. decision, determination, resolution 7. disrupt, interrupt
8. freedom, liberty
9. grade, mark, point, score 10. huge, big, large, enormous 11. opportunity, chance 12. persuade, convince
Unit 9 Can you explain it?
1. homework, assignment 2. hurt, injure, damage 3. heal, cure
9. game, contest, competition, match, meet, race
10. assure, ensure
3.4.2 Teaching Activities
In this research, the participating students had forty minutes for teaching
near-synonyms per week. It took about two or three weeks to learn a unit. The activities used in each unit and the timetable are presented in Table 3.5.
All the teaching activities were conducted through the data-driven learning with the corpus-based concordance lines of the teaching materials. Like the pilot study, in the quasi-experiment study, hands-on activities were designed by the researcher who put emphasis on the vocabulary strategies based on the Schmitt’s (2012:207-208) taxonomy.
‧
These activities intended to make use of the corpus to enhance participants’ attention on vocabulary and accessed their vocabulary knowledge.
Table 3.6 Teaching Activities and Timetable of the Study
Week Date Unit Activities Length of Activity
1 3/4
Conduct pretest and background questionnaire 40 mins
Conduct orientation 10 mins
2 3/11
Unit 7
‘human, person, people’, ‘see, watch, look at’,
‘spend, take, cost’ ,‘tour, travel, trip’ 50 mins
3 3/18
‘eventful, significant, important’ ,‘creative, imaginative’, ‘advantage, benefit’,
‘alter, change’
50 mins
4 3/25
‘across, cross’ ,‘date, appointment’, ‘field, court, ground, ring’, ‘heaven, paradise’
50 mins
5 4/1
Unit 8
‘continue, begin, start’, ’regard, consider, think’
‘understand, comprehend, realize’
‘spell, pronounce’
50 mins
6 4/8
‘diligent, industrious’ ,‘disrupt, interrupt’
‘decision, determination, resolution’
‘grade, mark, point, score’, ‘huge, big, large, enormous’, ‘opportunity, chance’, ‘persuade, convince’
50 mins
9 4/29
‘hurt, injure, damage’ ,‘heal, cure’
‘hospital, clinic’ ,‘inhibit, prohibit’
‘option, choice’
50 mins
10 5/6
‘join, attend, participate, enter’ , ‘mature, ripe’
‘replicate, duplicate, copy’ , ‘assure, insure’ 50 mins
11 5/13
Conduct posttest 30 mins
learners’ perception questionnaire 20 mins
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
37
The instruction procedures consisted of four main parts in each class. The following section gives a brief description of each part and their purpose.
3.4.3 Teaching Procedure
Under the notion of Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) Model (Takač, 2008:35), three stages “cognitive, associative and autonomous” were adapted in activity.
These activities also followed the traditional 3P model— presentation, practice and production. The 3P model can be coded into three stages mentioned in Anderson’s model.
Orientation
Students in the experimental group had a concordance observational orientation to ensure they have no problem analyzing the concordance. As shown in Appendix A, the orientation was divided into three parts: introduce the concept of near-synonym, corpus and concordance.
Warm up
In a natural setting, learners always encounter words in context rather than in isolation. This warm-up activity not only gave students confidence but also self-efficacy to continue their learning, interest and achievement (Takač, 2008:43). In this stage, teacher used a strategy which was “guess from the lyric context” under Schmitt’s (2012) and Chandrasegaran’s (1980) framework. Before listening to the music, the teacher asked students three questions for inferring words’ meaning and also for asking students to guess the word meaning. After listening to the pop song, students discussed with each other and then teacher generalized students’ answers. In this part, teacher helped students
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
38
create word consciousness through asking three pre-listening questions.
Vocabulary presentation
In the presentation stage, teacher demonstrated the research procedures which students followed in the proceeding activities, such as how to find the natural lexicon through dictionaries or teacher-made concordances. After illustrating the concept of concordance, the teacher used near-synonym and corpus to raise students’ awareness of second language vocabulary learning. Students at this time not only learned declarative knowledge but also conceptual structures in the cognitive and conative model of Young &
Perkins (1995). Students will observe near-synonyms in each group and wrote down their observations on the worksheet. Once they have questions, they could discuss with their teammates. The teacher did not give the students correct answers immediately in order to activate their active participation as suggested in Stern’s synthesis model (1986). Based on the Stern’s synthesis framework, in this part, teacher cultivated students “active planning strategies” and “social learning strategies (Stern, 1986:411).” According to Young and Perkins (1995:150), they define learning strategies as “specialized ways of processing information that enhance its comprehension, learning or retention.” To attain so-called “specialized ways”, the teacher has to give students some strategy trainings in consideration of different personal learning styles. To sum up, in the presentation stage, strategy was introduced by teacher at first and then teacher gave students some hand-on activities to make sure they understood the procedures of researching on
near-synonymous words.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
39
Vocabulary Activities
Enhancing the memory of the new learn words was the purpose of this stage.
Students did hand-on activities in order to ensure they understand the concept of concordance and near-synonym. The students will become more “proceduralized”
through practice Anderson’s ACT framework (Takač, 2008:35).
Wrap up
The teacher generalized each pair of near-synonyms patterns and asked students questions in order to make sure the participants have the ability to apply the target words in various contexts.