The main purpose of the present study was to determine which post-reading activity facilitated English word learning more effectively among Chinese EFL learners. Recall that in the present study, the participants were told the same set of stories in the same format but were counterbalancedly exposed to three different post-reading activities across the three clusters of storybooks. Each child obtained two scores representing the number of the words he or she could recognize correctly (i.e., written and spoken vocabulary) after receiving a designated post-reading activity. They were also given a story comprehension test to make sure that they paid adequate attention to the story content.
Effect of Post-Reading Word Instruction
The results of the present study revealed that the three types of post-reading activities resulted in differential effects on English word learning among young EFL learners. The participants receiving word instruction in isolation performed significantly better than the controlled condition, i.e., repeated reading. The facilitative effect of word instruction in isolation was even evident when compared to word instruction in context. This study joins previous research (Blok, 1999; Brett et al., 1996; Huang, 2001; Lin, 2003; Nation, 2008; Tyan
& Shen, 2003; Zimmerman, 1997) in demonstrating that direct and deliberate vocabulary instruction, where explicit attention is directed to isolated words, can yield greater positive effects on the retention of word learning than word instruction in context.
As indicated by Johnston (2000), learning words in isolation can be a way of quickly raising learners’ awareness of the particular words when learners subsequently meet those words in reading or listening. In line with Johnston’s suggestion, the facilitative effect of isolated word instruction in the present study was evident not only when the words were presented in the written form but also when they were presented in the spoken form, indicating that the beneficial effect of isolated word instruction was independent of input modality.
Further, theoretical perspectives on word learning suggest that word retention is enhanced when learners isolate an individual word from context and process the word elaborately and focally (Prince, 1996).
Also, Ehri and Wilce (1980) found that beginning readers trained to read words on flashcards (i.e., in isolation) demonstrated faster word learning and more complete speech sounds represented by letters, i.e., orthographic retention, than those trained in meaningful sentences. In other words, word learning in isolation requires learners to rely entirely upon formal aspects of the language (i.e., graphophonic cues in written language or phonological cues in spoken language), which provides a good opportunity for beginning EFL learners to process the constituent forms of the new words in depth, thereby increasing the odds of retention of the words in memory. In the present study, children had better performance on word learning when the supportive context offered by story texts was diminished or removed and when the young EFL learners were forced to attend to the visual characteristics of the target words by using word cards and to the phonological details of the target words by aural-oral practice.
In contrast, the results of the present study revealed an
incongruous facilitative effect of word instruction in context. When the effect of word learning in context was compared with repeated reading, there was generally no superiority effect of word instruction in context. In the first cluster of storybooks, performance on written vocabulary following word instruction in context was even worse than that following repeated reading. The nil facilitating effect of word instruction in context might be an artifact of the experimental design of the present study. The processing for unscrambling the sentences according to the story line might be too heavy and thus might have cancelled out the potential facilitative effect of contextual word instruction in the present study. Recall that in the present study, the intention of using sentence strips as one of the post-reading word instruction activities was to reduce the distracting effect of the illustrations in the storybooks and increase the possibility of focusing on linguistic cues in learning new words. It was hoped by encountering the target words in context and by retrieving the story line to rearrange the sentences, the students were given opportunities to elaborate and consolidate the meanings of the words in multiple sentential contexts. It was possible that many of the children’s mental resources were devoted to reordering the sentences, which might have overloaded the participants and thus reduced the potential beneficial effect of word instruction in context.
On the other hand, the nil favorable effect might also point to the limitations of contextual word instruction in an EFL context. For young EFL learners who have not mastered the ability to quickly and thoroughly process the orthographic and phonological representations of a word, learning words in context could be a complicated process.
According to Adams (1990), it is easy to use context to quickly identify the unfamiliar word, but it is not easy for the learner to pay attention to the spelling of the word as the form of the word becomes obscure when it is embedded in the text. Without adequate attention to intra-word orthographic or phonological details, it is difficult for the participants to develop the visual familiarity or acoustic familiarity of the unfamiliar words. The distracting effect of context could be more devastating in beginning EFL learners as they are not sensitive to intra-word orthographic structure (Koda, 1999) and are not good at segmenting words from a string of coarticulated sounds, resulting in poor association of acceptable orthographic letter strings with the correct pronunciation. Moreover, young EFL learners, lacking the necessary semantic and syntactic analysis skills, are not accustomed to using the constraining properties of the sentence or the story context to rough out the meaning of an unknown word and to refine the meaning of the word when it is subsequently encountered.
The Varying Effects for Students of Different Proficiencies
In the present study, the effects of post-reading activities for students of different proficiency levels varied. For higher-proficiency learners, word instruction in isolation was shown to be particularly effective, whereas for lower-proficiency learners, there did not seem to be a post-reading activity that was more effective than the others.
Consistent with previous work (Lesgold et al., 1985), higher-proficiency learners who received word learning in isolation identified single words quickly. Higher-proficiency learners, with greater knowledge of word forms and better decoding skills, were
more able to distribute their greater degree of attention between form and meaning effectively and were more likely to encode the relevant orthographic and phonological representations when learning new words in isolation. This finding is similar to that of Johnston (2000), who found that word learning through a word bank was most effective for all three achievement groups, particularly for the high group, where students learned approximately five times more words than the lowest group and twice as many as the middle group.
However, this finding was not anticipated in light of previous research that only higher-proficiency learners could benefit from the contextual cues for learning new words (e.g., Goerss et al., 1999;
Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Kondo-Brown, 2006; McKeown, 1985; Nagy et al., 1985; Pardo, 2004). It should be noted that the results from the previous studies support only the idea that word reading or word recognition performance is better in context. The results did not lend support to the idea that word learning can be enhanced in context.
As for the lower-proficiency learners in the present study, none of the three post-reading activities, either involving deliberate word instruction or not, was more effective than the others in promoting word learning. It was possible that the lower-proficiency learners had poorly developed decoding skills and they might thus have failed to attend to a word’s orthographic and phonological representations.
Therefore, they did not properly encode the information required to form a lasting representation (Shefelbine, 1990).
Some scholars have argued that lower-proficiency learners rely more on contextual cues than higher-proficiency learners because of their inability to use sound-spelling relationships to decode words
(Gough & Juel, 1991). In other words, lower-proficiency learners, who have weak decoding skills, are more successful when decoding words in context (Alexander, 1998; Nicholson, 1991; Nicholson, Bailey, & McArthur, 1991). Then, why did word instruction in context not yield greater beneficial effect in word learning in the present study? One possible reason might be that there were too many unfamiliar words in the sentential contexts, which might have distracted lower achievers’ attention from the target words. Another possibility was that the lower-proficiency learners, with general poor knowledge of the target language, could not derive or construct a correct definition of an unknown word from context.
Though the failure to identify a post-reading activity particularly effective for learners of lower proficiency is disappointing, it is important to keep in mind that learners of lower proficiency did show some evidence of word learning. In the two outcome measures of each storybook, there were four alternatives for each test item, so learners had at least 25% to score correctly by guessing. The lower-proficiency learners in the present study performed above the chance level in the two outcome measures, indicating that they still could learn new words after receiving the three post-reading activities in this study (all ps < .001) in spite of the nonsignificant main effect of post-reading activities on the two outcome measures.
In summary, the present study showed that word instruction in isolation after reading a story was effective in promoting word learning among young EFL learners beyond repeatedly reading the same story. The effect of isolated word instruction was even greater than word instruction in context, especially for students of higher
proficiency. Though word instruction in context was not as effective in facilitating word learning as word instruction in isolation, the results should not be taken as evidence that reading or learning words in context is not beneficial to vocabulary acquisition over the course of language development. The results only support that word instruction in isolation after reading is more effective than word instruction in context for young EFL learners.
Pedagogical Implications
Based on the major findings of the study, some pedagogical implications are indicated. First, it has been pointed out that vocabulary lists can be an effective way to quickly learn word-pair translations (Nation, 1990). This view is supported by the results of the present study where young EFL learners were more apt to learn new words in post-reading word instruction in isolation. Teachers and parents should be encouraged to point out the target words after reading the entire text and have children pay attention to the graphophonic cues and phonological cues of the print.
Second, it is suggested that lower-proficiency students learn English from the basics, such as phonics instruction, which will prepare the students to develop the ability to map sounds onto spelling. This ability enables readers to decode words (Stanovich &
West, 1989) and make an improvement in word learning. Therefore, it is recommended that teachers integrate phonics instruction into early reading programs to facilitate young EFL learners’ development of word learning.
Finally, the present study adds to the growing body of evidence
that young EFL learners can learn new words with explicit vocabulary instruction (Elley, 1989; Hulstijn et al., 1996; Zimmerman, 1997).
Teachers and parents should be encouraged to enhance children’s word learning by providing rich explanations of new vocabulary in all books (Collins, 2005). Thus, direct vocabulary instruction needs to be an integral part of post-reading activities that actively engage children’s direct attention to novel words.
Limitations of the Present Study
This study had several limitations. The first limitation concerns the span of reading instruction. The study was conducted during the short and intensive class period. Thus, the participants were required to finish storybook reading, post-reading activities, and immediate outcome measures within a forty-minute class period under pressure, which might have undermined the children’s intrinsic motivation in reading English storybooks and might have reduced the potential beneficial effect of story reading and post-reading activities. Future research could offer reading instruction in the first class, and then have post-reading activities in another class, which might lead to greater insights into the effect of post-reading activities on young EFL learners’ word learning.
The second limitation concerns the way the outcome measures were administered. The test items in the written and spoken outcome measures were isolated target words, and the results revealed that there was a positive effect of post-reading word instruction in isolation on young EFL learners’ word learning. However, it had been found that children demonstrated excellent performance when the congruency between training and outcome measures was high
(Martin-Chang et al., 2007). A good avenue for the outcome measure in the future research would be the one that includes testing vocabulary knowledge in context to assess the effect of word learning in context more properly.
REFERENCES
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Alexander, J. C. (1998). Reading skill and context facilitation: A classic study revisited. The Journal of Educational Research, 9, 314-318.
Archer, N., & Bryant, P. (2001). Investigating the role of context in learning to read: A direct test of Goodman’s model. British Journal of Psychology, 92, 579-591.
Biemiller, A., & Boote, C. (2006). An effective method for building meaning vocabulary in primary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 44-62.
Blok, H. (1999). Reading to young children in educational settings: A meta-analysis of recent research. Language Learning, 49, 343-371.
Brett, A., Rothlein, L., & Hurley, M. (1996). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories and explanations of target words. The Elementary School Journal, 96, 415-422.
Collins, M. F. (2005). ESL preschoolers’ English vocabulary acquisition from storybook reading. Reading Research
Quarterly, 40, 406-408.
Day, R. R., Omura, C., & Hiramitsu, M. (1991). Incidental EFL vocabulary learning and reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7, 541-551.
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1981). Peabody picture vocabulary test-revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
Ehri, L. C. (1991). Development of the ability to read words. In R.
Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. D. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 2, pp. 383-417). New York:
Longman.
Ehri, L. C., & Roberts, K. T. (1979). Do beginners learn printed words better in context or in isolation? Child Development, 50, 675-685.
Ehri, L. C., & Wilce, L. S. (1980). Do beginners learn to read function words better in sentences or in lists? Reading Research Quarterly, 15, 451-476.
Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories.
Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 174-187.
Frantzen, D. (2003). Factors affecting how second language Spanish students derive meaning from context. The Modern Language Journal, 87, 168-199.
Fukkink, R. G., Blok, H., & de Glopper, K. (2001). Deriving word meaning from written context: A multicomponential skill.
Language Learning, 51, 477-496.
Goerss, B. L., Beck, I. L., & McKeown, M. G. (1999). Increasing remedial students’ ability to derive word meaning from context.
Reading Psychology, 20, 151-175.
Gough, P. B., & Juel, C. (1991). The first stages of word recognition.
In L. Rieben & C. A. Perfetti (Eds.), Learning to read: Basic research and its implications (pp. 47-56). Hillsadle, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Goulden, R., Nation, P., & Read, R. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11, 41-63.
Grabe, W., & Stoller, L. F. (2002). Teaching and researching reading.
Harlow: Pearson Education.
Huang, C. C. (2001). An investigation of ESP students’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Selected Papers from the Tenth International Symposium on English Teaching (pp.
435-445). Taipei: Crane Publishing Company.
Huckin, T., & Bloch, J. (1993). Strategies for inferring word-meanings in context: A cognitive model. In T. Huckin, M.
Haynes, & J. Coady (Eds.), Second language reading and vocabulary learning (pp. 153-176). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hulstijn, J. H., Hollander, M., & Greidanus, T. (1996). Incidental vocabulary learning by advanced foreign language students:
The influence of marginal glosses, dictionary use, and reoccurrence of unknown words. The Modern Language Journal, 80, 327-339.
Hung, Y. L., Huang, Sh.-Sh., Chu, I.-L., Liou, Y.-M., Lin, J.-R., &
Hsieh, L.-Sh. (2006). Word recognition test. Taipei:
Psychological Publishing Co., Ltd.
Joe, A. (1998). What effects do text-based tasks prompting generation have on incidental vocabulary acquisition? Applied Linguistics, 19, 357-377.
Johnston, F. R. (1998). The reader, the text, and the task: Learning words in first grade. The Reading Teacher, 51, 666-675.
Johnston, F. R. (2000). Word learning in predictable text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 248-255.
Justice, L. M., Meier, J., & Walpole, S. (2005). Learning new words from storybooks: An efficacy study with at-risk kindergartners.
Language, Speech, & Hearing Services in Schools, 36, 17-32.
Koda, K. (1999). Development of L2 intra-word orthographic sensitivity and decoding skills. The Modern Language Journal, 83, 51-64.
Kondo-Brown, K. (2006). How do English L1 learners of advanced Japanese infer unknown Kanji words in authentic texts?
Language Learning, 56, 109-153.
Landi, N., Perfetti, C. A., Bolger, D. J., Dunlap, S., & Foorman, B. R.
(2006). The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: A paradoxical relation between reading and learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 94, 114-133.
Laufer, B., & Shmueli, K. (1997). Memorizing new words: Does teaching have anything to do with it? RELC Journal, 28, 89-108.
Lesgold, A. M., Resnick, L. B., & Hammond, K. (1985). Learning to read: A longitudinal study of word skill development in two curricula. In G. Waller & E. MacKinnon (Eds.), Reading research: Advances in theory and practice (pp. 107-138). New York: Academic Press.
Lin, H. L. (2003). Integrating English children’s picture books with
teaching children English as a foreign language in a 9-year joint curricula plan for elementary and junior high schools. English Teaching & Learning, 27(1), 15-30.
Martin-Chang, S. L., Levy, B. A., & O’Neil, S. (2007). Word acquisition, retention, and transfer: Findings from contextual and isolated word training. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 96, 37-56.
McCarthy, M. (1990). Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKeown, M. G. (1985). The acquisition of word meaning from context by children of high and low ability. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 482-496.
Mondria, J., & Wit-De Boer, M. (1991). The effects of contextual richness on the guessability and the retention of words in a foreign language. Applied Linguistics, 12(3), 249-267.
Morrison, L. (1996). Talking about words: A study of French as a second language learners’ lexical inferencing procedures.
Canadian Modern Language Review, 53, 41-75.
Nagy, W. E., Herman, P. A., & Anderson, R. C. (1985). Learning words in context. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 233-253.
Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. New York:
Newbury House.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nation, I. S. P. (2008). Teaching vocabulary: Strategies and techniques. Boston: Cengage Learning.
Nation, K., & Snowling, M. J. (1998). Individual differences in contextual facilitation: Evidence from dyslexia and poor reading
comprehension. Child Development, 69, 996-1011.
Nemko, B. (1984). Context versus isolation: Another look at beginning readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 461-467.
Nicholson, T. (1991). Do children read words better in context or lists?
A classic study revisited. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 444-450.
Nicholson, T., Bailey, J., & McArthur, J. (1991). Context cues in reading: The gap between research and popular opinion.
Reading, Writing, and Learning Disabilities, 7, 33-41.
Oxford, R., & Scarcella, R. C. (1994). Second language vocabulary learning among adults: State of the art in vocabulary instruction.
System, 22, 231-243.
Pardo, L. S. (2004). What every teacher needs to know about comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 58, 272-280.
Penno, J. F., Wilkinson, I. A. G., & Moore, D. W. (2002). Vocabulary acquisition from teacher explanation and repeated listening to stories: Do they overcome the Matthew effect? Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 23-33.
Prince, P. (1996). Second language vocabulary learning: The role of context versus translations as a function of proficiency. The Modern Language Journal, 80, 478-493.
Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robbins, C., & Ehri, L. C. (1994). Reading storybooks to kindergartners helps them learn new vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 54-64.
Roth, S. F., & Perfetti, C. A. (1980). A framework for reading,
language comprehension, and language disability. Topics in Language Disorder, 11, 15-27.
Rott, S. (1999). The effect of exposure frequency on intermediate language learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention through reading. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 589-619.
Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge:
Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge: