The importance of listening and reading
Listening and reading is "the most important of all the sources of vocabulary learning (Nation, 2022, p. 336). Moreover, extensive reading increases the opportunities of guessing from context which is an essential tool to grow a learner’s vocabulary size and therefore enhance text comprehension. In fact, extensive is one the various types of contexts for learning vocabulary, other types include:
- Taking part in conversations
- Listening to stories
- Viewing films, television and web-based resources
(Nation, 2022, p. 336-337)
Incidental or intentional learning?
According to Hulstijn (2003) incidental learning refers to the process that learners are not conscient that a test will take place. In other words, students are learning without the idea of preparing themselves for a test. Learning vocabulary from context should be largely incidental learning, but there should be a deliberate, intentional focus on developing the skills and strategies needed to carry out such learning. In fact, it is difficult to separate incidental and intentional learning as "most learning involves conscious attention." (Nation, 2022, p. 337)
Finding the right balance of message-focused activities and direct study of language items...
Therefore, the incidental learning with the message-focused activities aim should represent three-quarter of the learning program (Nation, 2022, p. 336). Incidental learning through listening and reading. The main focus of the attention of the students should be on the meaning of the text.
Effect of reading on vocabulary growth
First and foremost, learners should increase their time dealing with the language with many means or the amount of input, and certainly through reading. As a starting point, reading accompanied with the ability of inferring from context, a guessing strategy, will enable students to increase their vocabulary size. This help students to decode and access the meaning of words. These four elements, being exposed to language through reading, then the ability of inferring from context, followed by decoding skills along with the skill to grasp the word meaning will translates of a better text comprehension that will obviously in return enable learners to connect more with the language, through reading for example as an accessible mean if not the most accessible, among others.
The following causal circle of Perfetti (2010) illustrates easily the causal effect of the amount of input, such as reading on the vocabulary growth that lead to the ultimate goal, comprehension throughout skills.
As one can see, the model of the causal circle is a linear diagram that does not include extensive reading as such as the repeated occasions to grow up vocabulary size are not considered. In fact, it is important to see the same words back, ideally 16 times, and in various contexts (Nation, 2022, p. 340) Moreover, this model "ignores or assumes
important factors like motivation, knowledge of the world, and oral
language growth" (Ibid., p. 340)
Our goal: In-class implementation of reading sessions
In order to assist L2 learners of English, as teachers we should integrate in our class schedule a reading session of about 10 minutes in every class of 60 minutes. In other words, students can invest 10 minutes of reading at the beginning of the period and will be asked to read about 20 minutes each week at home for a total of 30 minutes. The reading will be Therefore during a school year of about 40 weeks, students can reach 2nd 1000 word-level, thus 200,000 tokens to read in an average of 29 minutes of reading per week (Nation, 2022, Chapter 5, p. 199).
We can follow the four ways regarding on how teachers would be able to enhance learning from context of their students as Nation clearly indicated to decide on the material and maximize their practice.
"The most important ways in which teachers can help learners
improve learning from context is by
1. helping them find and choose reading and listening material of
appropriate difficulty
2. encouraging them to read a lot and helping them gain a lot of comprehensible spoken input
3. improving their reading skills so that they read fluently and with
good comprehension
4. providing training in guessing from context, including training in a
particular strategy which includes giving attention to various clues,
and providing substantial focused guessing practice."
Important notes concerning guessing from context
As teachers, if we want that learners can guess from context through the available clues, they should be familiar to "at least 95% of the running words" (Nation, 2022, p. 341). A teacher should take into consideration some important factors of the vocabulary words.
- Using simplified or adapted texts
- Knowledge of the learner and the unknown words by each learner
- Skill of the learner to guess
- Learner should receive credit even if the guesses are not 100% authentic
- "Distinguish guessing from natural contexts, from deliberate learning" (Nation, 2022, p. 343)
Here is an example of a passage where an action verb needs to be guessed.
Sample sentence:
The snake slithered through the grass. It was hunting.
You must discover what slithered means by using logic. Here are your choices, and the analysis:
- INCORRECT: the sentence above says THROUGH the grass. “Through” means there
- INCORRECT: the sentence above says it was hunting. Snakes don't sleep when they
- INCORRECT: the sentence above says it was hunting. Snakes don't eat when they are
hunting. They eat AFTER they hunt.
- CORRECT ANSWER: the sentence above says THROUGH the grass. “Through”
means that there is some movement.
Therefore, the word "through" is the clue word that the learner should focus on to deduce and guess the meaning of the action verb done by the snake.
Effectiveness of inferring/guessing from context
There are a couple of studies realized to know the success of the inferring or guessing strategy in different context settings. In our purpose, the study of Knight (1994) on the words learned from context by second language learners is interesting. The learners knew as required at least 95% of the words. The result of the study indicates that "(...) on average 6 per cent of the unknown words on an immediate translation test and 27 per cent on an immediate multiple-choice test (corrected for guessing)." (Nation, 2022, p. 343-344). These numbers show the effectiveness of assessing with multiple-choice questions test as this type of assessment provide choices and additional guessing opportunities. However, as low as there are, they also suggest that tests are of "poor design" and to the fact of the "cumulative nature of such learning involving only small gains per meeting for most words" (Ibid., p. 344).
It is noteworthy that studies with second language learners are not completely realized as native speakers. Nevertheless, a research reveals a similar result as the one in the multiple-choice test. That is to say, that about one in five, or 20%, "of the unknown words were
learned to some degree" of a long text (Nation, 2022, p. 346).
There are three main factors that influence the scores (see Nation, 2022, p. 346)
1. Length of the text
2. The use of a simplified reader where the unknown words do not occur too densely
3. The conceptual knowledge that learners bring from their first language
A last important observation would be to note the long-term effect of "small gains". If students read extensively, that is to say reading a large amount of reading will obviously translate into learning a high amount of vocabulary.
Activities
Activity 1: Contextual Word Guessing (Elementary, 5th grade)
The activity helps students learn new words by figuring out their meanings from the context. It makes them better at understanding what they read and builds their vocabulary skills.
Instructions:
Explain the importance of using context clues to understand unfamiliar words.
Discuss various types of context clues students can look for, like synonyms, antonyms, examples and explanations.
Show a sentence with a word missing.
Show how to guess the missing word by looking at the words around it.
Say out loud how you’re figuring it out.
Remember to think about what the whole sentence means.
Split the class into small groups and give each group a different sentence with a missing word.
Have them work together to guess the missing word using clues from the sentence and walk around to help if they need it.
After, ask the groups to share their guesses and talk about how they figured out the words.
If they got it wrong, help clear up any confusion.
Activity 2: Word Detective (Elementary, Cycle 3, Grade 5 and/or 6)
This activity helps students understand new words by figuring out their meanings from the context. By working as word detectives, students learn to use sentences to understand unfamiliar vocabulary.
Explain to students that they will be word detectives today, searching for clues in sentences to guess the right meaning of new words.
Explain that understanding the context helps us figure out what unfamiliar words mean.
Show a sentence or paragraph on the board with a new word.
The teacher models how to guess the meaning by reading it aloud and think aloud as he figures out what the new word means using other words around it.
Explain how it was figured out and why context matters.
Give each student group a sentence with a new word and have them work together to guess the word’s meaning using the context.
Help them if needed as they work.
References
Nation, I. S. P. (2022). Chapter 5 - Vocabulary and reading and writing. Learning vocabulary in another language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Nation, I. S. P. (2022). Chapter 9 - Learning words from context. Learning vocabulary in another language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Demetros, Catherine. Context Clues: 5 Fun Activities to Boost Vocabulary Development | Lexia. (May 5, 2018). Www.lexialearning.com. https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/context-clues-5-fun-activities-boost-vocabulary-development#:~:text=Stop%20and%20reread%20the%20words
Yıldız Technical University. Guessing Vocabulary in Context. (n.d.). https://ybd.yildiz.edu.tr/images/files/Guessing%20Vocabulary%20in%20Context.pdf
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