 |
| Photo by Tzvi Meller |
As much as it seems counter-intuitive, teaching new vocabulary in
semantic sets (e.g. jobs: doctor, teacher, lawyer etc. or colours: red, blue, yellow etc.) does not facilitate learning. As far back as in the 1990s,
research showed that teaching semantically related items is counter-productive. Have these findings been taken
on board? Of course not! New vocabulary in elementary level coursebooks is
routinely presented in lists of semantically related items.
Semantic sets and interference
In 1993, Thomas Tinkham investigated the effect of learning new words
under two conditions. One group received a list of words belonging to the same
semantic set while the other was given random, semantically unrelated words. Tinkham
revealed that list-learning of unrelated words yielded better results as the second
group performed significantly better when they were asked to recalled the target words.
A few years later, Rob Waring (1997) replicated the experiment with two groups
of Japanese learners of English and confirmed the results. More recently, Erten
and Tekin (2008) in their study of 60 Turkish 4th graders, found the same
negative effect on recall and learning when new words were grouped according to
semantic categories.
The results of these studies are usually interpreted in the light of
Interference theory which states that similarity between the items learned at
the same time hinders learning and retention. In vocabulary teaching it means
that when words learned at the same time are closely related or share common characteristics
they will interfere with each other. You have probably observed the phenomenon
of learners remembering the words they have learned (or,
rather, their forms: how a word is spelled or pronounced) and the meanings but confusing which
word goes with each meaning.
However, there are other reasons why learning lists of semantically
related words is counter-productive. Presenting words in such lists, related by
virtue of their belonging to the same superordinate category (shirt, skirt,
trousers - CLOTHES), doesn’t give the learner much information about how the words in a list should be used. The same is true of other paradigmatic (vertical) relationships, such as synonyms and antonyms. (See my post on paradigmatic and syntagmatic
relationships HERE).
Semantic sets in coursebooks
Despite the above arguments, coursebooks – especially at elementary levels – still
organize new vocabulary in semantic lists. What can teachers do to counter-balance
the negative effect of semantic clustering? This is the question we tried to
answer with two groups of Primary school teachers I’ve been working with this
year on an INSET course in vocabulary teaching. We started by brainstorming kinds of vocabulary items that are commonly presented in coursebooks in lists and came up with the following categories:
Transport bus bike taxi train plane van | Colours red blue yellow green black white |
Clothes shirt skirt scarf trousers/pants hat | Animals cat dog lion bear elephant |
Classroom objects pen pencil ruler eraser | Food pizza pasta hamburger ice-cream |
Developing alternatives
We then looked at how we can teach new vocabulary horizontally instead of
presenting vertical lists, i.e. how to teach new words with the words they are likely to go with (co-text) rather than
with other words sharing the same superordinate concept. Colours seemed to be an easy category
to start with.
Colours
Instead of teaching a list of, say, six colours, it would be more effective
to focus on just three at a time and present these alongside the nouns they can
go with, i.e. adjective + noun collocations.
blue sky
red dress or flower
black coffee
followed by another three in the following lesson:
green grass
yellow sand
white snow
We felt that white snow perhaps may not have immediate relevance for primary
school pupils in a hot Mediterranean country,
so white clouds was suggested instead. White clouds can also combine with blue
sky (white clouds in the blue sky) providing the learner with immediately
useable language for describing, for example, a picture of a landscape. Note
also how alliterative patterns in red dress and green grass can serve as
mnemonic devices which have been shown to facilitate learning (Boers &
Lindstromberg 2005)
Animals
Colours can also combine easily with animals, especially if you use the
Brown Bear story.
Here, it is advisable not to teach the whole story to children but
introduce 3-4 animals (with their colours) at a time.
Brown Bear, Red Bird, Yellow Duck in the first lesson, and then gradually add other colour+animal combinations:
Blue Horse, Green Frog, Purple Cat, White Dog, Black Sheep etc.
Clothes
Clothes was not an easy category to convert into “horizontal” teaching. The following pattern came to mind:
STUDENT NAME is wearing | a shirt a skirt a hat etc |
This is clearly a step in the right direction as here we provide also a
useful grammatical structure the new words can be slotted in but a semantic list
still remains a long list.
Again, an alternative can be combining words for clothes with colours
using the items of clothing your students are wearing and presenting them in the
same incremental fashion (three at a time) as colours + animals combinations.
Classroom objects
 |
| Photo by aClilToClimb via eltpics on Flickr |
Once again, one possibility is dividing a long list into two and
combining the items with colours using the real objects (realia) students
happen to have with them. Or adding the following grammar to the list:
Have you got a(n) … / Do you
have a(n) … ?
or – depending on the level of the learner -
Can I use your …?
Can I borrow your …?
Transport
There are many ways these can be extended horizontally, for example:
I always take the bus to school / I go to school by bus
In this video Herbert Puchta teaches new words and
provides collocations for them using Total Physical Response (TPR)
Similar action stories can be created with:
get on/off the bus/train/plane
drive a car/van
ride a bike
Food
This group often has cognates (=words that are the same across languages)
such as pizza and hamburger. Some patterns that food items can be taught with are the following:
I eat I have I like | eggs pasta vegetables | for | breakfast lunch dinner supper |
These patterns also helps relate names of different foods to meals they
are likely to be eaten for, thus creating mental associations between words. For example, eggs for breakfast, pasta for supper
Hania Kryzsewska in her article Chunking for Beginners
suggests teaching different food names with countries they come
from. By the way, countries are another category which tends to be presented
in lists. Hania’s horizontal alternatives would look something like this:
Tea from China
Pizza from Italy
Wine from France
Football from Brazil
Cars from Germany
Kangaroos from Australia
Note that the list contains not only names of food but other unrelated
items.
I hope the above suggestions help you add a “horizontal” aspect to your
vocabulary teaching. I would like to thank my course participants for their
contributions and ideas, and generally being lovely groups to work with. I hope
you learned from the course as much as I learned from you!
For more suggestions on alternatives to vertical lists, see Andrew Walkley’s posts
The problems of lexical sets and some alternative approaches and Developing Lexical Sets
References
Boers, F., & Lindstromberg, S. (2005). Finding ways to make
phrase-learning feasible: The mnemonic effect of alliteration. System, 33(2),
225–238
Erten, İ. H., & Tekin, M. (2008). Effects on vocabulary
acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically
unrelated sets. System, 36(3), 407–422
Tinkham, T. (1993). The effect of semantic clustering on the
learning of second language vocabulary. System, 21(3), 371–380
Waring, R. (1997). The
negative effects of learning words in semantic sets: A replication. System,
25(2), 261–274
Comments
Post a Comment