Volume 5 (2014) Issue 1
Incidental
Vocabulary Learning through Reading1
Nina
Daskalovska (Stip, Republic of Macedonia)
Abstract
(English)
A
lot of studies on vocabulary learning have demonstrated that one of
the ways of acquiring vocabulary is through reading. The purpose of
this study was to replicate the study conducted by Zahar, Cob and
Spada (2001) and compare the results with the original study and
another replication study using the same design. The study was
conducted with university students who were in their first year of
studying English language and literature. In order to establish the
participants’ vocabulary size, Nation’s Vocabulary Levels Test
(1990) was used. The effect of the reading treatment was determined
by using a pretest-posttest design. The results of the posttest
showed that the participants learned one in three previously unknown
words. There was a positive relationship between the participants’
vocabulary size and the relative gains as well as between the
frequency of the words in the text and the relative gain scores. The
findings suggest that learners’ general knowledge and cognitive
abilities may be significant factors that affect the rate of
vocabulary acquisition through reading.
Key
words: vocabulary acquisition, incidental learning, reading,
vocabulary size, word frequency
1
Introduction
It
is believed that reading is
one of
the best ways of enriching one’s vocabulary knowledge. The
credibility of this
belief
has been confirmed
by
studies which have demonstrated that during their primary and
secondary education, children
learn
about 3.000 words a year (Nagy & Herman 1987: 21).
On the
other hand, direct instruction in the classroom enables
children to learn about
200-300
words per year (Nagy et al. 1987: 237).
These
findings suggest
that
most of the
vocabulary
is acquired through listening and reading. Comparing the distribution
of words in oral and print language, Cunningham & Stanovich
(1998: 10) found out that the average frequency of the words in oral
speech was in the 400-600 range,
and
came to the conclusion that compared to written language, oral
language was
“lexically
impoverished”. This implies that reading can greatly contribute to
vocabulary
development,
which
has been confirmed in
first
language acquisition
studies
(Saragi
et al. 1978, Jenkins et al. 1984, Nagy et al. 1985, Nagy et al.
1987).
Krashen’s
Input Hypothesis, which postulates
that
children
acquire
language by being exposed to
comprehensible
input which is a little beyond their
current
level of
competence
and that listening and reading are of primary importance for language
acquisition
(Krashen
1982; Krashen & Terrel 1983), has prompted researchers to
investigate the possibility of L2 learners to acquire vocabulary
through reading.
There is now a substantial body of research which demonstrates that
L2 learners can also learn vocabulary incidentally while reading for
meaning (Brown
et al. 2008, Cho
and Krashen 1994, Day et al. 1991, Dupuy and Krashen 1993, Elley & Mangubhai 1981, Grabe & Stoller 1997, Hafiz & Tudor 1989,
Horst 2005, Horst et al. 1998, Horst & Meara 1999,
Pellicer-Sánchez & Schmitt 2010, Pigada
& Schmitt 2006, Pitts
et al. 1989, Waring & Takaki, 2003, Zahar et al. 2001). However,
these studies have sparked a debate about the effectiveness of
reading for vocabulary learning. Some researchers remark that some of the studies
at times lacked control of the research design (Nation 2001: 155) and
were “methodologically flawed” (Horst et al. 1998: 210). Others
point out that these studies lack validity because learning
vocabulary from context was not compared with other techniques, which
would determine the effectiveness of different methods (Raptis 1997:
573). However, we should bear in mind that some techniques are quite
different and cannot be compared easily. Moreover, the aim of studies
on vocabulary acquisition should not be finding the best way of
learning vocabulary, but finding several effective ways which can be
combined for achieving the best results. This is especially true if
we know that learners have different learning styles and preferences,
and one method will not be suitable for all learners. Thus, we should
strive to determine which methods enable learners to acquire
vocabulary knowledge effectively, and it is up to learners and
teachers to determine which methods they will use and how they will
combine the recommended ways of vocabulary acquisition.
In
addition to conducting new studies, replicating existing studies can
help us gain deeper insights and can enable us to make stronger
conclusions about a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this study
was to replicate the study conducted by Zahar et al. (2001), to
compare the results of the present study with the original study and
another replication study and draw conclusions about the
effectiveness of reading for vocabulary learning.
2
The Original Study
The
study (Zahar et al. 2001) was conducted with 144
grade seven ESL (English as a second language) students in Canada who
read the text The
Golden Fleece,
which contains 2,387 words. In order to determine the participants’
vocabulary size, they were given the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation
1990) at the five levels. The pretest / posttest consisted of 30
words which appeared with various frequencies in the text. Before the
treatment, the participants knew the meaning of 19.66 of the target
words, which increased to 21.82 after the treatment. Thus, the
participants learned the meaning of 2.16 words from the remaining
10.34 unknown words or 20.88% of the available words. The correlation
between the frequency of the words in the text and the absolute
learning gains was 0.36. As the effect of frequency of the words in
the text was expressed most clearly for the participants with the
smallest vocabulary sizes, the authors suggest that the role of
frequency is greater for learners with smaller vocabulary sizes.
3
The First Replication Study
In
the first replication study (Daskalovska 2014), the participants were
83 secondary school students, aged 16, who had been studying English
as a foreign language for six years. The study design was the same as
in the original study. The results of the Vocabulary Levels
Test showed that the participants knew 54.88% of all the tested
words. Because of the big differences in their vocabulary sizes, they
were divided into three groups: Group 1 knew 76.58%, Group 2 knew
57.54% and Group 3 knew 34.33% of the words. The posttest revealed
that on average, the participants learned 3.02 words or 25.98% of the
previously unknown words, which is about one in four words. The
correlation between the participants’ vocabulary size and the
learning gains was not significant, while the correlation between word
frequency and learning gains was r=0.34, which showed that the
frequency of the words in the text played a certain role on the rate
of acquisition of the unknown words, but unlike the original study,
it was less significant for the participants with smaller vocabulary
sizes. The learning gains in this study were slightly higher than the
learning gains in the original study, even though the vocabulary
sizes of the participants in this study were slightly lower than
those in the original study. Since the participants in the
replication study were four years older, the author suggests that the
suitability of the text, the readers’ general knowledge and their
cognitive abilities may be significant factors in incidental
vocabulary learning.
4
Research Design
The present
study attempts to answer the following questions:
1. How
does reading affect
vocabulary acquisition?
2. What
is the effect of participants'
vocabulary size on the
acquisition of unknown vocabulary?
3. What
is the relationship between word
frequency in the text and the
rate at which words are acquired?
The
participants in this study were 94 university students in the first
year of their undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature
in the Republic of Macedonia. They had studied English as a foreign
language for eight years in primary and secondary school. This age
group was selected because it was considered that their vocabulary
sizes would match rather closely the vocabulary sizes of the
participants in the original study who were learning English as a
second language. By excluding the factor of vocabulary size, the
effects of age difference between the participants in the original
study, the first replication study and the present study could be
seen more clearly. The results of the Vocabulary Levels Test, which
was administered before the treatment, showed that there were
considerable differences in participants' vocabulary sizes. In
order to determine the effect of vocabulary size on the acquisition
rate of vocabulary more clearly, the participants were divided into
three groups.
As
in the original study, the participants read the text The
Golden Fleece,
which is a Greek myth taken from an intermediate ESL reader and contains 2,387 words. The computer analysis of the text showed that
91% of the words in the text belong to the first 2,000 most frequent
words, 1% of the words are from the University Word List, and 8% are
off-list words half of which are proper nouns (Zahar et al. 2001). As
most of the participants were familiar with the words belonging to
the 2.000-word-level list, it was assumed that that the coverage of known words would at least be 95%, which would enable the
learners to understand the text and infer the meaning of unknown
words from the context (Hirsh
and Nation 1992, Hu and Nation 2000, Laufer 1997).
In
order to determine the effect of the participants’ vocabulary size
on vocabulary acquisition, it was necessary to establish their
vocabulary size prior to the treatment. For this purpose, Nation’s
Vocabulary Levels Test (1990) was used. It measures learners’
knowledge of words at five levels: 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 and
University Word Level.
The
pretest / posttest consisted of 30 target words which appeared in the
text with a different frequency, ranging from 1 to 15. However, the
majority of the words appeared from two to five times.
The test was designed in the same way as the Vocabulary Levels Test
and contained 10 blocks of 6 words (Zahar et al. 2001).
The
participants were asked for their agreement to take part in a study,
but the goal of the study was not disclosed. The Vocabulary Levels
Test and the pretest were administered one week before the treatment.
In the original study, the participants listened to the recording of
the text and followed it in their books at the same time. A recording
of the text was not available for the present study, so the text was
read aloud by the instructor and the participants followed it in
their copies. The reading treatment lasted 30 minutes. The
posttest was administered two days after the reading treatment.
5
Results
The results of
the Vocabulary Levels Test show that the participants knew the
meaning of 56.37% of the words, with the greatest knowledge of the
words at the 2,000-word level and the University Word List, and only
21.93% of the words at the 10,000-word level.
Mean
|
Standard
deviation
|
Range
|
|
2,000
word level
|
23.45
|
6.26
|
22
|
3,000
word level
|
18.5
|
7.04
|
23
|
5,000
word level
|
15.2
|
5.14
|
20
|
University
Word List
|
20.83
|
4.90
|
15
|
10,000
word level
|
6.58
|
3.32
|
15
|
Total
84.56 (56.37%)
|
|||
Table
1: Vocabulary Levels Test results
However, there
were considerable differences between the participants' vocabulary
sizes so that in order to determine the effect of vocabulary size on
vocabulary learning, they were divided into three groups. The figures
in Table 2 show that the first group knew 73.33% of the words while
the third group only knew 37.58%.
- Group200030005000UWL10000Total%128.4225.2820.8525.719.7111073.33225.5520.3315.2222.336.4489.8859.91316.7510.510.2514.87456.3737.58
Table
2: Vocabulary Levels Test results by groups
The
participants’ vocabulary sizes were reflected in their knowledge of
the target words on the pretest. Thus, the first group knew 22.75
words or 75.83% of the target words, while the third group only knew
10.75 words or 35.83%. Thus, the number of words available for
learning was quite different as well. For the first group, there were
only 7.25 words available for learning, for the second group, there
were 10.25 words and for the third group, the number of available
words was 19.25:
- GroupNPre-testSD%Post-testSD%Gain%Relative gain %13122.751.9875.8326.371.3987.93.6212.0743.8423219.752.9665.8325.51.81855.7519.1754.6433110.753.6935.8313.124.9643.732.377.912.77Total9417.756.0359.1621.666.8872.23.9113.0437.09
Table
3: Pretest-posttest results by groups
The
posttest results show that on the average, the participants were able
to learn the meaning of 3.91 words or 31.9% of the previously unknown
words, which represents a relative gain of 37.09%. The t-test for
paired samples (t=6.38, p<0 .01="" difference="" shows="" span="" that="" the="">between
the pretest and the posttest was significantly greater than chance.
According to these results, the participants managed to learn one in
three unknown words, which is one of the highest scores ever in the
research on vocabulary acquisition through reading. The group with
the greatest gain was group 2, that learned the meaning of 5.75 words
or 54.64% of the available words for learning, which means that they
learned more than half of the unknown words. Group 1 had a gain of
3.62 words or 43.84%. On the other hand, the group that had 19.25
words available for learning managed to learn the meaning of only
2.37 words or 12.77%.
The
Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient for the correlation
between the relative gain scores and the total scores on the
Vocabulary Levels Test for group 1 was r=0.13; for group 2, it was
r=-0.40; and for group 3, it was r=0.54. The correlation figures and
the posttest results show that the effect of the vocabulary size on
learning vocabulary from reading is most clearly expressed for
learners with the smallest vocabulary sizes and indicate that
probably the main reason for the small learning gains were the
considerably small vocabulary sizes of the learners in this group.
They knew only half of the words at the 2.000 word level, which
implies that they probably had difficulties in understanding the text
and inferring the meaning of new words from reading.
As
mentioned above, the frequency of the target words in the text ranged
from 1 to 15, and the majority of words appeared from two to five
times. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient for the
correlation between the learning gain scores and the frequency of the
words in the text was r=0.29 for group 1, r=0.30 for group 2, and
r=0.11 for group 3. These figures show that the effect of frequency
was the least significant for the group with the smallest vocabulary
size, which is in contrast with the results obtained in the original
study.
However,
it seems that due to the small vocabulary sizes of these learners, the coverage of known words in the text was much lower, and this was
likely to affect learners’ text comprehension so that the factor of
frequency could not play a more important role in the acquisition of
vocabulary.
6
Discussion
The
aim of this study, which was a second replication of the study
conducted by Zahar et al. (2001), was to find out whether the results
obtained in the original study and the first replication study would
be confirmed with another group of learners in a different setting.
In order to compare the results, we first need to state the
similarities and differences between the participants in the
three studies.
In
the original study, the participants were seventh grade students
around the age of 12 who were studying English in an ESL context. In
the first replication study, the participants were secondary school
students, aged 16, studying English in an EFL context. In the present
study the participants were first-year university students, aged 19,
who were also studying English in an EFL context. According to the
results of the Vocabulary Levels Test, there was not a substantial
difference between the vocabulary sizes of the participants in the
three studies, but the participants in the original study on average
knew 59% of the words at the five levels, the participants in the
first replication study knew 54.88% and the participants in the
present study they knew 56.37% of all the words. Thus, the greatest
vocabulary size was recorded for the participants in the original
study.
In
relation to the first question, in the original study the
participants learned the meaning of 2.16 words or 20.88% of the
previously unknown words, in the first replication study they learned
3.02
words or 25.98%,
while
in the present study, the participants were able to learn the meaning
of 3.91 words or 31.9%, which means that the participants in the
present study had the greatest learning gains and learned one in
three previously unknown words as compared to one in four words in
the first replication study and one in five words in the original
study. As the main difference between the participants was age, which
implies different levels of cognitive abilities and world knowledge
which, according to Hirsh (2003), are important conditions for better
reading comprehension, we may conclude that apart from vocabulary
size, the suitability of the text, the learners’ background
knowledge and cognitive abilities are significant factors that
influence the rate of vocabulary acquisition through reading.
The
second question investigated the effect of vocabulary size on
vocabulary learning. In the three studies, the participants with the
smallest and the biggest vocabulary size had lower gains than those
in the middle. The results suggest that knowledge of around 60% of
the words at the five levels of the Vocabulary Levels Test ensures
good reading comprehension and an ability to infer the meaning of
words from context for texts graded at an intermediate level. The
smaller learning gains of the participants with the biggest
vocabulary sizes suggest that if the number of unknown words in the
text is too low, readers do not focus on them and do not invest too
much effort to infer their meaning as they can easily understand the
meaning of the text. This confirms Krashen’s hypothesis (1982) that
in order for input to be beneficial for learners and to create
conditions for learning the meaning of unknown words, it has to be
slightly beyond the learners’ current level.
In
relation to the last question whose aim was to find out the effect of
word frequency on vocabulary learning, the results in the three
studies show a moderate effect, but whereas in the original study,
the greatest effect was found for the learners with the smallest
vocabulary sizes, both replication studies show smaller effects for
the participants with the smallest vocabulary sizes. One of the
reasons may be the difficulty of the text for these learners.
However, this text does not seem quite suitable for investigating the
factor of word frequency as there was not enough variability in the
frequency of the target words.
7
Conclusion
This
study has investigated the effect of reading on vocabulary
acquisition by replicating the study conducted by Zahar et al.
(2001). It has demonstrated that EFL learners can learn the meaning
of unknown words from reading. The participants in this study learned
more words than the participants in the original study and the first
replication study even though their vocabulary sizes were similar.
The major difference between the participants was their age, which
implies that besides vocabulary size, the learners’ cognitive
abilities and world knowledge can greatly influence their ability to
infer the meaning of unknown words from context. Moreover, the
results of the study suggest that if there are only a few unfamiliar
words in the text, readers will not put too much effort to learn the
meaning of the unknown words, which means that texts should be a bit
more challenging in order to be beneficial for learners.
The
findings of the study suggest that if EFL learners read texts at the
appropriate level for 30 minutes a day, they may learn more than
1,000 new words a year, which means that, combined with direct
instruction, reading can greatly improve their vocabulary knowledge.
Thus, incorporating an extensive reading component in the language
programmes would significantly increase the possibility of acquiring
a body of vocabulary that would enable learners to become
competent users of the respective foreign language.
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Author:
Nina
Daskalovska, Ph.D.
Goce
Delcev University
Department
of English Language and Literature
Krste
Misirkov 10-A, Stip 2000
Republic
of Macedonia
E-mail:
nina.daskalovska@ugd.edu.mk
1
The present study was first presented at the 3rd International
Conference on Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (FLTAL) in
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, in 2013.