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Teaching vocabulary out of context: conclusions
This follows on my earlier post Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time?
About a month ago I blogged about my mini action research on decontextualised vocabulary learning. The post generated some discussion with some people arguing that there was nothing decontexualised about it - you can read the original post and the comments here. The main finding was that on the post-test there was no difference between the items which were learnt out of context and the items presented in class in context. So is decontextualised vocabulary teaching a justified strategy?Obvious benefits
Even though the decontextualised “Go home and look up” activity produced mixed results and there was a lot of reteaching involved, I still consider it to be successful. Besides enriching their vocabulary it gives learners a sense of autonomy as well as responsibility for their learning, not to mention practice with using dictionaries, an often overlooked skill in ELT. I will definitely keep giving my students such tasks it in the future.
The fact there was no significant difference between the explicitly taught and independently learnt items on the test attests to the fact that an initial encounter (whether contextualised or decontextualised) is not as important as subsequent elaboration on various aspects of the word's meaning, repeated encounters with the item, rehearsal and recycling. The research seems to corroborate it (see for example Hulstijn 2001).
Ifs, buts and qualifications
Decontextualised vocabulary learning was frowned upon in the communicative teaching tradition.However, recent years have seen its resurgence due to the emerging evidence that this type of learning is legitimate for studying the basic vocabulary quickly (see Laufer 2009). Note that Laufer uses the word “basic”. In other words, in order to get to some threshold level, learners need to quickly acquire a large number of words, and decontextualised learning is a perfectly justified strategy. But when it comes to post-intermediate learners, I would only use decontextualised learning of discrete items if learners:
1) are trained to look up words in a monolingual dictionary, carefully studying the examples provided and patterns of use;
2) have a subsequent opportunity to contextualise with the teacher providing guidance and corrective feedback;
3) are given ample opportunities for recall and recycling (as with any vocabulary learning)
Another issue which has been recently raised in the literature on vocabulary acquisition is the question of effectiveness vs. efficiency of a vocabulary task, i.e. how effective a vocabulary task is in terms of the time spent on it. Coming from this perspective, independent decontextualised learning for post-intermediate learners does not seem to be time efficient because a lot of time has to be spent on remedying learners’ problems and re-teaching mislearnt items
References
- Hulstijn, J. H. (2001). Intentional and incidental second language vocabulary learning: A reappraisal of elaboration, rehearsal and automaticity. In Robinson, P. (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction.
- Laufer, B (2009). Research timeline: Second language vocabulary acquisition from language input and from form-focused activities. In Language Teaching, 42(3), 341-354.
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