Bonjour,
I would like to conclude for now our discussion on vocabulary learning with the question, “ What vocabulary items are easy to learn and which are harder?”
Starting with the easy vocabulary items we can all agree that the high frequency words are the easiest. This is most likely because we encounter them often and they are essential to any spoken or written message so we fulfill two of the main requirements for being able to keep them in our long term memories. They are also usually short. High frequency words are typically members of a list of some 1000-2000 words or lexical chunks making up 80% of everyday language. So if we analysed a typical conversation or book 80% of the words would be in the high frequency list. One would think that this is going to be a very large number of words but in English in fact 25 words make up a third of all written material, 100 make up about half. (www.janbrett.com/games/high_frequency_word_list_main.htm)
Under the easy to learn category also come words that have strong associations for us as learners or which can be linked to things we already know a lot about. This fulfills the requirement of imaging that we mentioned in the fourth newsletter.
How about words that are hard to learn? For starters words which don’t get much use, or which are hard to connect to something we know about are hard to learn.
Other hard to learn words are those which are easily confused with similar words eg. source and sauce, words which are opposites such as left and right, (we know the words but we confuse the meanings!) and words which are hard to pronounce. Very long words may also be considered hard to learn.
Words which we can make little sense of, the ones where we don’t understand how they may be used or how they are made from other words are particularly hard to learn. Eg. If we were to come across a word such as juxtapose and not see a connection to position (juxtaposition, placed side by side, especially for comparison or contrast) then we have no idea of what the word is about, where it comes from or how to use it. This is a case against learning wordlists which are unconnected to real experiences, or lacking supporting schema.
Learners are thought to generally increase their vocabularies by 1000 new words a year without even thinking about how they do it, imagine if we could become really expert and increase that to 1500! How much faster could we then learn a language.
Chris
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Why we forget words
Talofa lava,
To continue the topic of vocabulary learning it is probably right and proper if we ask why we forget words.
I am beginning to appreciate as I get older that forgetting is part of the human condition, and this is as true for young people as for the older person. So what do we know about the forgetting of words and chunks?
Beginning learners of another language apparently forget quite a lot at first, probably because they have limited webs of meaning to hang the new words on, but as their language webs increase forgetting new material is reduced considerably.
Estimates are that for beginners about 80% of new material is forgotten within a day. Research has shown though that when a learner stops using their second language the initial loss of language is rapid over the first 3 or 4 years but after that there is little further deterioration even up to 50 years later. (reported in Thornbury, S. 2002. p 26) My guess is that the language which remains is that which was highly usable and well connected to the learner’s web of words and meanings.
We tend to forget the words which were harder to learn and connect to our web, and also those which we tried to learn in short intense bursts without revisiting them afterwards. Hard to learn words may be those that are really different from what we already know in either language. Perversely some words may be displaced in memory by words which are almost the same.
The other factor is learning load, in other words trying to learn too many words at a time without being able to revisit and recycle them sufficiently.
It seems that the solution is to learn vocabulary in manageable amounts, spread the learning out over days and weeks, and make every opportunity to re-encounter them and use them in new contexts at different levels of depth.
Ia manuia lou aso,
Chris
Reference: How To Teach Vocabulary. Scott Thornbury,
2002, Published by Pearson Longman.
To continue the topic of vocabulary learning it is probably right and proper if we ask why we forget words.
I am beginning to appreciate as I get older that forgetting is part of the human condition, and this is as true for young people as for the older person. So what do we know about the forgetting of words and chunks?
Beginning learners of another language apparently forget quite a lot at first, probably because they have limited webs of meaning to hang the new words on, but as their language webs increase forgetting new material is reduced considerably.
Estimates are that for beginners about 80% of new material is forgotten within a day. Research has shown though that when a learner stops using their second language the initial loss of language is rapid over the first 3 or 4 years but after that there is little further deterioration even up to 50 years later. (reported in Thornbury, S. 2002. p 26) My guess is that the language which remains is that which was highly usable and well connected to the learner’s web of words and meanings.
We tend to forget the words which were harder to learn and connect to our web, and also those which we tried to learn in short intense bursts without revisiting them afterwards. Hard to learn words may be those that are really different from what we already know in either language. Perversely some words may be displaced in memory by words which are almost the same.
The other factor is learning load, in other words trying to learn too many words at a time without being able to revisit and recycle them sufficiently.
It seems that the solution is to learn vocabulary in manageable amounts, spread the learning out over days and weeks, and make every opportunity to re-encounter them and use them in new contexts at different levels of depth.
Ia manuia lou aso,
Chris
Reference: How To Teach Vocabulary. Scott Thornbury,
2002, Published by Pearson Longman.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Modelling and Metacognition.
Kia ora tatou,
To continue the subject of learning vocabulary two elements of last week’s column deserve further exploration., modelling and metacognition.
How would one model the sorts of learning we have been talking about?
This is problematical because the processes take place in the brain and are not observable. The challenge is to make them observable. One way is the “think aloud” strategy. Let’s say we are presented with the task of adding cognitive depth to a chunk or word we are learning. (This where we try to use the word in new sentences, of think deeply about how that word works.)
If we were learning the word amber, the situation might look like this:
“Can I say, ‘… going to amber…’?”
“No because amber looks like a noun, it’s a thing not an action.”
“Ah but you could say it if Amber was a name!”
“But this word doesn’t have a capital A so it’s not a name.”
“ Well what about switching from green to amber and then to red like traffic lights.”
By doing it this way we can show how we are thinking about the word, its schema, and how it works.
Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking, in other words to have reflect on and be able to say how your brain works, how you approached a problem. This has been shown to be a very successful strategy for effective learning. By using metacognition learners can shortcircuit the learning process because they understand how they are learning, reflect on how successful the process is and can deliberately employ the strategy. The conversation above shows metacognition at work and models patterns of thinking for the student.
Metacognition is one of the reasons why bilinguals reach higher levels of achievement than monolinguals, because they are having to make conscious decisions about how language works on a daily basis.
We can help our students learn vocabulary more effectively by having conversations about words/chunks with them and in our conversations show by “thinking aloud” how we come to particular decisions about how that word/chunk can be used.
Noho ora mai na,
Chris
To continue the subject of learning vocabulary two elements of last week’s column deserve further exploration., modelling and metacognition.
How would one model the sorts of learning we have been talking about?
This is problematical because the processes take place in the brain and are not observable. The challenge is to make them observable. One way is the “think aloud” strategy. Let’s say we are presented with the task of adding cognitive depth to a chunk or word we are learning. (This where we try to use the word in new sentences, of think deeply about how that word works.)
If we were learning the word amber, the situation might look like this:
“Can I say, ‘… going to amber…’?”
“No because amber looks like a noun, it’s a thing not an action.”
“Ah but you could say it if Amber was a name!”
“But this word doesn’t have a capital A so it’s not a name.”
“ Well what about switching from green to amber and then to red like traffic lights.”
By doing it this way we can show how we are thinking about the word, its schema, and how it works.
Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking, in other words to have reflect on and be able to say how your brain works, how you approached a problem. This has been shown to be a very successful strategy for effective learning. By using metacognition learners can shortcircuit the learning process because they understand how they are learning, reflect on how successful the process is and can deliberately employ the strategy. The conversation above shows metacognition at work and models patterns of thinking for the student.
Metacognition is one of the reasons why bilinguals reach higher levels of achievement than monolinguals, because they are having to make conscious decisions about how language works on a daily basis.
We can help our students learn vocabulary more effectively by having conversations about words/chunks with them and in our conversations show by “thinking aloud” how we come to particular decisions about how that word/chunk can be used.
Noho ora mai na,
Chris
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