Vocabulary Teaching v6

Participants: I need at least 60-75 of 10th graders. 20-25 for each of my three group. They are senior high school students in PCSH. Almost all of them do not know K.K. phonetics. So they use some other techniques to memorize newr words.

Test time(C, E1, E2):

	explanation	teaching	practicing	total time
C	2 min	10 min	8 min	20 min
E1	2 min	10 min	8 min	20 min
E2	2 min	10 min	8 min	20 min

Pre-test

Tell the participants the story about a real case about illusion of learning from my student (He can not distinguish “country” from “culture” becuase his way of memorizing words is so poor. He simply look at them and observe their initials and Chinese translations, then tell me he had done the memorization. He does not do the spelling or memorization at all!)

Since they are all 10th graders and freshmen of PCSH, we could anticipate they have very similar English proficiency and word knowledge base.

Our pretest is simple: we take the word for them in the stage of explanation, then ask them to do the multiple choice directly. We will check the answer afterward (in the end of the stage of practicing).

This is the table for our Pre-test

	Vocabulary	中文意思
1	turbine
2	ambush
3	depression
4	coach
5	flee
6	hover
7	bob-cut
8	suffer from
9	octopus
10	parachute
11	guilty
12	swarm out
13	helicopter
14	parachute-jumping
15	fight
16	bind
17	assist
18	clips
19	Denim skirt
20	belly

Material (for teaching):

Word list for each comic strips are listed below

There are 4 comic strips in total. Each of them has a different theme.

1. heartline app	2. Spiderman	3. Skype	4. shopping	5. mission
depression	爪子 claw	nervous	小喇叭褲 flares/bell-bottoms	helmet
hopeless	章魚 Octopus	approach	直筒褲 straight jeans	belly
feel  disconnected	捆綁 bind	guilty	牛仔短裙 Denim skirt	ambush
be remind of	倉皇逃跑 flee	program	羅馬涼鞋 Roman sandals	helicopter
alone	搏鬥 fight	include	七分褲 Cropped pants	chopper
suffer from	高架鐵軌high railway	soon-to-be father	Chinese bob cut	boots
support system	struggle	assist		clips
system	蜂擁而出 swarm out/ rush our	in real time		ammo
		on-demand		turbine
		supportive role		parachute-jumping
		coach		hover
		exhausting

The following samples are the comic strips I will use in class.

 

Teaching the class (the precise process on how to instruct them)

I cancel the grouping and group discussion since it will consume more of my precious borrowed time. Also, it is more natural to assume EFL student to acquire new vocabulary from the setting of independent reading. So it’s perfectly alright to design my instruction in this way.

 

Material (for testing):

These comic strips could be different from the previous ones we used in teaching stage. However, they need to cover similar ideas and key words within the pictures.

I’d provide these pictures, and ask them to recall their meanings (and plot). This time, no words would be presented on the pictures.

*issues: the conrol group shall be provided with some supportive texts/scripts of the pictures. The text would be a substitution for the comic strips. So that we can make sure the control group also receive enough information from context in a literal way rather than via visual linkage.

To save time, I would just give them the multiple choice as the mid-test.

 

 

Mid-Test (C, E1, E2)

Basically, I would only use multiple choice questions to test their retention. The rest of the test items would be saved for the next day’s post-test.

1		John lives alone in the big city. He often feel _____ when he returns to his apartment.	(a) connected (b) disconnected (c) supportive (d) guilty
2		Last Saturday, Mary registered a fitness  ______  in nearby the gym.	(a) system (b) real-time (c) program (d)ambush
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Post-test

The post-test would be done in the 2nd day.

The Post-test is more difficult then all the previous tests. Participants would be required to do the following types of tests to show how good the newly acquired words have incorporated into their own knowledge system.

*Issues: the the stage of word-recognition test, target words would be addressed in a different scenario. We want to know if it is possible to make the participants recall from a different settings, yet the meanings carried by the words would still be the same. The content of the post-test would be completely different from the mid and pre-test.

	control	E1, E2
spelling	y	y
story recall test	y	y
word-recognition	y	y
multiple-choice	y	y
L1 translation	y	y

Here are some samples for the post-test

	C, E1, E2	Write down your answers here
spelling
story recall test
word-recognition
multiple choice	The hummingbird ____ above the flowers.	(a)coach  (b)ambush  (c ) hover (d) parachute
L1 translation	flee

 

Other references

https://www.coursera.org/course/learning (learning how to learn; chunking skill; illusions of learning)