VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES --------o0o-------- HOÀNG THU BA THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PRESENTING AND PRACTISING NEW VOCABULARY THROUGH MINIMAL CONTEXT FOR SECOND - YEAR NON ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT VIETNAM UNIVERSITY OF COMMERCE HIỆU QUẢ GIỚI THIỆU VÀ LUYỆN TẬP TỪ VỰNG MỚI QUA NGỮ CẢNH TỐI THIỂU CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ HAI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC THƯƠNG MẠI M.A Minor Thesis Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60.10 MA course: 19 HANOI – 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES --------o0o-------- HOÀNG THU BA THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PRESENTING AND PRACTISING NEW VOCABULARY THROUGH MINIMAL CONTEXT FOR SECOND YEAR NON ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT VIETNAM UNIVERSITY OF COMMERCE HIỆU QUẢ GIỚI THIỆU VÀ LUYỆN TẬP TỪ VỰNG MỚI QUA NGỮ CẢNH TỐI THIỂU CHO SINH VIÊN NĂM THỨ HAI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC THƯƠNG MẠI M.A Minor Thesis Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60.10 MA course: 19 Supervisor: Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Quynh HANOI – 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.
vi LIST OF TABLES. vii LIST OF FIGURES. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND RATIONALE. AIMS OF THE STUDY.
SCOPE OF THE STUDY. METHOD OF THE STUDY. ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS. 4 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW 4 1.
Context and minimal context .2 OVERVIEW OF VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN CONTEXT. Vocabulary implicit learning and explicit teaching. Vocabulary teaching procedure. 10 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.3 ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF PRESENTING VOCABULARY IN CONTEXT AND MINIMAL CONTEXT .5 JUSTIFICATION FOR THE STUDY.
16 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY .1 Identifying initial problem.3 Data collection methods .1 Pre-test/ posttest .4 Data collection procedure .5 Data analysis methods. 27 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .1 STUDENTS‟ IMPROVEMENT IN ACQUISITION OF THE TARGET VOCABULARY.2 STUDENTS‟ MOTIVATION IN NEW VOCABULARY ACQUISITION .1 Data from the Observation .2 Data from the students‟ questionnaire. 35 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. SUMMARY OF THE STUDY.
LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES. 41 APPENDICES vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL English as a foreign language ELT English Language Teaching MCQs Multiple Choice questions M Mean VUC Vietnam University of Commerce SPSS Statistical Product and Service Solutions vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 Plan of the intervention Table 3.1 Means and Standard Deviations of the scores of the pretest and post test Table 3.2 Correlations of the pretest and posttest Table 3.3 Paired Sample T-Test Table 3.4 Students‟ interest and benefits in the intervention LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 The frequency of adapting vocabulary teaching techniques Figure 3.1 Scores of the pretest and posttest Figure 3.2 Class motivation during the lessons Figure 3.3 Students‟ motivation in guessing new vocabulary in minimal context Figure 3.4 Students‟ motivation in vocabulary practice activities viii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND RATIONALE Vocabulary is one of the most important aspects of language learning and language use (Laufer 1997; Bromley, 2007).
It is a principle contributor to comprehension, fluency and achievement. Moreover, lack of command in vocabulary becomes the cause of communication breakdown (Balochowicz & Fisher, 2000; Nagy & Scott, 2000). Therefore, it is of great importance for teaching and learning vocabulary. Meanwhile, in the real context in many English classes at Vietnam University of Commerce, where teachers have devoted much time to vocabulary teaching, applied a lot of different methods like glosses, translation, pictures, etc., the results have been disappointing.
A large number of students do not know and remember what word to use, they never feel encouraged when frequently encountering unfamiliar and less familiar words, much less do they have the passion and courage to use them in daily social conversations and exchanges in an appropriate way. Thus, there needs a question of the effective ways to promote understanding and use of vocabulary. Quite a few of linguistics researchers (e. Nation, 1982; Nation & Coady, 1988), have suggested that new words can be best learnt when presented in context and when their meaning must be inferred from context by learners themselves.
From this suggestion and above initial problems, the author decided to develop an action research on the effectiveness of presenting and practicing vocabulary in minimal context for second-year students at Vietnam University of Commerce. AIMS OF THE STUDY This was an action research whose purpose was to investigate the effectiveness of presenting and practicing vocabulary in minimal context for the second-year non 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com English major students at Vietnam University of Commerce (VUC). Specifically, it addressed the following research questions: a. How much do presentation and practice using minimal contexts improve learners' acquisition of the target vocabulary? b.
Do presenting and practicing vocabulary in minimal context have any effect on students’ motivation in learning of the words? Pedagogically, the findings and comments of this study were believed to be relevant to improve the teaching English to students at VUC. The study would help teachers to motivate their English classroom so that their students can develop their language skills. SCOPE OF THE STUDY This study was conducted on 40 second-year non English majors at the University of Commerce. They were taught during two weeks (five contacts) of the intervention.
The study covered the vocabulary items from course book including collocations, nouns. Grammatical aspect of the vocabulary was beyond the scope of this study. The study only focuses on vocabulary meaning recognition. Therefore, the productive aspect of the vocabulary was ignored during the study.
Linguistic context and situational context in terms of background knowledge presented in one sentence were used in this study. When the participants encountered the single - context sentence, they used their prior knowledge as a comprehension process approach. As a result, the participants should have schemata in order to make sense of the minimal context. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
METHOD OF THE STUDY An action research was applied in this minor thesis to find out students‟ achievement and interest in learning vocabulary after new vocabulary items were taught in minimal context. In order to collect sufficient and relevant data for the study, three research techniques were employed: - using a pre-test and post-test to evaluate the teaching and learning results - observing classes to find out how students participate in the intervention. - Conducting a survey questionnaire to investigate how much students are interested in the intervention 5. ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS The study consists of three parts: Introduction, development and conclusion.
The Introduction presents the rationale, aims, scope and method of the study. The development includes three chapters. Chapter One covers an in-depth review of the literature in which relevant theoretical background and reviews of related studies concerning teaching vocabulary in context and minimal context. Chapter Two continues with the research method including the participants of the study, the methods and procedures of data collection and data analysis.
Chapter Three demonstrates the findings accompanied by data analysis and discussion. The Conclusion ends the report with the summary of the findings, pedagogical implications, limitations of the study and suggestions for further studies. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter gives an overview of the literature related to the present study. In the chapter, definitions of key terms and selected theoretical background such as context, minimal context, vocabulary are presented.
Then the review of the areas relevant to the research questions, namely vocabulary teaching techniques, presenting and practicing new vocabulary in context and minimal context is also provided. Context and minimal context In the study of language and discourse, the concept of “context” is notoriously vague and ambiguous. As a result, a number of researchers have attempted to define context in the framework of vocabulary learning. According to New Oxford American Dictionary (2010), context is defined as (1) The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
Or (2) the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage and clarify its meaning. Crystal (1991:78) defines that context is a general term in linguistics and phonetics to refer to specific parts of an utterance (or text) near or adjacent to a unit (e., a sound, word) which is the focus of attention. The occurrence of a unit is partly or wholly determined by its context, which is specified in terms of the unit‟s relations. Blackburn (1984) offers a similar definition: “In linguistics, context is the parts of an utterance surrounding a unit and which may affect both its meaning and its grammatical contribution.80) However, he is quick to add that context also refers to the “wider situation, either of the speaker or of the surroundings, that may play a part in determining the significance of a saying.80) 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Following the previous studies, Nguyen Hoa (2000) states context consists of two components: the linguistic context (cotext) and the situational or extralinguistic context.
In that definition, cotext refers to the text surrounding a message. This includes the textual elements that occur before and/or after a word, a phrase or even a longer utterance or a text. The cotext often helps in understanding the particular meaning of the word, phrase, etc. And situational context concerns the physical context in which a message is conveyed.
It includes the type of communicative event, the topic, the purpose of the event, the setting, the participants and the relationships between them, and the background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event (Nunan, 1999). It is the broader social situation in which a linguistic item is used. On the whole, it is widely agreed that context has two aspects which are co-text (linguistic context) and situational context. Although linguistic context in language learning and teaching has been extensively discussed in the literature, not much has been said about the effectiveness both context types in language teaching and learning.
Due to the small scale of the study, the author decided to use the term “minimal context” in the study, defined as co-text in a length of one sentence and non-linguistic context covering a minimal scope of the background knowledge of the participants in the communicative event. Regarding the term “minimal context”, Laufer and Shmueli (1997) are among the few researchers have used the term which is just defined as one meaningful sentence. Recently, Webb (2007) has used the term “single-context sentence” in the study on the effect of a single-context sentence on vocabulary learning, of which he examined vocabulary learning in five dimensions: orthography, meaning and form, syntagmatic associations, paradigmatic associations, and grammatical functions. In the two earlier studies, minimal context is just limited in the co-text type.
The findings of 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com these studies yielded not much benefit for a seeming reason of the limited context into co-text. There are some examples below illustrating the minimal context used to teach the word “tsunami”: Example 1:Non-linguisitc context Japanese people were killed because of the tsunami on the March 11th, 2011. In this type of context, prior knowledge was built to reveal the meaning of the target word. Example 2: Co-text A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water.
This context used definition, synonyms surroundings to illustrate the meaning of the target word.