The Effects of Timing and Modality of Teaching on Learners’ Retention of Academic and Technical Vocabulary
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Abstract
The effectiveness of explicit lexical instruction has been widely accepted for several years. However, various explicit methods have been used, and a few studies have engaged in direct comparisons between these methods. This study addresses this problem not only by comparing implicit and explicit measures but also by comparing different explicit teaching methods: namely the effects of timing of the explicit instruction and the effect of visual and written explicit materials. The effects of pre-teaching L2 target words as a timing has not been compared to the effects of post-teaching timing in the literature. Hence, this study is the first to address this gap by comparing the effectiveness of both timings to each other. Pre-teaching in this study was proposed based on the Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1990). Moreover, the visual modality has been largely applied to concrete nouns only when investigated in the literature given the challenge of pictorially representing non-concrete concepts. Therefore, the current study addresses this gap by examining the effects of visual aids to non-concrete words. Some of the applied visual aids in this study were made through creating associated interactions between logogens and imagens in the drawn scenes (Dual Coding Theory, Pavio, 1971, 1986) while others were created based on the conceptual peg hypothesis (Paivio, 1969). Such creations of visual aids are almost unmentioned in the literature covering L2 teaching.
The study is quasi-experimental and included two intact classes as control groups and four intact classes as experimental groups. The control groups were taught the target vocabulary implicitly through their normal class, whereas the experimental groups were taught the target vocabulary explicitly through the proposed explicit conditions over an eight-week period. The experimental group instruction employed a 2*2 design, whereby items were either taught before or after the relevant class activity and were presented either in visual-aided or written-only format. These explicit conditions were implemented to teach non-concrete academic and technical lexis in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. The study participants comprised 70 adult male students attending their preparatory year at a university in Saudi Arabia aiming to specialise in engineering or applied sciences. Immediate and delayed post-tests were administered to the participants (meaning recognition and meaning recall), and a questionnaire was given only to the experimental participants in order to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data.
The test results showed that combining explicit and implicit lexical teaching was more effective than providing students with implicit teaching alone. The results also showed an effect in favour of pre-teaching target words in visual-aided format. The experimental participants’ responses to the questionnaire were consistent with their performance in the tests. I conclude that pre-teaching in visual-aided format increases learners’ ability to take note of and understand non-concrete vocabulary items as demonstrated by their increased vocabulary scores, thus providing an effective strategy to increase non-concrete vocabulary intake.