VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES **************************************** PHÙNG THỊ LAM THE IMPACT OF REPETITION AND RECYCLING ON GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL (TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11 Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG HẢI – PHƯỚC TỈNH ) MINOR M.A THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 HÀ NỘI, 2011 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES **************************************** PHÙNG THỊ LAM THE IMPACT OF REPETITION AND RECYCLING ON GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL (TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11 Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG HẢI – PHƯỚC TỈNH ) MINOR M.A THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10 Supervisor: ĐỖ BÁ QUÝ, M.A HÀ NỘI, 2011 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate of originality…………… ………………………………………………………i Acknowledgements …… …………………………………………………………………ii Abstract…………………………………… …………………………………………… iii Table of content ……………………………………………………………………………iv List of abbreviations ……………………………………………………………………… v PART A – INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Aims of the study Scope of the study Research hypotheses and questions Method of the study Organization of the study PART B – DEVELOPMENT 54 CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW Teaching and Learning Vocabulary 1.1 What is Vocabulary? 1.1.1 Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary 1.1.2 Active and passive vocabulary 1.2 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning 1.3 What is involved in knowing a word 1.3.1 Form 1.3.2 Meaning 1.3.3 Grammar 1.3.4 Collocation Factors affecting the retention of vocabulary 2.1 Memory and storage system 2.1.1 The Keyword Method 10 2.1.2 The Visual Aids on Vocabulary Learning 10 2.1.3 The Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Learning 10 2.2 Frequency of meeting 11 v 2.3 Quality of Processing 11 Other factors 11 3.1 Learning styles 11 3.2 Teaching method 12 Repetition and Recycling in Language learning 12 4.1 The spacing of repetition 13 4.2 Testing and the Retrieval Practice Effect 14 A review of similar studies 14 CHAPTER – METHODOLOGY…………………………………………………….15 1.The setting of study 16 1.1 Context of Study 16 1.2 Why quasi – experimental research 17 Participants of the study 18 2.1 Participants 18 2.2 Sampling 18 Materials 19 3.1 The course book 19 3.2 The course content 19 3.3 What are relevant activities? 19 Data collection instruments 21 4.1 T –Test 21 4.1.1 The purpose of the test 21 4.1.2.What to test 22 4.1.3 Test 22 4.2 Questionnaires 22 4.2.1.Questionnaires for students 22 4.2.1.1.The pre-treatment questionnaire 23 4.2.1.2.The post-treatment questionnaire 23 4.2.2.Questionnaires for teachers 23 Procedure of data collection 23 5.1 Schedules 24 5.2 Treatment 24 vi 5.3 Data collecting and processing procedures 25 CHAPTER - DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 26 3.1 Results of the T – Test 26 3.2 The result of pre-test scores of the two groups 26 3.3 The result of post-test scores of the two groups 28 3.4 Summary of the test scores of the two groups in the pretest and posttest 32 3.5 Survey results 33 3.5.1 The pre-treatment questionnaire for students 33 3.5.2 The Post-treatment Questionnaire for students 34 3.5.2 Questionnaire for teachers 34 PART C CONCLUSION 38 Findings and conclusion 38 Pedagogical Implications 40 Limitations of the study 41 Suggestions for further studies 41 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………… 42 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………… I PART A – INTRODUCTION Rationale Given its importance to learning, vocabulary has been a prominent concern of many theorists and researchers in the field In learning English, however, the greatest challenge is likely retaining the words Researchers and teachers now have been drawn to the concern of how to make students enhance vocabulary retention for communicative value Studies have shown that practising things makes us better in learning a language and develops automaticity In other words, language learning proceeds gradually through repeated exposure and practice The course book English 11 (published by Educational Press), however, does not deal with it sufficiently Many students now suffer from considerable difficulties in retaining previously encountered English words They struggle to maintain retention But not many of them are capable of it This matter of fact leads to their poor production both in speaking and writing Aims of the study The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of repetition and recycling on vocabulary learning and retention, or to put it differently, the extent to which short tailored activities helps to retain vocabulary for the students at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh High school and some pedagogical implications Scope of the study In the current study, the author set the limit of investigating possibly – applied activities that can be carried out at beginning or in the middle of 45-minute periods in such large-sized classes at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh High school, vung Tau The activities were related to first three units (which equal to 18 lessons) of the course book English 11 Research hypotheses and questions The study is to get the answers to the following questions: 1) To what extent EFL teachers encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among their students? 2) What is the effectiveness of using repetitive and recycling focused activities on enhancing 11th - graders’ vocabulary retention? 3) What are the students’ attitudes towards using activities in teaching and learning vocabulary? Method of the study The study is a quasi-experimental design involving the three components of experiments: the population (the 11th grade students at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school, Ba Ria Vung Tau), the treatment (repetitive and recycling focused activities), and the measurement of the treatment (T-test) - Questionnaires were delivered to teachers to investigate the ways they encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among students - Questionnaires were delivered to the subjects before treatment to get to know their own strategies of memorizing vocabulary - Questionnaire s were delivered to the subjects after treatment as a supporting tool to obtain their attitude towards the technique applied - Observation was also employed during the teaching time to recognize the participation of students in the control group and the experimental group Organization of the study This thesis is organized around three parts: Part A is the introduction which presents the rationale for the research topic, aims of study, scope of study, research hypotheses and questions, and method of the study Part B is the development which consists of three chapters - Chapter one reviews scholarly theoretical background to teaching and learning vocabulary in a second language - Chapter two deals with the methodology of this research in terms of the setting of the study, sampling participants, instruments and procedure of data collection - Chapter three devotes to the account of the study in terms of data analysis and findings interpreted from the results of the T-test and questionnaires Part C is the conclusion which discusses the major findings and limitations of the research, then suggests teaching implications and proposes some suggestions for further research 3 PART B - DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW Teaching and Learning Vocabulary 1.1 What is Vocabulary? 1.1.1 Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary 1.1.2 Active and passive vocabulary 1.2 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning 1.3 What is involved in knowing a word 1.3.1 Form 1.3.2 Meaning 1.3.3 Grammar 1.3.4 Collocation Factors affecting the retention of vocabulary 2.1 Memory and storage system 2.1.1 The Keyword Method 2.1.2 The Visual Aids on Vocabulary Learning 2.1.3 The Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Learning 2.2 Frequency of meeting 2.3 Quality of processing Other factors Learning styles Teaching method Repetition and Recycling in Language learning 4.1 The spacing of repetition 4.2 Testing and the Retrieval Practice Effect A review of similar studies CHAPTER – METHODOLOGY 1.The setting of study 1.1 Context of Study Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school is a state-run school located in Long Hai town in Ba Ria – Vung Tau The school has a modest educational staff of 71 people who provide education to 1425 students The EFL group consists of teachers The typical setting of instruction is three 45-minute –long periods of English a week Due to the limited time in a correspondence to a wide range of words to teach and students’ low English proficiency, EFL teachers at Long Hai _ Phuoc Tinh high school often teach vocabulary in the traditional teacher-centered method The teachers normally dominate class to explain words by words They often employ three following steps in teaching vocabulary First, teachers have students read the passage After that, new words are raised and elicited through some games, word maps, or simple presentations Then students try to get Vietnamese equivalents of the words and read them aloud once or twice To help students practice the vocabulary, the teachers have them some kinds of exercises such as: gap filling, word matching, definitions matching, etc available in the course book 1.2 Why quasi – experimental research As this study was conducted on the students in two already existing classes which were assigned by the high school where the researcher was working, a quasi-experimental method was naturally chosen Participants of the study 2.1 Participants The population of the study were 84 ESL students coming from two classes in Long HaiPhuoc Tinh high school in BR-VT Most of them were born in 1995 and have studied English as a Foreign Language for five years or more Results of the pre-test showed that their English vocabulary competence differed little All in all, these two groups had a lot of common features in terms of number, gender, English level as well as motivation to learn Moreover, these students’ characteristics were typical of the 11th grade non-major students at Long HaiPhuoc Tinh high school 2.2 Sampling In the study the researcher adopted the systematic sampling as a strategy to select subjects from a population list in a systematic Specifically, with the required number of 56 out of the population of 84, the simple statistic should be use: f=N÷ Sn f = frequency interval N = the total number of the wider population Sn = the required number in the sample Hence the frequency interval (f) is 84÷56 = 1.5 As a result, the researcher omitted every third name on the list of cases 3.Materials 3.1 The course book The English 11 is designed basing on the basic principles of Communicative Language Teaching However, the course book not include sufficient communicative activities for practice This demands more work on the part of the teacher in selecting appropriate activities to attract students 3.2 The course content As being stated above, due to the limitation of time and application, the study only deals with three units among sixteen ones appearing in the current course book English 11, namely unit “Friendship”, unit “Personal Experience”, and unit “A Party” 3.3 What are relevant activities? - Activities that involve brief reading, repetition, making sentences, listing words and so on are supposed to be relevant to provide background for practicing certain chunks or for recycling vocabulary, thus aid language processing and ultimately vocabulary retention - When designing some extra activities, the researcher took into account all the conditions of the participants and based on the Taxonomy of Vocabulary Learning Strategies which is adopted from Schmitt 1997:207 Data collection instruments 4.1 T -Test The pre-test and post–test employed in the study were designed to measure the effect of repetitive and recycling-focused activities on students’ ability to retain vocabulary 4.1.1 The purpose of the test - The pre-test was given to the two groups in the same week with the primary purpose of measuring students’ vocabulary size and their level of vocabulary retention - The post-test was implemented to assess how effective the tailored activities utilized were 6 4.1.2 What to test The pre-test served as a means to measure students’ vocabulary size and their level of vocabulary retention The target words in the pre-test were drawn from the word list of the course book English 10 ( from unit to unit 16 inclusively) whereas ones in the progress test came from the glossary of three units of the course book and a number of words added by the teacher on assumption of they are unfamiliar to the students 4.1.3 Test In the study, the test comprised five different types of exercises in the form of an objective test Here in this paper, the test frame included multiple choice, gap-filling, matching and word – formation 4.2 Questionnaires 4.2.1 Questionnaires for students 4.2.1.1 The pre-treatment questionnaire On completing the study, 20 random subjects in the two groups were sampled out of the 56, A questionnaire listed 15 memory strategies was used in the survey 4.2.1.2 The post-treatment questionnaire The post- treatment questionnaire was administered to get students’ feedback about the treatment It was a brief questionnaire with questions 4.2.2 Questionnaires for teachers The aim of the questionnaire for teachers was to find out teachers' attitude towards enhancing vocabulary retention and approaches they use The questionnaire contains 10 questions where questions require only yes and no responses Procedure of data collection The practice of study involves the systematic collection of information about the subjects, activities, and outcomes of the experiment measuring the impact of repetition and recycling on students’ vocabulary retention This is a experimentally quantitative research involving a trial in which the subjects (n=56) are measured before and after treatment with T-test 5.1 Schedules The study was carried out within weeks of the first semester in classes Each class work with English of forty-five minute periods a week So, the schedules were designed upon 18 periods The detailed schedule of supplemental activities for both class was in the appendix 5.2 Treatment In the first stage, the participants were asked to take a vocabulary pretest Then a brief questionnaire is delivered In the class hours, both control and experimental group received the usual instruction and exercises based on the course book Words and structures were presented to them in a same traditional manner Regularly at the beginning of each class, the experimental group joined a variety of activities designed by the teacher focusing on the production and recycling of the words that they have learnt before Six weeks later, students were unexpectedly given a posttest The result of the test, then, was drawn out to be compared with the prior test A follow-up questionnaire was then administered to investigate students perceptions and attitudes toward vocabulary learning 5.3 Data collecting and processing procedures The following steps were carried out to collect the results from the pretest and the posttest Step 1: Doing and marking the pre-test All test - takers sat at the tests on the same day under the serious control of the teacher (who is also the researcher) The pre-test took place on 16th August, 2011 and the marking process was seriously carried out right after the tests Step 2: Conducting a brief minor questionnaire to explore students’ preferred strategies to memorize vocabulary Step 3: Doing and marking the post-test The post-test took place on 24th September, 2011 and the marking process was seriously carried out right after the tests Step 4: Administering another questionnaire to investigate subjects’ attitude towards techniques applied Step 5: Synthesizing the results of the pretest and posttest for later analysis and comparisons Step 6: Using the SPSS software version 16.0 as a tool to analyze the results of the tests CHAPTER - DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 3.1 Results of the T – Test After having students the pre-test and post-test, the researcher has devoted time to seriously mark the tests The scores were given on the 10- mark-scale 3.2 The result of pre-test scores of the two groups The result of pre-test showed that the participants of both groups almost have the equal level of vocabulary competence The mean of the control groups was 3.8 and mean of the experimental group was 3.9 The slight difference of mean of 0.1 was not statistically significant Students in control group seemed to be of more uniform level whereas students from experimental one had more excellent individuals The means also showed that in general the students were only at average level And both two groups have no good students They were mainly at under the conventionally average score of (75.1% students in control group and 76,8% students in experimental group) In general, the English proficiency and vocabulary size of students in both groups was at low level but rather equal The correlation coefficient (rxy) value of 743 means we can predict one test score from the second and that the error of prediction is relatively small Therefore, we would conclude that this test is reliable 3.3 The result of post-test scores of the two groups Comparing with the mean of the pretest, we can see that while the control group made a little bit progress (from 3.8 to 5.2) the experimental one took big pace with a rise from 3.9 to 6.5 This big difference in the mean scores between pre-test and post-test showed very clearly that after six weeks of enhancing repetition and recycling words in teaching and learning vocabulary, the students’ vocabulary capacity has been improved significantly However, the change in SD of the two classes is different The SD of 1.3 in pre-test and 1.5 in post test of the control group (students’ test scores varied a lot) showed that absorbing vocabulary in the traditional approach depended on many other factors beyond teachingrelated ones whereas steadily low standard deviation in the pre-test and post test scores of experimental group indicates that the impact of repetition and recycling on students’ vocabulary was positive despite subjective factors Furthermore, the comparison between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group showed that the groups of low scores in the pre-test (ranged from 1.5 to 4) made more progress than the group of high scores in the pre-test (ranged from 4.5 to 6.5) in term of scores in the post-test The low-scored group possessed the average additional score of 3.02 while the high-scored only achieved 2.00 as the average additional score This could lead to the conclusion that the repetition and recycling work efficiently for weak students rather than strong students The correlations between the pre-test and post-test scores in the two groups were rather strong (r = 74 and 59 respectively) This implies that the implementation of method strategy (using regular vocabulary – focused activities) might have succeeded in enhancing intrinsic motivation of some participants and failed to so to other participants 3.5 Summary of the test scores of the two groups in the pretest and posttest In short, the descriptive and inferential statistics show a positive change in the vocabulary test scores of the two classes in the posttest The t-test and p-values tell that different scores must be the result of the teaching method in which repetitive and recycling – focused activities have been applied to help students improve their vocabulary retention This implied that students of experimental group outperformed control group in test and that the teaching memory strategies was successful in both storing and retrieving 3.6 Survey results 3.6.1 The pre-treatment questionnaire for students The result reveals that the participants’ preference of memory strategies was visual rather than audio This minor survey also indicated that the majority of two groups seldom used some strategies involving elaborative mental processing On the other hand, they tended to use strategies related to utilizing some phonetic knowledge and activities to recall words And the strategies considered by the advanced group resembled those of medium groups, such as recycle repetition, notebook 3.6.2 The Post-treatment Questionnaire for students - Most strategies used were believed to be beneficial by the subjects - Among many strategies, the value of repetition and practical production is universally confirmed - 65% students gave a high evaluation about the designed activities influence on the learning atmosphere 3.6.2 Questionnaire for teachers 10 The results of the questionnaire also show that only teachers are concerned of reviewing vocabulary but they not it very often These two teachers prefer to use social strategies; determination rather than metacognitive strategies and memory strategies as tools to help students foster vocabulary All teachers said that they frequently have students play short games or exercises in pairs or in groups Additionally, they have their students write down all the vocabulary in a notebook Two among the teachers said that they sometimes design their own activities which include the words that students have learnt and brief vocabularytests to check their retention PART C CONCLUSION 1.Findings and conclusion In general, the results of this present study showed a positive support to the attempt to compare the impacts of memory strategies repetition and recycling on experimental group and the control group During the study, students of the experimental group were taught with the enhancement of activities to help subjects better retain vocabulary The results reflected in the students' post-test results indicated that the students of experimental group outperformed in scores; portrayed the superiority of memory strategies in vocabulary memorizing and retention In other words, the better result of the experimental group can be considered the means to lead to the conclusion that to some extent repetition and recycling bring some efficiency to the students’ vocabulary retention Also, it was shown that being over-dependent on survey tools are open to question, in spite of being widely used The results indicated that repetition and recycling strategy applied in the study works far better for weak students in term of retention The results also portrayed the superiority of memory strategy use both in short and long term retention The next most frequently used strategies were cognitive and compensation strategies respectively As stated in the Introduction chapter, the study addressed three research questions: 1) To what extent EFL teachers encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among their students? 2) What is the effectiveness of using repetitive and recycling focused activities on enhancing 11th - graders’ vocabulary retention? 11 3) What are students’ attitudes towards used activities in teaching and learning vocabulary? Through the major findings, it is proved that the study has fully answered the given research questions The conclusions therefore can be summarized as follows: For the first research question, most of the teachers in charge of teaching 11th grade in Long hai – Phuoc Tinh high school acknowledged the importance of teaching vocabulary and started to devote more time to facilitate students’ vocabulary memorizing As a matter of fact, only two out of five teachers have been concerned of reviewing vocabulary and prefer to use social, determination strategies metacognitive strategies and memory strategies as tools to help students foster vocabulary However, most of them highly appreciate reviewing vocabulary in class and two among them frequently design activities to help them with this In general, the results of this present study showed a positive support to the attempt to compare the impacts of memory strategies repetition and recycling on experimental group and the control group Repetition and recycling undoubtedly lead to different degrees of vocabulary retention During the study, students of the experimental group were taught with the enhancement of activities to help subjects better retain vocabulary The results reflected in the students' post-test results indicated that the students of experimental group outperformed in scores; indicating the superiority of memory strategies in vocabulary memorizing and retention The low-scored group possessed the average additional score of 3.02 while the highscored only achieved 2.00 as the average additional score This could lead to the conclusion that the repetition and recycling work efficiently for weak students rather than strong students In a nutshell, the better result of the experimental group can be considered the means to lead to the conclusion that to some extent repetition and recycling bring some efficiency to the students’ vocabulary retention The results indicated that repetition and recycling strategy applied in the study works far better for weak students in term of retention The results also portrayed the superiority of memory strategies used both in short and long term retention The next most frequently used strategies were cognitive and compensation strategies respectively Based on the analysis of data elicited from the questionnaires in the previous chapter, the study has come to an answer for the third research question that most of students think that 12 learning vocabulary is important and hard However, due to the lack of autonomic self-study, they have not mastered satisfactory vocabulary size Thus, they appear to learn a lot if the teacher cares for and organizes relevant vocabulary activities to help them foster and retain what they have learnt Having tried a great number of activities to reinforce memorizing vocabulary, 65% felt greatly satisfied and 75% supposed that the treatment worked effectively on their vocabulary retention Pedagogical Implications In conclusion, relating to the research questions posed at the outset of the study, the data obtained from the project indicate the following findings: Repetition and recycling undoubtedly lead to different degrees of vocabulary retention The retention of vocabulary seems to be related little to the learner's general learning patterns or cognitive styles of visual, audio or contextual association However, visual presentation appears to lead to higher levels of retention and should thus be recommended The implications of the findings for incorporating these strategies in teaching will be discussed in detail 1) Activities that involve reading, repetition, making sentences… can provide background for practicing certain chunks or for recycling vocabulary, thus aid language processing and ultimately vocabulary retention 2) Involving the activities in each lesson reinforces previous learning and encourages many learners to sustain their interest and work 3) Repetition and recycling can supply students with intense and meaningful practice, thus make what they previously learn be more vividly experienced and, therefore, better remembered 4) As EFL teachers, we have to be aware of the importance of recycling language for learning We have to not only mention this in our teaching but also train our learners how to it effectively Learning is remembering and recycling language plays a central role in creating strong and lasting memories Therefore, a systematic approach with a variety of strategies should be a natural part of any language teaching Limitations of the study Limitations of the study are something inevitable for some reasons This was an empirical study that only included a small number of participants and a small number of teachers teaching English as a foreign language A larger sample from different institutions would definitely yield more generalizable findings As other studies, the data were collected by using 13 only three instruments which not reflect a reality because students might have not read the questions carefully but only circled them The subjects of the present study are from one school in Ba Ria- Vung Tau, therefore the results of the study may not be generalized to all Vietnamese students The study focused on grade 11 students; therefore the results of the study may not be generalized to all levels This study definitely will not be the only one in this field and does not offer any conclusive findings about vocabulary learning and teaching at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school Inherently, its intention is to be part of a discussion on the complex construct of vocabulary learning, particularly in EFL contexts and in such an environment like Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school Hopefully, this will lead to more thorough investigations in the field and both students and teacher will benefit from these findings Suggestions for further studies The previous section highlighted the fact that there exist possibilities of exploring the issue in variously different ways so that upon this foundation, the innovations and improvements may be far better A fuller understanding of the repetition and recycling and the subjects could eventually aid in its application and might help to avoid some inappropriate applications Hence, I believe the further research on preferred strategies of memorizing and designing extra vocabulary activities should proceed Apart from this effort, some attempt should be made to figure out the ways to adapt abundant sources of activities available for use in large – scaled classes in order to make the most of them in improving students’ vocabulary retention  ... AND RECYCLING ON GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL (TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11 Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG. .. supposed that the treatment worked effectively on their vocabulary retention Pedagogical Implications In conclusion, relating to the research questions posed at the outset of the study, the data obtained... use The questionnaire contains 10 questions where questions require only yes and no responses Procedure of data collection The practice of study involves the systematic collection of information