Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2 vocabulary
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Transcript of Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2 vocabulary
IVLOS
Task effectiveness and the Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2 vocabularyacquisition of L2 vocabulary
Rick de Graaff, Machteld Moonen, Gerard Westhoff
IVLOS, Institute of EducationUtrecht University, The Netherlands
[email protected]@ivlos.uu.nl
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Example 1:Example 1:
Place the words in each row in a logical order and explain why:
• stunning, splendid, gorgeous• exciting, breathtaking, interesting• embarrassing, outrageous, shocking
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Example 2:Example 2:
Which words belong together?Form 3 groups and place the words in each group in a logical order:
Thrilling, risky, prohibitive, dangerous, unsafe, expensive, frightening, pricey, bloodcurdling
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Example 3:Example 3:
You have participated in a survival trip and broke your leg. Write a complaint letter to the agency using the following words if possible:
Thrilling, risky, prohibitive, dangerous, unsafe, expensive, frightening, pricey, bloodcurdling
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Task definitionTask definition
“A task is an activity which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on meaning, to attain an objective, and which is intended to lead to or stimulate acquisition”
(Bygate, Skehan & Swain, 2001)
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Task effectivenessTask effectiveness
Involvement load? (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001):
Need Search Motivation
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Task effectiveness: task scope?Task effectiveness: task scope?
Willis (1996) Exposure Use Motivation instruction
Westhoff (2004) Exposure Focus on meaning Focus on form Output & interaction Strategy use
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Task effectiveness:Task effectiveness:Cognitive psychology/ connectionismCognitive psychology/ connectionism
Distributed representation Connection strengths Spreading activation
Learning = Concept formation = building & strengthening sets of features
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3 Components of a task3 Components of a task
Assignment Content Mental actions
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The Multi-Feature HypothesisThe Multi-Feature Hypothesis
Retention and ease of activation are Retention and ease of activation are enhanced by tasks that elicit enhanced by tasks that elicit mental mental
actionsactions involving: involving:
more features, more different categories of features, in great frequency, in life-like combinations, simultaneously.
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Examples of featuresExamples of features
Semantic Syntactic Morphologic Collocative Pragmatic Associative Affective
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The studyThe study
Dutch secondary education N=49, age 12 Quasi-experimental pre-test post-test
design Spanish vocabulary: school subjects Two tasks, differing according to MFH Tests: cloze and translation
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Research questionsResearch questions
Differences in mental actions on content features?method: think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews
Differences in retention after task performance?method: vocabulary tests
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Preliminary results Q 1Preliminary results Q 1
Example think-aloud protocol, control:
Eh, let’s see what’s still left, physics, fi física or something like that, on miércoles, I do physics, física, and I do physics once more on jueves in any case, jueve, what was it like? Jueves then I do it from 14 to 15 I do once more physics and then I’ve got only one left geography, geografía, I put that on jueves the 15th and
16th hour.
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Preliminary results Q 1Preliminary results Q 1
Example think-aloud protocol, experimental:
Ethics or geography, geography that is more suitable for a cab driver mathematics no, a cab driver does have to, he’s got a meter, mathematics should be there, because they also have to return change they have to be able to count, oh no, now I write it down in Dutch, matemáticas or something like that. Geography also belongs to cab driver, or not, I’m not
sure anymore geografía.
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Preliminary results Q 2Preliminary results Q 2
ANCOVA: over-all effect for condition
Experimental group ourperforms control group
But: effect only significant at immediate post-test
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DiscussionDiscussion
Multi-feature hypothesis as key for task effectiveness?
Effects of time-on-task and motivation? Task-based testing for research
purposes? Also suitable for acquisition of language
structure?