My graduation thesis
I am now very busy and I am exhausted because of overworking, as a doctor says. But I now have to do many things; studying for the teaching exam, reading papers for my thesis and seeing a doctor regularly. I am worried about what to write in my paper. The topic of my graduation thesis is vocabulary acquisition in SLA. The title of the thesis is “Vocabulary acquisition by intermediate learners”.
The reason why I chose this topic is that I think vocabulary is one of the most necessary elements of language learning. When people do not understand more than three words in one sentence, they will not be able to understand the meaning of the sentence even if they have a perfect command of the grammar. Also, if people know the meaning of all the words in a sentence, they can guess what happens there even though they may be unfamiliar with the grammar, I think. Thus, knowing the meaning of words is the key, especially for reading. In speaking, I think knowing many nouns is important.
In fact, there are many people in Japan who do not like memorizing English words because they have to memorize spelling, meaning and pronunciation. Furthermore, they have to recognize the words in spoken English. Then, I want to research how to memorize words effectively; for example, to trace the etymology of the word to understand its meaning is a good way.
However, I think grammar is also important. When I write on Tawawa, I always think how to express my feelings or opinions in English effectively. But I do not read so much English, so my English may be awkward sometimes.
And, I have not defined precisely the term “intermediate learners” yet. I am now pondering…
Comments
I think memorizing vocabulary items is one of the parts students dislike in learning English. Maybe they think it is boring and too basic. (This basic skill is very important, though.) When I was a high school student, some of my friends wanted to improve their English skills while avoiding basic tasks such as just memorizing words. Building vocabulary skills is, of course, very fundamental, but without this skill we can’t expect to be able to use the language.
Thank you for responses.
Yeah,Yukiko. I parfectly agree with you. So I would like to discover the effective means to acquire vocabulary for people who want to improve vocabulary skill.
Ruedi, I know that your idea for vocablary building is very effective, but it is too hard to continue every day. Also, I can hardly find the similarity between Japanese words and English words.
I have to read some theses on Vocabulary.
kevin :: June 23, 2004
I knew this guy once who left out all prepositions when he talked, and he didn’t use any tense. for example, only saying
“I go store”. or “I no like speak prepositions, I think prepositions no need. People understand anyway”.
He was a real freak, (in that he did this for the entire brief time I was aquainted with him… but he was right… I always understood what he was saying, even if it annoyed me so much I didn’t want to talk to him.
O, I see. Words can tell the meaning, but the words-only sentences such as “I no like speak prepositions” are awkward…
I read your (Kevin’s) comment and I realize that we can read only(?) by knowing words, but we have to know grammar when we speak.
I have to check my grammar when speaking so I don’t annoy Ruedi.. haha..
kevin :: June 27, 2004
I forgot to mention, that guy was an Anerican - native English speaker.
Sounds like a grown-up to me: if he knew what a preposition is, he was hardly a child.
People do strange things and teach themselves strange skills. Some people study and speak the Kingon language. Back at the university where I studied, I knew a guy who wrote a paper in linguistics on Klingon — and managed to get it accepted. I don’t know if the paper dealt with SLA, though. =)
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Take care of yourself, Ayumi-san — don’t overdo it!
I haven’t looked very hard into the SLA literature, so I wonder; is the etymology approach something that’s actually being discussed? And if it is, does it make sense in an East Asian setting? I studied German, French, Latin and English in the equivalent of junior high / high school, and one of my Latin teachers said something sensible very early on: he advised us to seek connections between the vocabulary items of the languages we studied. This made sense because French largely derives from Latin, English has many vocabulary items from both French and Latin (which to a lesser extent is true for German as well), and both English and German are germanic languages — there are lots of connections there, and as soon as you start to make these connections, you’re etymologising, you’re beginning to create hypotheses about what comes from where.
But if you’re studying English as a native speaker of an East Asian language, you won’t be able to make such connections, except for the very few words that English has borrowed from your language, and without such connections the etymology of any given English word won’t relate to anything you’re already familiar with. For this reason it won’t, I’d imagine, be so helpful from a purely practical perspective.
I’m teaching a freshman course right now which fairly much focuses on vocabulary building; I print out news items from the Web and ask the students to read them for homework so we can discuss them in class. I also ask them to keep vocabulary lists in which they enter new words, along with a definition or synonyms in English, along with the phrase or sentence in which they found the item.
This task is based on two assumptions I am making:
(1) Students shouldn’t translate back and forth between L1 and L2; they should stay within L2 as much as they can. Translation (and interpretation, for that matter) are highly specialised skills, and, despite everything that’s being practiced in Japanese classroms, I believe it’s a hindrance rather than a help when it comes to language learning.
(2) Students should learn new vocabulary items in the context within which they first encounter them — hence the requirement to copy the phrase or the sentence.
I got neither of these assumptions from the SLA literature, they’re simply based on my own experience as a language learner.
I’d be happy, though, if anyone could point me to any established SLA findings that confirm or reject them.