Revising vocabulary #2

In the last post, I suggested a range of activities that could be used in class to ‘activate’ a set of vocabulary before doing more communicative revision / recycling practice. In this, I’ll be suggesting a variety of more communicative tasks. As before, the activities require zero or minimal preparation on the part of the teacher.
1 Simple word associations
Write on the board a large selection of words that you want to recycle. Choose one word (at random) and ask the class if they can find another word on the board that they can associate with it. Ask one volunteer to (1) say what the other word is and (2) explain the association they have found between the two words. Then, draw a line through the first word and ask students if they can now choose a third word that they can associate with the second. Again, the nominated volunteer must explain the connection between the two words. Then, draw a line through the second word and ask for a connection between the third and fourth words. After three examples like this, it should be clear to the class what they need to do. Put the students into pairs or small groups and tell them to continue until there are no more words left, or it becomes too difficult to find connections / associations between the words that are left. This activity can be done simply in pairs or it can be turned into a class / group game.
As a follow-up, you might like to rearrange the pairs or groups and get students to see how many of their connections they can remember. As they are listening to the ideas of other students, ask them to decide which of the associations they found the most memorable / entertaining / interesting.
2 Association circles (variation of activity #1)
Ask students to look through their word list or flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the items that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. Tell them to write these words in a circle on a sheet of paper.
Tell the students to choose, at random, one word in their circle. Next, they must find another word in the circle which they can associate in some way with the first word that they chose. They must explain this association to their partner. They must then find another word which they can associate with their second word. Again they must explain the association. They should continue in this way until they have connected all the words in their circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
3 Multiple associations
Using the same kind of circle of words, students again work with a partner. Starting with any word, they must find and explain an association with another word. Next, beginning with the word they first chose, they must find and explain an association with another word from the circle. They continue in this way until they have found connections between their first word and all the other words in the circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
4 Association dice
Prepare two lists (six in each list) of words that you want to recycle. Write these two lists on the board (list A and list B) with each word numbered 1 – 6. Each group in the class will need a dice.
First, demonstrate the activity with the whole class. Draw everyone’s attention to the two lists of the words on the board. Then roll a dice twice. Tell the students which numbers you have landed on. Explain that the first number corresponds to a word from List A and the second number to a word from List B. Think of and explain a connection / association between the two words. Organise the class into groups and ask them to continue playing the game.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask them if they had any combinations of words for which they found it hard to think of a connection / association. Elicit suggestions from the whole class.
5 Picture associations #1
You will need a set of approximately eight pictures for this activity. These should be visually interesting and can be randomly chosen. If you do not have a set of pictures, you could ask the students to flick through their coursebooks and find a set of images that they find interesting or attractive. Tell them to note the page numbers. Alternatively, you could use pictures from the classroom: these might include posters on the walls, views out of the window, a mental picture of the teacher’s desk, a mental picture generated by imagining the whiteboard as a mirror, etc.
In the procedure described below, the students select the items they wish to practise. However, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask the students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. The students should then find an association between each of the words on their list and one of the pictures that they select. They discuss their ideas with their partner, before comparing their ideas with a new partner.
6 Picture associations #2
Using the pictures and word lists (as in the activity above), students should select one picture, without telling their partner which picture they have selected. They should then look at the word list and choose four words from this list which they can associate with that picture. They then tell their four words to their partner, whose task is to guess which picture the other student was thinking of.
7 Rhyme associations
Prepare a list of approximately eight words that you want to recycle and write these on the board.
Ask the students to look at the words on the board. Tell them to work in pairs and find a word (in either English or their own language) which rhymes with each of the words on the list. If they cannot find a rhyming word, allow them to choose a word which sounds similar even if it is not a perfect rhyme.
The pairs should now find some sort of connection between each of the words on the list and their rhyming partners. When everyone has had enough time to find connections / associations, combine the pairs into groups of four, and ask them to exchange their ideas. Ask them to decide, for each word, which rhyming word and connection will be the most helpful in remembering this vocabulary.
Conduct feedback with the whole class.
8 Associations: truth and lies
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. Individually, they should then write a series of sentences which contain these words: the sentences can contain one, two, or more of their target words. Half of the sentences should contain true personal information; the other half should contain false personal information.
Students then work with a partner, read their sentences aloud, and the partner must decide which sentences are true and which are false.
9 Associations: questions and answers
Prepare a list of between 12 and 20 items that you want the students to practise. Write these on the board (in any order) or distribute them as a handout.
Demonstrate the activity with the whole class before putting students into pairs. Make a question beginning with Why / How do you … / Why / How did you … / Why / How were you … which includes one of the target items from the list. The questions can be rather strange or divorced from reality. For example, if one of the words on the list were ankle, you could ask How did you break your ankle yesterday? Pretend that you are wracking your brain to think of an answer while looking at the other words on the board. Then, provide an answer, using one of the other words from the list. For example, if one of the other words were upset, you might answer I was feeling very upset about something and I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I fell down some steps. If necessary, do another example with the whole class to ensure that everyone understand the activity.
Tell the students to work in pairs, taking it in turns to ask and answer questions in the same way.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask if there were any particularly strange questions or answers.
(I first came across a variation of this idea in a blog post by Alex Case ‘Playing with our Word Bag’
10 Associations: question and answer fortune telling
Prepare for yourself a list of items that you want to recycle. Number this list. (You will not need to show the list to anyone.)
Organise the class into pairs. Ask each pair to prepare four or five questions about the future. These questions could be personal or about the wider world around them. Give a few examples to make sure everyone understands: How many children will I have? What kind of job will I have five years from now? Who will win the next World Cup?
Tell the class that you have the answers to their questions. Hold up the list of words that you have prepared (without showing what is written on it). Elicit a question from one pair. Tell them that they must choose a number from 1 to X (depending on how many words you have on your list). Say the word aloud or write it on the board.
Tell the class that this is the answer to the question, but the answer must be ‘interpreted’. Ask the students to discuss in pairs the interpretation of the answer. You may need to demonstrate this the first time. If the question was How many children will I have? and the answer selected was precious, you might suggest that Your child will be very precious to you, but you will only have one. This activity requires a free imagination, and some classes will need some time to get used to the idea.
Continue with more questions and more answers selected blindly from the list, with students working in pairs to interpret these answers. Each time, conduct feedback with the whole class to find out who has the best interpretation.
11 Associations: narratives
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
This activity often works best if it is used as a follow-up to ‘Picture Associations’. The story that the students prepare and tell should be connected to the picture that they focused on.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words.
Still in pairs, they should prepare a short story which contains at least seven of the items in their list. After preparing their story, they should rehearse it before exchanging stories with another student / pair of students.
To extend this activity, the various stories can be ‘passed around’ the class in the manner of the game ‘Chinese Whispers’ (‘Broken Telephone’).
12 Associations: the sentence game
Prepare a list of approximately 25 items that you want the class to practise. Write these, in any order, on one side of the whiteboard.
Explain to the class that they are going to play a game. The object of the game is to score points by making grammatically correct sentences using the words on the board. If the students use just one of these words in a sentence, they will get one point. If they use two of the words, they’ll get two points. With three words, they’ll get three points. The more ambitious they are, the more points they can score. But if their sentence is incorrect, they will get no points and they will miss their turn. Tell the class that the sentences (1) must be grammatically correct, (2) must make logical sense, (3) must be single sentences. If there is a problem with a sentence, you, the teacher, will say that it is wrong, but you will not make a correction.
Put the class into groups of four students each. Give the groups some time to begin preparing sentences which contain one or more of the words from the list.
Ask a member from one group to come to the board and write one of the sentences they have prepared. If it is an appropriate sentence, award points. Cross out the word(s) that has been used from the list on the board: this word can no longer be used. If the sentence was incorrect, explain that there is a problem and turn to a member of the next group. This person can either (1) write a new sentence that their group has prepared, or (2) try, with the help of other members of their group to correct a sentence that is on the board. If their correction is correct, they score all the points for that sentence. If their correction is incorrect, they score no points and it is the end of their turn.
The game continues in this way with each group taking it in turns to make or correct sentences on the board.

(There are a number of comedy sketches about word associations. My favourite is this one. I’ve used it from time to time in presentations on this topic, but it has absolutely no pedagogical value (… unlike the next autoplay suggestion that was made for me, which has no comedy value).

Revising vocabulary #1

A few years ago, I wrote a couple of posts about the sorts of things that teachers can do in classrooms to encourage the use of vocabulary apps and to deepen the learning of the learning items. You can find these here and here. In this and a future post, I want to take this a little further. These activities will be useful and appropriate for any teachers wanting to recycle target vocabulary in the classroom.

The initial deliberate learning of vocabulary usually focuses on the study of word meanings (e.g. target items along with translations), but for these items to be absorbed into the learner’s active vocabulary store, learners will need opportunities to use them in meaningful ways. Classrooms can provide rich opportunities for this. However, before setting up activities that offer learners the chance to do this, teachers will need in some way to draw attention to the items that will be practised. The simplest way of doing this is simply to ask students to review, for a few minutes, the relevant word set in their vocabulary apps or the relevant section of the word list. Here are some more interesting alternatives.

The post after this will suggest a range of activities that promote communicative, meaningful use of the target items (after they have been ‘activated’ using one or more of the activities below).

1             Memory check

Ask the students to spend a few minutes reviewing the relevant word set in their vocabulary apps or the relevant section of the word list (up to about 20 items). Alternatively, project / write the target items on the board. After a minute or two, tell the students to stop looking at the target items. Clean the board, if necessary.

Tell students to work individually and write down all the items they can remember. Allow a minute or two. Then, put the students into pairs: tell them to (1) combine their lists, (2) check their spelling, (3) check that they can translate (or define) the items they have, and (4) add to the lists. After a few minutes, tell the pairs to compare their lists with the work of another pair. Finally, allow students to see the list of target items so they can see which words they forgot.

2             Simple dictation

Tell the class that they are going to do a simple dictation, and ask them to write the numbers 1 to X (depending on how many words you wish to recycle: about 15 is recommended) on a piece of paper or in their notebooks. Dictate the words. Tell the students to work with a partner and check (1) their spelling, and (2) that they can remember the meanings of these words. Allow the students to check their answers in the vocabulary app / a dictionary / their word list / their coursebook.

3             Missing vowels dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but tell the students that they must only write the consonants of the dictated words. When comparing their answers with a partner, they must reinsert the missing vowels.

4             Collocation dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but instead of single words, dictate simple collocations (e.g. verb – complement combinations, adjective – noun pairings, adverb – adjective pairings). Students write down the collocations. When comparing their answers with a partner, they have an additional task: dictate the collocations again and identify one word that the students must underline. In pairs, students must think of one or two different words that can collocate with the underlined word.

5             Simple translation dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but tell the students that must only write down the translation into their own language of the word (or phrase) that you have given them. Afterwards, when they are working with a partner, they must write down the English word. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.)

6             Word count dictation

As above (‘Simple translation dictation’): when the students are doing the dictation, tell them that they must first silently count the number of letters in the English word and write down this number. They must also write down the translation into their own language. Afterwards, when they are working with a partner, they must write down the English word. As an addition / alternative, you can ask them to write down the first letter of the English word. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.)

I first came across this activity in Morgan, J. & M. Rinvolucri (2004) Vocabulary 2nd edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

7             Dictations with tables

Before dictating the target items, draw a simple table on the board of three or more columns. At the top of each column, write the different stress patterns of the words you will dictate. Explain to the students that they must write the words you dictate into the appropriate column.

As an alternative to stress patterns, you could use different categories for the columns. Examples include: numbers of syllables, vowel sounds that feature in the target items, parts of speech, semantic fields, items that students are confident about / less confident about, etc.

8             Bilingual sentence dictation

Prepare a set of short sentences (eight maximum), each of which contains one of the words that you want to recycle. These sentences could be from a vocabulary exercise that the students have previously studied in their coursebooks or example sentences from vocab apps.

Tell the class that they are going to do a dictation. Tell them that you will read some sentences in English, but they must only write down translations into their own language of these sentences. Dictate the sentences, allowing ample time for students to write their translations. Put the students into pairs or small groups. Ask them to translate these sentences back into English. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.) Conduct feedback with the whole class, or allow the students to check their answers with their apps / the coursebook.

From definitions (or translations) to words

An alternative to providing learners with the learning items and asking them to check the meanings is to get them to work towards the items from the meanings. There are a very wide variety of ways of doing this and a selection of these follows below.

9             Eliciting race

Prepare a list of words that you want to recycle. These lists will need to be printed on a handout. You will need at least two copies of this handout, but for some variations of the game you will need more copies.

Divide the class into two teams. Get one student from each team to come to the front of the class and hand them the list of words. Explain that their task is to elicit from their team each of the words on the list. They must not say the word that they are trying to elicit. The first team to produce the target word wins a point, and everyone moves on to the next word.

The race can also be played with students working in pairs. One student has the list and elicits from their partner.

10          Eliciting race against the clock

As above (‘Eliciting race’), but the race is played ‘against the clock’. The teams have different lists of words (or the same lists but in a different order). Set a time limit. How many words can be elicited in, say, three minutes?

11          Mime eliciting race

As above (‘Eliciting race’), but you can ask the students who are doing the eliciting to do this silently, using mime and gesture only. A further alternative is to get students to do the eliciting by drawing pictures (as in the game of Pictionary).

12          The fly-swatting game

Write the items to be reviewed all over the board. Divide the class into two teams. Taking turns, one member of each group comes to the board. Each of the students at the board is given a fly-swatter (if this is not possible, they can use the palms of their hands). Choose one of the items and define it in some way. The students must find the word and swat it. The first person to do so wins a point for their team. You will probably want to introduce a rule where students are only allowed one swat: this means that if they swat the wrong word, the other player can take as much time as they like (and consult with their tem members) before swatting a word.

13          Word grab

Prepare the target items on one or more sets of pieces of paper / card (one item per piece of paper). With a smallish class of about 8 students, one set is enough. With larger classes, prepare one set per group (of between 4 – 8 students). Students sit in a circle with the pieces of paper spread out on a table or on the floor in the middle. The teacher calls out the definitions and the students try to be the first person to grab the appropriate piece of paper.

As an alternative to this teacher-controlled version of the game, students can work in groups of three or four (more sets of pieces of paper will be needed). One student explains a word and the others compete to grab the right word. The student with the most words at the end is the ‘winner’. In order to cover a large number of items for recycling, each table can have a different set of words. Once a group of students has exhausted the words on their table, they can exchange tables with another group.

14          Word hold-up

The procedures above can be very loud and chaotic! For a calmer class, ensure that everyone (or every group) has a supply of blank pieces of paper. Do the eliciting yourself. The first student or team to hold up the correct answer on a piece of paper wins the point.

15          Original contexts

Find the words in the contexts in which they were originally presented (e.g. in the coursebook); write the sentences with gaps on the board (or prepare this for projection). First, students work with a partner to complete the gaps. Before checking that their answers are correct, insert the first letter of each missing word so students can check their own answers. If you wish, you may also add a second letter. Once the missing words have been checked, ask the students to try to find as many different alternatives (i.e. other words that will fit syntactically and semantically) as they can for the missing words they have just inserted.

Quick follow-up activities

16          Word grouping

Once the learning items for revision have been ‘activated’ using one of the activities above, you may wish to do a quick follow-up activity before moving on to more communicative practice. A simple task type is to ask students (in pairs, so that there is some discussion and sharing of ideas) to group the learning items in one or more ways. Here are a few suggestions for ways that students can be asked to group the words: (1) words they remembered easily / words they had forgotten; (2) words they like / dislike; (3) words they think will be useful to them / will not be useful to them; (4) words that remind them of a particular time or experience (or person) in their life; (5) words they would pack in their holiday bags / words they would put in the deep-freeze and forget about for the time being (thanks to Jeremy Harmer for this last idea).

What we can learn from glosses and research into glosses

I’m a sucker for meta-analyses, those aggregates of multiple studies that generate an effect size, and I am even fonder of meta-meta analyses. I skip over the boring stuff about inclusion criteria and statistical procedures and zoom in on the results and discussion. I’ve pored over Hattie (2009) and, more recently, Dunlosky et al (2013), and quoted both more often than is probably healthy. Hardly surprising, then, that I was eager to read Luke Plonsky and Nicole Ziegler’s ‘The CALL–SLA interface: insights from a second-order synthesis’ (Plonsky & Ziegler, 2016), an analysis of nearly 30 meta-analyses (later whittled down to 14) looking at the impact of technology on L2 learning. The big question they were looking to find an answer to? How effective is computer-assisted language learning compared to face-to-face contexts?

Plonsky & Ziegler

Plonsky and Ziegler found that there are unequivocally ‘positive effects of technology on language learning’. In itself, this doesn’t really tell us anything, simply because there are too many variables. It’s a statistical soundbite, ripe for plucking by anyone with an edtech product to sell. Much more useful is to understand which technologies used in which ways are likely to have a positive effect on learning. It appears from Plonsky and Ziegler’s work that the use of CALL glosses (to develop reading comprehension and vocabulary development) provides the strongest evidence of technology’s positive impact on learning. The finding is reinforced by the fact that this particular technology was the most well-represented research area in the meta-analyses under review.

What we know about glosses

A gloss is ‘a brief definition or synonym, either in L1 or L2, which is provided with [a] text’ (Nation, 2013: 238). They can take many forms (e.g. annotations in the margin or at the foot a printed page), but electronic or CALL glossing is ‘an instant look-up capability – dictionary or linked’ (Taylor, 2006; 2009) which is becoming increasingly standard in on-screen reading. One of the most widely used is probably the translation function in Microsoft Word: here’s the French gloss for the word ‘gloss’.

Language learning tools and programs are making increasing use of glosses. Here are two examples. The first is Lingro , a dictionary tool that learners can have running alongside any webpage: clicking on a word brings up a dictionary entry, and the word can then be exported into a wordlist which can be practised with spaced repetition software. The example here is using the English-English dictionary, but a number of bilingual pairings are available. The second is from Bliu Bliu , a language learning app that I unkindly reviewed here .

So, what did Plonsky and Ziegler discover about glosses? There were two key takeways:

• both L1 and L2 CALL glossing can be beneficial to learners’ vocabulary development (Taylor, 2006, 2009, 2013)
• CALL / electronic glosses lead to more learning gains than paper-based glosses (p.22)

On the surface, this might seem uncontroversial, but if you took a good look at the three examples (above) of online glosses, you’ll be thinking that something is not quite right here. Lingro’s gloss is a fairly full dictionary entry: it contains too much information for the purpose of a gloss. Cognitive Load Theory suggests that ‘new information be provided concisely so as not to overwhelm the learner’ (Khezrlou et al, 2017: 106): working out which definition is relevant here (the appropriate definition is actually the sixth in this list) will overwhelm many learners and interfere with the process of reading … which the gloss is intended to facilitate. In addition, the language of the definitions is more difficult than the defined item. Cognitive load is, therefore, further increased. Lingro needs to use a decent learner’s dictionary (with a limited defining vocabulary), rather than relying on the free Wiktionary.

Nation (2013: 240) cites research which suggests that a gloss is most effective when it provides a ‘core meaning’ which users will have to adapt to what is in the text. This is relatively unproblematic, from a technological perspective, but few glossing tools actually do this. The alternative is to use NLP tools to identify the context-specific meaning: our ability to do this is improving all the time but remains some way short of total accuracy. At the very least, NLP tools are needed to identify part of speech (which will increase the probability of hitting the right meaning). Bliu Bliu gets things completely wrong, confusing the verb and the adjective ‘own’.

Both Lingro and Bliu Bliu fail to meet the first requirement of a gloss: ‘that it should be understood’ (Nation, 2013: 239). Neither is likely to contribute much to the vocabulary development of learners. We will need to modify Plonsky and Ziegler’s conclusions somewhat: they are contingent on the quality of the glosses. This is not, however, something that can be assumed …. as will be clear from even the most cursory look at the language learning tools that are available.

Nation (2013: 447) also cites research that ‘learning is generally better if the meaning is written in the learner’s first language. This is probably because the meaning can be easily understood and the first language meaning already has many rich associations for the learner. Laufer and Shmueli (1997) found that L1 glosses are superior to L2 glosses in both short-term and long-term (five weeks) retention and irrespective of whether the words are learned in lists, sentences or texts’. Not everyone agrees, and a firm conclusion either way is probably not possible: learner variables (especially learner preferences) preclude anything conclusive, which is why I’ve highlighted Nation’s use of the word ‘generally’. If we have a look at Lingro’s bilingual gloss, I think you’ll agree that the monolingual and bilingual glosses are equally unhelpful, equally unlikely to lead to better learning, whether it’s vocabulary acquisition or reading comprehension.

 

The issues I’ve just discussed illustrate the complexity of the ‘glossing’ question, but they only scratch the surface. I’ll dig a little deeper.

1 Glosses are only likely to be of value to learning if they are used selectively. Nation (2013: 242) suggests that ‘it is best to assume that the highest density of glossing should be no more than 5% and preferably around 3% of the running words’. Online glosses make the process of look-up extremely easy. This is an obvious advantage over look-ups in a paper dictionary, but there is a real risk, too, that the ease of online look-up encourages unnecessary look-ups. More clicks do not always lead to more learning. The value of glosses cannot therefore be considered independently of a consideration of the level (i.e. appropriacy) of the text that they are being used with.

2 A further advantage of online glosses is that they can offer a wide range of information, e.g. pronunciation, L1 translation, L2 definition, visuals, example sentences. The review of literature by Khezrlou et al (2017: 107) suggests that ‘multimedia glosses can promote vocabulary learning but uncertainty remains as to whether they also facilitate reading comprehension’. Barcroft (2015), however, warns that pictures may help learners with meaning, but at the cost of retention of word form, and the research of Boers et al did not find evidence to support the use of pictures. Even if we were to accept the proposition that pictures might be helpful, we would need to hold two caveats. First, the amount of multimodal support should not lead to cognitive overload. Second, pictures need to be clear and appropriate: a condition that is rarely met in online learning programs. The quality of multimodal glosses is more important than their inclusion / exclusion.

3 It’s a commonplace to state that learners will learn more if they are actively engaged or involved in the learning, rather than simply (receptively) looking up a gloss. So, it has been suggested that cognitive engagement can be stimulated by turning the glosses into a multiple-choice task, and a fair amount of research has investigated this possibility. Barcroft (2015: 143) reports research that suggests that ‘multiple-choice glosses [are] more effective than single glosses’, but Nation (2013: 246) argues that ‘multiple choice glosses are not strongly supported by research’. Basically, we don’t know and even if we have replication studies to re-assess the benefits of multimodal glosses (as advocated by Boers et al, 2017), it is again likely that learner variables will make it impossible to reach a firm conclusion.

Learning from meta-analyses

Discussion of glosses is not new. Back in the late 19^th century, ‘most of the Reform Movement teachers, took the view that glossing was a sensible technique’ (Howatt, 2004: 191). Sensible, but probably not all that important in the broader scheme of language learning and teaching. Online glosses offer a number of potential advantages, but there is a huge number of variables that need to be considered if the potential is to be realised. In essence, I have been arguing that asking whether online glosses are more effective than print glosses is the wrong question. It’s not a question that can provide us with a useful answer. When you look at the details of the research that has been brought together in the meta-analysis, you simply cannot conclude that there are unequivocally positive effects of technology on language learning, if the most positive effects are to be found in the digital variation of an old sensible technique.

Interesting and useful as Plonsky and Ziegler’s study is, I think it needs to be treated with caution. More generally, we need to be cautious about using meta-analyses and effect sizes. Mura Nava has a useful summary of an article by Adrian Simpson (Simpson, 2017), that looks at inclusion criteria and statistical procedures and warns us that we cannot necessarily assume that the findings of meta-meta-analyses are educationally significant. More directly related to technology and language learning, Boulton’s paper (Boulton, 2016) makes a similar point: ‘Meta-analyses need interpreting with caution: in particular, it is tempting to seize on a single figure as the ultimate answer to the question: Does it work? […] More realistically, we need to look at variation in what works’.

For me, the greatest value in Plonsky and Ziegler’s paper was nothing to do with effect sizes and big answers to big questions. It was the bibliography … and the way it forced me to be rather more critical about meta-analyses.

References

Barcroft, J. 2015. Lexical Input Processing and Vocabulary Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Boers, F., Warren, P., He, L. & Deconinck, J. 2017. ‘Does adding pictures to glosses enhance vocabulary uptake from reading?’ System 66: 113 – 129

Boulton, A. 2016. ‘Quantifying CALL: significance, effect size and variation’ in S. Papadima-Sophocleus, L. Bradley & S. Thouësny (eds.) CALL Communities and Culture – short papers from Eurocall 2016 pp.55 – 60 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED572012.pdf

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J. & Willingham, D.T. 2013. ‘Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques’ Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14 / 1: 4 – 58

Hattie, J.A.C. 2009. Visible Learning. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Howatt, A.P.R. 2004. A History of English Language Teaching 2^nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Khezrlou, S., Ellis, R. & K. Sadeghi 2017. ‘Effects of computer-assisted glosses on EFL learners’ vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension in three learning conditions’ System 65: 104 – 116

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