Glossing (extensions)

In the latest issue of ‘Language Teaching’, there’s a ‘state-of-the-art’ article by Frank Boers entitled ‘Glossing and vocabulary learning’. The effect of glosses (‘a brief definition or synonym, either in L1 or L2, which is provided with [a] text’ (Nation, 2013: 238)) on reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition has been well researched over the years. See Kim et al. (2020) for just one recent meta-analysis.

It’s a subject I have written about before on this blog (see here), when I focussed on Plonsky ad Ziegler (2016), a critical evaluation of a number of CALL meta-analyses, including a few that investigated glosses. Plonsky and Ziegler found that glosses can have a positive effect on language learning, that digital glosses may be more valuable than paper-based ones, and that both L1 and L2 glosses can be beneficial (clearly, the quality / accuracy of the gloss is as important as the language it is written in). Different learners have different preferences. Boers’ article covers similar ground, without, I think, adding any new takeaways. It concludes with a predictable call for further research.

Boers has a short section on the ‘future of glossing’ in which he notes that (1) ‘onscreen reading [is] becoming the default mode’, and (2) that ‘materials developers no longer need to create glosses themselves, but can insert hyperlinks to online resources’. This is not the future, but the present. In my last blog post on glossing (August 2017), I discussed Lingro, a digital dictionary tool that you can have running in the background, allowing you to click on any word on any website and bring up L1 or L2 glosses. My reservation about Lingro was that the quality of the glosses left much to be desired, relying as they did on Wiktionary. Things would be rather different if it used decent content – sourced, for example, from Oxford dictionaries, Robert (for French) or Duden (for German).

And this is where the content for the Google Dictionary for Chrome extension comes from. It’s free, and takes only seconds to install. It allows you to double-click on a word to bring up translations or English definitions. One more click will take you to a more extensive dictionary page. It also allows you to select a phrase or longer passage and bring up translations generated by Google Translate. It allows you to keep track of the items you have looked up, and to download these on a spreadsheet, which can then be converted to flashcards (e.g. Quizlet) if you wish. If you use the Safari browser, a similar tool is already installed. It has similar features to the Google extension, but also offers you the possibility of linking to examples of the targeted word in web sources like Wikipedia.

Boers was thinking of the provision of hyperlinks, but with these browser extensions it is entirely up to the reader of a text to decide how many and which items to look up, what kind of items (single words, phrases or longer passages) they want to look up, how far they want to explore the information available to them, and what they want to do with the information (e.g. store / record it).

It’s extraordinary that a ‘state-of-the-art article’ in an extremely reputable journal should be so out of date. The value of glossing in language learning is in content-focussed reading, and these tools mean that any text on the web can be glossed. I think this means that further research of the kind that Boers means would be a waste of time and effort. The availability of free technology does not, of course, solve all our problems. Learners will continue to benefit from guidance, support and motivation in selecting appropriate texts to read. They will likely benefit from training in optimal ways of using these browser extensions. They may need help in finding a balance between content-focussed reading and content-focussed reading with a language learning payoff.

References

Boers, F. (2022). Glossing and vocabulary learning. Language Teaching, 55 (1), 1 – 23

Kim, H.S., Lee, J.H. & Lee, H. (2020). The relative effects of L1 and L2 glosses on L2 learning: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research. December 2020.

Nation, I.S.P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Plonsky, L. & Ziegler, N. (2016). The CALL–SLA interface: insights from a second-order synthesis. Language Learning & Technology 20 / 2: 17 – 37

Words & Monsters: a review

NB This is an edited version of the original review.

Words & Monsters is a new vocabulary app that has caught my attention. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, because it’s free. Secondly, because I was led to believe (falsely, as it turns out) that two of the people behind it are Charles Browne and Brent Culligan, eminently respectable linguists, who were also behind the development of the New General Service List (NGSL), based on data from the Cambridge English Corpus. And thirdly, because a lot of thought, effort and investment have clearly gone into the gamification of Words & Monsters (WAM). It’s to the last of these that I’ll turn my attention first.

WAM teaches vocabulary in the context of a battle between a player’s avatar and a variety of monsters. If users can correctly match a set of target items to definitions or translations in the available time, they ‘defeat’ the monster and accumulate points. The more points you have, the higher you advance through a series of levels and ranks. There are bonuses for meeting daily and weekly goals, there are leaderboards, and trophies and medals can be won. In addition to points, players also win ‘crystals’ after successful battles, and these crystals can be used to buy accessories which change the appearance of the avatar and give the player added ‘powers’. I was never able to fully understand precisely how these ‘powers’ affected the number of points I could win in battle. It remained as baffling to me as the whole system of values with Pokemon cards, which is presumably a large part of the inspiration here. Perhaps others, more used to games like Pokemon, would find it all much more transparent.

The system of rewards is all rather complicated, but perhaps this doesn’t matter too much. In fact, it might be the case that working out how reward systems work is part of what motivates people to play games. But there is another aspect to this: the app’s developers refer in their bumf to research by Howard-Jones and Jay (2016), which suggests that when rewards are uncertain, more dopamine is released in the mid-brain and this may lead to reinforcement of learning, and, possibly, enhancement of declarative memory function. Possibly … but Howard-Jones and Jay point out that ‘the science required to inform the manipulation of reward schedules for educational benefit is very incomplete.’ So, WAM’s developers may be jumping the gun a little and overstating the applicability of the neuroscientific research, but they’re not alone in that!

If you don’t understand a reward system, it’s certain that the rewards are uncertain. But WAM takes this further in at least two ways. Firstly, when you win a ‘battle’, you have to click on a plain treasure bag to collect your crystals, and you don’t know whether you’ll get one, two, three, or zero, crystals. You are given a semblance of agency, but, essentially, the whole thing is random. Secondly, when you want to convert your crystals into accessories for your avatar, random selection determines which accessory you receive, even though, again, there is a semblance of agency. Different accessories have different power values. This extended use of what the developers call ‘the thrill of uncertain rewards’ is certainly interesting, but how effective it is is another matter. My own reaction, after quite some time spent ‘studying’, to getting no crystals or an avatar accessory that I didn’t want was primarily frustration, rather than motivation to carry on. I have no idea how typical my reaction (more ‘treadmill’ than ‘thrill’) might be.

Unsurprisingly, for an app that has so obviously thought carefully about gamification, players are encouraged to interact with each other. As part of the early promotion, WAM is running, from 15 November to 19 December, a free ‘team challenge tournament’, allowing teams of up to 8 players to compete against each other. Ingeniously, it would appear to allow teams and players of varying levels of English to play together, with the app’s algorithms determining each individual’s level of lexical knowledge and therefore the items that will be presented / tested. Social interaction is known to be an important component of successful games (Dehghanzadeh et al., 2019), but for vocabulary apps there’s a huge challenge. In order to learn vocabulary from an app, learners need to put in time – on a regular basis. Team challenge tournaments may help with initial on-boarding of players, but, in the end, learning from a vocabulary app is inevitably and largely a solitary pursuit. Over time, social interaction is unlikely to be maintained, and it is, in any case, of a very limited nature. The other features of successful games – playful freedom and intrinsically motivating tasks (Driver, 2012) – are also absent from vocabulary apps. Playful freedom is mostly incompatible with points, badges and leaderboards. And flashcard tasks, however intrinsically motivating they may be at the outset, will always become repetitive after a while. In the end, what’s left, for those users who hang around long enough, is the reward system.

It’s also worth noting that this free challenge is of limited duration: it is a marketing device attempting to push you towards the non-free use of the app, once the initial promotion is over.

Gamified motivation tools are only of value, of course, if they motivate learners to spend their time doing things that are of clear learning value. To evaluate the learning potential of WAM, then, we need to look at the content (the ‘learning objects’) and the learning tasks that supposedly lead to acquisition of these items.

When you first use WAM, you need to play for about 20 minutes, at which point algorithms determine ‘how many words [you] know and [you can] see scores for English tests such as; TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, EIKEN, Kyotsu Shiken, CEFR, SAT and GRE’. The developers claim that these scores correlate pretty highly with actual test scores: ‘they are about as accurate as the tests themselves’, they say. If Browne and Culligan had been behind the app, I would have been tempted to accept the claim – with reservations: after all, it still allows for one item out of 5 to be wrongly identified. But, what is this CEFR test score that is referred to? There is no CEFR test, although many tests are correlated with CEFR. The two tools that I am most familiar with which allocate CEFR levels to individual words – Cambridge’s English Vocabulary Profile and Pearson’s Global Scale of English – often conflict in their results. I suspect that ‘CEFR’ was just thrown into the list of tests as an attempt to broaden the app’s appeal.

English target words are presented and practised with their translation ‘equivalents’ in Japanese. For the moment, Japanese is the only language available, which means the app is of little use to learners who don’t know any Japanese. It’s now well-known that bilingual pairings are more effective in deliberate language learning than using definitions in the same language as the target items. This becomes immediately apparent when, for example, a word like ‘something’ is defined (by WAM) as ‘a thing not known or specified’ and ‘anything’ as ‘a thing of whatever kind’. But although I’m in no position to judge the Japanese translations, there are reasons why I would want to check the spreadsheet before recommending the app. ‘Lady’ is defined as ‘polite word for a woman’; ‘missus’ is defined as ‘wife’; and ‘aye’ is defined as ‘yes’. All of these definitions are, at best, problematic; at worst, they are misleading. Are the Japanese translations more helpful? I wonder … Perhaps these are simply words that do not lend themselves to flashcard treatment?

Because I tested in to the app at C1 level, I was not able to evaluate the selection of words at lower levels. A pity. Instead, I was presented with words like ‘ablution’, ‘abrade’, ‘anode’, and ‘auspice’. The app claims to be suitable ‘for both second-language learners and native speakers’. For lower levels of the former, this may be true (but without looking at the lexical spreadsheets, I can’t tell). But for higher levels, however much fun this may be for some people, it seems unlikely that you’ll learn very much of any value. Outside of words in, say, the top 8000 frequency band, it is practically impossible to differentiate the ‘surrender value’ of words in any meaningful way. Deliberate learning of vocabulary only makes sense with high frequency words that you have a chance of encountering elsewhere. You’d be better off reading, extensively, rather than learning random words from an app. Words, which (for reasons I’ll come on to) you probably won’t actually learn anyway.

With very few exceptions, the learning objects in WAM are single words, rather than phrases, even when the item is of little or no value outside its use in a phrase. ‘Betide’ is defined as ‘to happen to; befall’ but this doesn’t tell a learner much that is useful. It’s practically only ever used following ‘woe’ (but what does ‘woe’ mean?!). Learning items can be checked in the ‘study guide’, which will show that ‘betide’ typically follows ‘woe’, but unless you choose to refer to the study guide (and there’s no reason, in a case like this, that you would know that you need to check things out more fully), you’ll be none the wiser. In other words, checking the study guide is unlikely to betide you. ‘Wee’, as another example, is treated as two items: (1) meaning ‘very small’ as in ‘wee baby’, and (2) meaning ‘very early in the morning’ as in ‘in the wee hours’. For the latter, ‘wee’ can only collocate with ‘in the’ and ‘hours’, so it makes little sense to present it as a single word. This is also an example of how, in some cases, different meanings of particular words are treated as separate learning objects, even when the two meanings are very close and, in my view, are hardly worth learning separately. Examples include ‘czar’ and ‘assonance’. Sometimes, cognates are treated as separate learning objects (e.g. ‘adulterate’ and ‘adulteration’ or ‘dolor’ and ‘dolorous’); with other words (e.g. ‘effulgence’), only one grammatical form appears to be given. I could not begin to figure out any rationale behind any of this.

All in all, then, there are reasons to be a little skeptical about some of the content. Up to level B2 – which, in my view, is the highest level at which it makes sense to use vocabulary flashcards – it may be of value, so long as your first language is Japanese. But given the claim that it can help you prepare for the ‘CEFR test’, I have to wonder …

The learning tasks require players to match target items to translations / definitions (in both directions), with the target item sometimes in written form, sometimes spoken. Users do not, as far as I can tell, ever have to produce the target item: they only have to select. The learning relies on spaced repetition, but there is no generative effect (known to enhance memorisation). When I was experimenting, there were a few words that I did not know, but I was usually able to get the correct answer by eliminating the distractors (a choice of one from three gives players a reasonable chance of guessing correctly). WAM does not teach users how to produce words; its focus is on receptive knowledge (of a limited kind). I learn, for example, what a word like ‘aye’ or ‘missus’ kind of means, but I learn nothing about how to use it appropriately. Contrary to the claims in WAM’s bumf (that ‘all senses and dimensions of each word are fully acquired’), reading and listening comprehension speeds may be improved, but appropriate and accurate use of these words in speaking and writing is much less likely to follow. Does WAM really ‘strengthen and expand the foundation levels of cognition that support all higher level thinking’, as is claimed?

Perhaps it’s unfair to mention some of the more dubious claims of WAM’s promotional material, but here is a small selection, anyway: ‘WAM unleashes the full potential of natural motivation’. ‘WAM promotes Flow by carefully managing the ratio of unknown words. Your mind moves freely in the channel below frustration and above boredom’.

WAM is certainly an interesting project, but, like all the vocabulary apps I have ever looked at, there have to be trade-offs between optimal task design and what will fit on a mobile screen, between freedoms and flexibility for the user and the requirements of gamified points systems, between the amount of linguistic information that is desirable and the amount that spaced repetition can deal with, between attempting to make the app suitable for the greatest number of potential users and making it especially appropriate for particular kinds of users. Design considerations are always a mix of the pedagogical and the practical / commercial. And, of course, the financial. And, like most edtech products, the claims for its efficacy need to be treated with a bucket of salt.

References

Dehghanzadeh, H., Fardanesh, H., Hatami, J., Talaee, E. & Noroozi, O. (2019) Using gamification to support learning English as a second language: a systematic review, Computer Assisted Language Learning, DOI: 10.1080/09588221.2019.1648298

Driver, P. (2012) The Irony of Gamification. In English Digital Magazine 3, British Council Portugal, pp. 21 – 24 http://digitaldebris.info/digital-debris/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html

Howard-Jones, P. & Jay, T. (2016) Reward, learning and games. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 10: 65 – 72

Questions about pre-teaching vocabulary (PTV)

‘Pre-teaching’ (of vocabulary) is a widely-used piece of language teaching jargon, but it’s a strange expression. The ‘pre’ indicates that it’s something that comes before something else that is more important, what Chia Suan Chong calls ‘the main event’, which is usually some reading or listening work. The basic idea, it seems, is to lessen the vocabulary load of the subsequent activity. If the focus on vocabulary were the ‘main event’, we might refer to the next activity as ‘post-reading’ or ‘post-listening’ … but we never do.

The term is used in standard training manuals by both Jim Scrivener (2005: 230 – 233) and Jeremy Harmer (2012: 137) and, with a few caveats, the practice is recommended. Now read this from the ELT Nile Glossary:

For many years teachers were recommended to pre-teach vocabulary before working on texts. Nowadays though, some question this, suggesting that the contexts that teachers are able to set up for pre-teaching are rarely meaningful and that pre-teaching in fact prevents learners from developing the attack strategies they need for dealing with challenging texts.

Chia is one of those doing this questioning. She suggests that ‘we cut out pre-teaching altogether and go straight for the main event. After all, if it’s a receptive skills lesson, then shouldn’t the focus be on reading/listening skills and strategies? And most importantly, pre-teaching prevents learners’ from developing a tolerance of ambiguity – a skill that is vital in language learning.’ Scott Thornbury is another who has expressed doubts about the value of PTV, although he is more circumspect in his opinions. He has argued that working out the meaning of vocabulary from context is probably a better approach and that PTV inadequately prepares learners for the real world. If we have to pre-teach, he argues, get it out of the way ‘as quickly and efficiently as possible’ … or ‘try post-teaching instead’.

Both Chia and Scott touch on the alternatives, and guessing the meaning of unknown words from context is one of them. I’ve discussed this area in an earlier post. Not wanting to rehash the content of that post here, the simple summary is this: it’s complicated. We cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that guessing meaning from context leads to more gains in either reading / listening comprehension or vocabulary development than PTV or one of the other alternatives – encouraging / allowing monolingual or bilingual dictionary look up (see this post on the topic), providing a glossary (see this post) or doing post-text vocabulary work.

In attempting to move towards a better understanding, the first problem is that there is very little research into the relationship between PTV and improved reading / listening comprehension. What there is (e.g. Webb, 2009) suggests that pre-teaching can improve comprehension and speed up reading, but there are other things that a teacher can do (e.g. previous presentation of comprehension questions or the provision of pictorial support) that appear to lead to more gains in these areas (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021). It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. There is even less research looking at the relationship between PTV and vocabulary development. What there is (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021) suggests that pre-teaching leads to more vocabulary gains than when learners read without any support. But the reading-only condition is unlikely in most real-world learning contexts, where there is a teacher, dictionary or classmate who can be turned to. A more interesting contrast is perhaps between PTV and during-reading vocabulary instruction, which is a common approach in many classrooms. One study (File & Adams, 2010) looked at precisely this area and found little difference between the approaches in terms of vocabulary gains. The limited research does not provide us with any compelling reasons either for or against PTV.

Another problem is, as usual, that the research findings often imply more than was actually demonstrated. The abstract for the study by Pellicer-Sánchez et al (2021) states that pre‐reading instruction led to more vocabulary learning. But this needs to be considered in the light of the experimental details.

The study involved 87 L2 undergraduates and postgraduates studying at a British university. Their level of English was therefore very high, and we can’t really generalise to other learners at other levels in other conditions. The text that they read contained a number of pseudo-words and was 2,290 words long. The text itself, a narrative, was of no intrinsic interest, so the students reading it would treat it as an object of study and they would notice the pseudo-words, because their level of English was already high, and because they knew that the focus of the research was on ‘new words’. In other words, the students’ behaviour was probably not at all typical of a student in a ‘normal’ classroom. In addition, the pseudo-words were all Anglo-Saxon looking, and not therefore representative of the kinds of unknown items that students would encounter in authentic (or even pedagogical) texts (which would have a high proportion of words with Latin roots). I’m afraid I don’t think that the study tells us anything of value.

Perhaps research into an area like this, with so many variables that need to be controlled, is unlikely ever to provide teachers with clear answers to what appears to be a simple question: is PTV a good idea or not? However, I think we can get closer to something resembling useful advice if we take another tack. For this, I think two additional questions need to be asked. First, what is the intended main learning opportunity (note that I avoid the term ‘learning outcome’!) of the ‘main event’ – the reading or listening. Second, following on from the first question, what is the point of PTV, i.e. in what ways might it contribute to enriching the learning opportunities of the ‘main event’?

To answer the first question, I think it is useful to go back to a distinction made almost forty years ago in a paper by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). They contrasted the Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) with the Text as a Vehicle for Information (TAVI). The former (TALO) is something that language students study to learn language from in a direct way. It has typically been written or chosen to illustrate and to contextualise bits of grammar, and to provide opportunities for lexical ‘quarrying’. The latter (TAVI) is a text with intrinsic interest, read for information or pleasure, and therefore more appropriately selected by the learner, rather than the teacher. For an interesting discussion on TALO and TAVI, see this 2015 post from Geoff Jordan.

Johns and Davies wrote their article in pre-Headway days when texts in almost all coursebooks were unashamedly TALOs, and when what were called top-down reading skills (reading for gist / detail, etc.) were only just beginning to find their way into language teaching materials. TAVIs were separate, graded readers, for example. In some parts of the world, TALOs and TAVIs are still separate, often with one teacher dealing with the teaching of discrete items of language through TALOs, and another responsible for ‘skills development’ through TAVIs. But, increasingly, under the influence of British publishers and methodologists, attempts have been made to combine TALOs and TAVIs in a single package. The syllabus of most contemporary coursebooks, fundamentally driven by a discrete-item grammar plus vocabulary approach, also offer a ‘skills’ strand which requires texts to be intrinsically interesting, meaningful and relevant to today’s 21^st century learners. The texts are required to carry out two functions.

Recent years have seen an increasingly widespread questioning of this approach. Does the exploitation of reading and listening texts in coursebooks (mostly through comprehension questions) actually lead to gains in reading and listening skills? Is there anything more than testing of comprehension going on? Or do they simply provide practice in strategic approaches to reading / listening, strategies which could probably be transferred from L1? As a result of the work of scholars like William Grabe (reading) and John Field and Richard Cauldwell (listening), there is now little, if any, debate in the world of research about these questions. If we want to develop the reading / listening skills of our students, the approach of most coursebooks is not the way to go about it. For a start, the reading texts are usually too short and the listening texts too long.

Most texts that are found in most contemporary coursebooks are TALOs dressed up to look like TAVIs. Their fundamental purpose is to illustrate and contextualise language that has either been pre-taught or will be explored later. They are first and foremost vehicles for language, and only secondarily vehicles for information. They are written and presented in as interesting a way as possible in order to motivate learners to engage with the TALO. Sometimes, they succeed.

However, there are occasions (even in coursebooks) when texts are TAVIs – used for purely ‘skills’ purposes, language use as opposed to language study. Typically, they (reading or listening texts) are used as springboards for speaking and / or writing practice that follows. It’s the information in the text that matters most.

So, where does all this take us with PTV? Here is my attempt at a break-down of advice.

1 TALOs where the text contains a set of new lexical items which are a core focus of the lesson

If the text is basically a contextualized illustration of a set of lexical items (and, usually, a particular grammatical structure), there is a strong case for PTV. This is, of course, assuming that these items are of sufficiently high frequency to be suitable candidates for direct vocabulary instruction. If this is so, there is also a strong case to be made for the PTV to be what has been called ‘rich instruction’, which ‘involves (1) spending time on the word; (2) explicitly exploring several aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; and (3) involving learners in thoughtfully and actively processing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 117). In instances like this, PTV is something of a misnomer. It’s just plain teaching, and is likely to need as much, or more, time than exploration of the text (which may be viewed as further practice of / exposure to the lexis).

If the text is primarily intended as lexical input, there is also a good case to be made for making the target items it contains more salient by, for example, highlighting them or putting them in bold (Choi, 2017). At the same time, if ‘PTV’ is to lead to lexical gains, these are likely to be augmented by post-reading tasks which also focus explicitly on the target items (Sonbul & Schmitt, 2010).

2 TALOs which contain a set of lexical items that are necessary for comprehension of the text, but not a core focus of the lesson (e.g. because they are low-frequency)

PTV is often time-consuming, and necessarily so if the instruction is rich. If it is largely restricted to matching items to meanings (e.g. through translation), it is likely to have little impact on vocabulary development, and its short-term impact on comprehension appears to be limited. Research suggests that the use of a glossary is more efficient, since learners will only refer to it when they need to (whereas PTV is likely to devote some time to some items that are known to some learners, and this takes place before the knowledge is required … and may therefore be forgotten in the interim). Glossaries lead to better comprehension (Alessi & Dwyer, 2008).

3 TAVIs

I don’t have any principled objection to the occasional use of texts as TALOs, but it seems fairly clear that a healthy textual diet for language learners will contain substantially more TAVIs than TALOs, substantially more extensive reading than intensive reading of the kind found in most coursebooks. If we focused less often on direct instruction of grammar (a change of emphasis which is long overdue), there would be less need for TALOs, anyway. With TAVIs, there seems to be no good reason for PTV: glossaries or digital dictionary look-up will do just fine.

However, one alternative justification and use of PTV is offered by Scott Thornbury. He suggests identifying a relatively small number of keywords from a text that will be needed for global understanding. Some of them may be unknown to the learners, and for these, learners use dictionaries to check meaning. Then, looking at the list of key words learners predict what the text will be about. The rationale here is that if learners engage with these words before encountering them in the text, it ‘may be an effective way of activating a learner’s schema for the text, and this may help to support comprehension’ (Ballance, 2018). However, as Ballance notes, describing this kind of activity as PTV would be something of a misnomer: it is a useful addition to a teacher’s repertoire of schema-activation activities (which might be used with both TAVIs and TALOs).

In short …

The big question about PTV, then, is not one of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s about the point of the activity. Balance (2018) offers a good summary:

‘In sum, for teachers to use PTV effectively, it is essential that they clearly identify a rationale for including PTV within a lesson, select the words to be taught in conjunction with this rationale and also design the vocabulary learning or development exercise in a manner that is commensurate with this rationale. The rationale should be the determining factor in the design of a PTV component within a lesson, and different rationales for using PTV naturally lead to markedly different selections of vocabulary items to be studied and different exercise designs.’

REFERENCES

Alessi, S. & Dwyer, A. (2008). Vocabulary assistance before and during reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2): pp. 246 – 263

Ballance, O. J. (2018). Strategies for pre-teaching vocabulary in context. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1-7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0732

Choi, S. (2017). Processing and learning of enhanced English collocations: An eye movement study. Language Teaching Research, 21, 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168816653271

File, K. A. & Adams, R. (2010). Should vocabulary instruction be integrated or isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 222–249.

Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson

Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1): pp. 1 – 19

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. & Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2021). The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers’ eye movements. Language Learning, 0 (0), 0-0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12430

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillan

Sonbul, S. & Schmitt, N. (2010). Direct teaching of vocabulary after reading: is it worth the effort? ELT Journal 64 (3): pp.253 – 260

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre‐learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (3): pp. 441–470.

Questions about subtitles and language learning

As both a language learner and a teacher, I have a number of questions about the value of watching subtitled videos for language learning. My interest is in watching extended videos, rather than short clips for classroom use, so I am concerned with incidental, rather than intentional, learning, mostly of vocabulary. My questions include:

• Is it better to watch a video that is subtitled or unsubtitled?
• Is it better to watch a video with L1 or L2 subtitles?
• If a video is watched more than once, what is the best way to start and proceed? In which order (no subtitles, L1 subtitles and L2 subtitles) is it best to watch?

For help, I turned to three recent books about video and language learning: Ben Goldstein and Paul Driver’s Language Learning with Digital Video (CUP, 2015), Kieran Donaghy’s Film in Action (Delta, 2015) and Jamie Keddie’s Bringing Online Video into the Classroom (OUP, 2014). I was surprised to find no advice, but, as I explored more, I discovered that there may be a good reason for these authors’ silence.

There is now a huge literature out there on subtitles and language learning, and I cannot claim to have read it all. But I think I have read enough to understand that I am not going to find clear-cut answers to my questions.

The learning value of subtitles

It has been known for some time that the use of subtitles during extensive viewing of video in another language can help in the acquisition of that language. The main gains are in vocabulary acquisition and the development of listening skills (Montero Perez et al., 2013). This is true of both L1 subtitles (with an L2 audio track), sometimes called interlingual subtitles, (Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al, 2011) and L2 subtitles (with an L2 audio track), sometimes called intralingual subtitles or captions (Vanderplank, 1988). Somewhat more surprisingly, vocabulary gains may also come from what are called reversed subtitles (L2 subtitles and an L1 audio track) (Burczyńska, 2015). Of course, certain conditions apply for subtitled video to be beneficial, and I’ll come on to these. But there is general research agreement (an exception is Karakaş & Sariçoban, 2012) that more learning is likely to take place from watching a subtitled video in a target language than an unsubtitled one.

Opposition to the use of subtitles as a tool for language learning has mostly come from three angles. The first of these, which concerns L1 subtitles, is an antipathy to any use at all of L1. Although such an attitude remains entrenched in some quarters, there is no evidence to support it (Hall & Cook, 2012; Kerr, 2016). Researchers and, increasingly, teachers have moved on.

The second reservation that is sometimes expressed is that learners may not attend to either the audio track or the subtitles if they do not need to. They may, for example, ignore the subtitles in the case of reversed subtitles or ignore the L2 audio track when there are L1 subtitles. This can, of course, happen, but it seems that, on the whole, this is not the case. In an eye-tracking study by Bisson et al (2012), for example, it was found that most people followed the subtitles, irrespective of what kind they were. Unsurprisingly, they followed the subtitles more closely when the audio track was in a language that was less familiar. When conditions are right (see below), reading subtitles becomes a very efficient and partly automatized cognitive activity, which does not prevent people from processing the audio track at the same time (d’Ydewalle & Pavakanun, 1997).

Related to the second reservation is the concern that the two sources of information (audio and subtitles), combined with other information (images and music or sound effects), may be in competition and lead to cognitive overload, impacting negatively on both comprehension and learning. Recent research suggests that this concern is ungrounded (Kruger et al, 2014). L1 subtitles generate less cognitive load than L2 subtitles, but overload is not normally reached and mental resources are still available for learning (Baranowska, 2020). The absence of subtitles generates more cognitive load.

Conditions for learning

Before looking at the differences between L1 and L2 subtitles, it’s a good idea to look at the conditions under which learning is more likely to take place with subtitles. Some of these are obvious, others less so.

First of all, the video material must be of sufficient intrinsic interest to the learner. Secondly, the subtitles must be of a sufficiently high quality. This is not always the case with automatically generated captions, especially if the speech-to-text software struggles with the audio accent. It is also not always the case with professionally produced L1 subtitles, especially when the ‘translations are non-literal and made at the phrase level, making it hard to find connections between the subtitle text and the words in the video’ (Kovacs, 2013, cited by Zabalbeascoa et al., 2015: 112). As a minimum, standard subtitling guidelines, such as those produced for the British Channel 4, should be followed. These limit, for example, the number of characters per line to about 40 and a maximum of two lines.

For reasons that I’ll come on to, learners should be able to switch easily between L1 and L2 subtitles. They are also likely to benefit if reliably accurate glosses or hyperlinks are ‘embedded in the subtitles, making it possible for a learner to simply click for additional verbal, auditory or even pictorial glosses’ (Danan, 2015: 49).

At least as important as considerations of the materials or tools, is a consideration of what the learner brings to the activity (Frumuselu, 2019: 104). Vanderplank (2015) describes these different kinds of considerations as the ‘effects of’ subtitles on a learner and the ‘effects with’ subtitles on learner behaviour.

In order to learn from subtitles, you need to be able to read fast enough to process them. Anyone with a slow reading speed (e.g. some dyslexics) in their own language is going to struggle. Even with L1 subtitles, Vanderplank (2015: 24) estimates that it is only around the age of 10 that children can do this with confidence. Familarity with both the subject matter and with subtitle use will impact on this ability to read subtitles fast enough.

With L2 subtitles, the language proficiency of the learner related to the level of difficulty (especially lexical difficulty) of the subtitles will clearly be of some significance. It is unlikely that L2 subtitles will be of much benefit to beginners (Taylor, 2005). It also suggests that, at lower levels, materials need to be chosen carefully. On the whole, researchers have found that higher proficiency levels correlate with greater learning gains (Pujadas & Muñoz, 2019; Suárez & Gesa, 2019), but one earlier meta-analysis (Montero Perez et al., 2013) did not find that proficiency levels were significant.

Measures of general language proficiency may be too blunt an instrument to help us all of the time. I can learn more from Portuguese than from Arabic subtitles, even though I am a beginner in both languages. The degree of proximity between two languages, especially the script (Winke et al., 2010), is also likely to be significant.

But a wide range of other individual learner differences will also impact on the learning from subtitles. It is known that learners approach subtitles in varied and idiosyncratic ways (Pujolá, 2002), with some using L2 subtitles only as a ‘back-up’ and others relying on them more. Vanderplank (2019) grouped learners into three broad categories: minimal users who were focused throughout on enjoying films as they would in their L1, evolving users who showed marked changes in their viewing behaviour over time, and maximal users who tended to be experienced at using films to enhance their language learning.

Categories like these are only the tip of the iceberg. Sensory preferences, personality types, types of motivation, the impact of subtitles on anxiety levels and metacognitive strategy awareness are all likely to be important. For the last of these, Danan (2015: 47) asks whether learners should be taught ‘techniques to make better use of subtitles and compensate for weaknesses: techniques such as a quick reading of subtitles before listening, confirmation of word recognition or meaning after listening, as well as focus on form for spelling or grammatical accuracy?’

In short, it is, in practice, virtually impossible to determine optimal conditions for learning from subtitles, because we cannot ‘take into account all the psycho-social, cultural and pedagogic parameters’ (Gambier, 2015). With that said, it’s time to take a closer look at the different potential of L1 and L2 subtitles.

L1 vs L2 subtitles

Since all other things are almost never equal, it is not possible to say that one kind of subtitles offers greater potential for learning than another. As regards gains in vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension, there is no research consensus (Baranowska, 2020: 107). Research does, however, offer us a number of pointers.

Extensive viewing of subtitled video (both L1 and L2) can offer ‘massive quantities of authentic and comprehensible input’ (Vanderplank, 1988: 273). With lower level learners, the input is likely to be more comprehensible with L1 subtitles, and, therefore, more enjoyable and motivating. This makes them often more suitable for what Caimi (2015: 11) calls ‘leisure viewing’. Vocabulary acquisition may be better served with L2 subtitles, because they can help viewers to recognize the words that are being spoken, increase their interaction with the target language, provide further language context, and increase the redundancy of information, thereby enhancing the possibility of this input being stored in long-term memory (Frumuselu et al., 2015). These effects are much more likely with Vanderplank’s (2019) motivated, ‘maximal’ users than with ‘minimal’ users.

There is one further area where L2 subtitles may have the edge over L1. One of the values of extended listening in a target language is the improvement in phonetic retuning (see, for example, Reinisch & Holt, 2013), the ability to adjust the phonetic boundaries in your own language to the boundaries that exist in the target language. Learning how to interpret unusual speech-sounds, learning how to deal with unusual mappings between sounds and words and learning how to deal with the acoustic variations of different speakers of the target language are all important parts of acquiring another language. Research by Mitterer and McQueen (2009) suggests that L2 subtitles help in this process, but L1 subtitles hinder it.

Classroom implications?

The literature on subtitles and language learning echoes with the refrain of ‘more research needed’, but I’m not sure that further research will lead to less ambiguous, practical conclusions. One of my initial questions concerned the optimal order of use of different kinds of subtitles. In most extensive viewing contexts, learners are unlikely to watch something more than twice. If they do (watching a recorded academic lecture, for example), they are likely to be more motivated by a desire to learn from the content than to learn language from the content. L1 subtitles will probably be preferred, and will have the added bonus of facilitating note-taking in the L1. For learners who are more motivated to learn the target language (Vanderplank’s ‘maximal’ users), a sequence of subtitle use, starting with the least cognitively challenging and moving to greater challenge, probably makes sense. Danan (2015: 46) suggests starting with an L1 soundtrack and reversed (L2) subtitles, then moving on to an L2 soundtrack and L2 subtitles, and ending with an L2 soundtrack and no subtitles. I would replace her first stage with an L2 soundtrack and L1 subtitles, but this is based on hunch rather than research.

This sequencing of subtitle use is common practice in language classrooms, but, here, (1) the video clips are usually short, and (2) the aim is often not incidental learning of vocabulary. Typically, the video clip has been selected as a tool for deliberate teaching of language items, so different conditions apply. At least one study has confirmed the value of the common teaching practice of pre-teaching target vocabulary items before viewing (Pujadas & Muñoz, 2019). The drawback is that, by getting learners to focus on particular items, less incidental learning of other language features is likely to take place. Perhaps this doesn’t matter too much. In a short clip of a few minutes, the opportunities for incidental learning are limited, anyway. With short clips and a deliberate learning aim, it seems reasonable to use L2 subtitles for a first viewing, and no subtitles thereafter.

An alternative frequent use of short video clips in classrooms is to use them as a springboard for speaking. In these cases, Baranowska (2020: 113) suggests that teachers may opt for L1 subtitles first, and follow up with L2 subtitles. Of course, with personal viewing devices or in online classes, teachers may want to exploit the possibilities of differentiating the subtitle condition for different learners.

REFERENCES

Baranowska, K. (2020). Learning most with least effort: subtitles and cognitive load. ELT Journal 74 (2): pp.105 – 115

Bisson, M.-J., Van Heuven, W.J.B., Conklin, K. and Tunney, R.J. (2012). Processing of native and foreign language subtitles in films: An eye tracking study. Applied Psycholingistics, 35 (2): pp. 399 – 418

Burczyńska, P. (2015). Reversed Subtitles as a Powerful Didactic Tool in SLA. In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences. Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 221 – 244)

Caimi, A. (2015). Introduction. In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences. Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 9 – 18)

Danan, M. (2015). Subtitling as a Language Learning Tool: Past Findings, Current Applications, and Future Paths. In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences. Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 41 – 61)

d’Ydewalle, G. & Pavakanun, U. (1997). Could Enjoying a Movie Lead to Language Acquisition?. In: Winterhoff-Spurk, P., van der Voort, T.H.A. (Eds.) New Horizons in Media Psychology. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-10899-3_10

Frumuselu, A.D., de Maeyer, S., Donche, V. & Gutierrez Colon Plana, M. (2015). Television series inside the EFL classroom: bridging the gap between teaching and learning informal language through subtitles. Linguistics and Education, 32: pp. 107 – 17

Frumuselu, A. D. (2019). ‘A Friend in Need is a Film Indeed’: Teaching Colloquial Expressions with Subtitled Television Series. In Herrero, C. & Vanderschelden, I. (Eds.) Using Film and Media in the Language Classroom. Bristol: Multimedia Matters. pp.92 – 107

Gambier, Y. (2015). Subtitles and Language Learning (SLL): Theoretical background. In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences. Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 63 – 82)

Hall, G. & Cook, G. (2012). Own-language Use in Language Teaching and Learning. Language Learning, 45 (3): pp. 271 – 308

Incalcaterra McLoughlin, L., Biscio, M. & Ní Mhainnín, M. A. (Eds.) (2011). Audiovisual Translation, Subtitles and Subtitling. Theory and Practice. Bern: Peter Lang

Karakaş, A. & Sariçoban, A. (2012). The impact of watching subtitled animated cartoons on incidental vocabulary learning of ELT students. Teaching English with Technology, 12 (4): pp. 3 – 15

Kerr, P. (2016). Questioning ‘English-only’ Classrooms: Own-language Use in ELT. In Hall, G. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp. 513 – 526)

Kruger, J. L., Hefer, E. & Matthew, G. (2014). Attention distribution and cognitive load in a subtitled academic lecture: L1 vs. L2. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 7: pp. 1 – 15

Mitterer, H. & McQueen, J. M. (2009). Foreign Subtitles Help but Native-Language Subtitles Harm Foreign Speech Perception. PLoS ONE 4 (11): e7785.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007785

Montero Perez, M., Van Den Noortgate, W., & Desmet, P. (2013). Captioned video for L2 listening and vocabulary learning: A meta-analysis. System, 41, pp. 720–739 doi:10.1016/j.system.2013.07.013

Pujadas, G. & Muñoz, C. (2019). Extensive viewing of captioned and subtitled TV series: a study of L2 vocabulary learning by adolescents, The Language Learning Journal, 47:4, 479-496, DOI: 10.1080/09571736.2019.1616806

Pujolá, J.- T. (2002). CALLing for help: Researching language learning strategies using help facilities in a web-based multimedia program. ReCALL, 14 (2): pp. 235 – 262

Reinisch, E. & Holt, L. L. (2013). Lexically Guided Phonetic Retuning of Foreign-Accented Speech and Its Generalization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0034409

Suárez, M. & Gesa, F. (2019) Learning vocabulary with the support of sustained exposure to captioned video: do proficiency and aptitude make a difference? The Language Learning Journal, 47:4, 497-517, DOI: 10.1080/09571736.2019.1617768

Taylor, G. (2005). Perceived processing strategies of students watching captioned video. Foreign Language Annals, 38(3), pp. 422-427

Vanderplank, R. (1988). The value of teletext subtitles in language learning. ELT Journal, 42 (4): pp. 272 – 281

Vanderplank, R. (2015). Thirty Years of Research into Captions / Same Language Subtitles and Second / Foreign Language Learning: Distinguishing between ‘Effects of’ Subtitles and ‘Effects with’ Subtitles for Future Research. In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences. Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 19 – 40)

Vanderplank, R. (2019). ‘Gist watching can only take you so far’: attitudes, strategies and changes in behaviour in watching films with captions, The Language Learning Journal, 47:4, 407-423, DOI: 10.1080/09571736.2019.1610033

Winke, P., Gass, S. M., & Sydorenko, T. (2010). The Effects of Captioning Videos Used for Foreign Language Listening Activities. Language Learning & Technology, 1 (1): pp. 66 – 87

Zabalbeascoa, P., González-Casillas, S. & Pascual-Herce, R. (2015). In Gambier, Y., Caimi, A. & Mariotti, C. (Eds.), Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, strategies and practical experiences Bern: Peter Lang (pp. 105–126)

Vocab Victor: a review

Vocab Victor is a very curious vocab app. It’s not a flashcard system, designed to extend vocabulary breadth. Rather it tests the depth of a user’s vocabulary knowledge.

The app’s website refers to the work of Paul Meara (see, for example, Meara, P. 2009. Connected Words. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Meara explored the ways in which an analysis of the words that we associate with other words can shed light on the organisation of our mental lexicon. Described as ‘gigantic multidimensional cobwebs’ (Aitchison, J. 1987. Words in the Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, p.86), our mental lexicons do not appear to store lexical items in individual slots, but rather they are distributed across networks of associations.

The size of the web (i.e. the number of words, or the level of vocabulary breadth) is important, but equally important is the strength of the connections within the web (or vocabulary depth), as this determines the robustness of vocabulary knowledge. These connections or associations are between different words and concepts and experiences, and they are developed by repeated, meaningful, contextualised exposure to a word. In other words, the connections are firmed up through extensive opportunities to use language.

In word association research, a person is given a prompt word and asked to say the first other word that comes to their mind. For an entertaining example of this process at work, you might enjoy this clip from the comedy show ‘Help’. The research has implications for a wide range of questions, not least second language acquisition. For example, given a particular prompt, native speakers produce a relatively small number of associative responses, and these are reasonably predictable. Learners, on the other hand, typically produce a much greater variety of responses (which might seem surprising, given that they have a smaller vocabulary store to select from).

One way of classifying the different kinds of response is to divide them into two categories: syntagmatic (words that are discoursally connected to the prompt, such as collocations) and paradigmatic (words that are semantically close to the prompt and are the same part of speech). Linguists have noted that learners (both L1 children and L2 learners) show a shift from predominantly syntagmatic responses to more paradigmatic responses as their mental lexicon develops.

The developers of Vocab Victor have set out to build ‘more and stronger associations for the words your students already know, and teaches new words by associating them with existing, known words, helping students acquire native-like word networks. Furthermore, Victor teaches different types of knowledge, including synonyms, “type-of” relationships, collocations, derivations, multiple meanings and form-focused knowledge’. Since we know how important vocabulary depth is, this seems like a pretty sensible learning target.

The app attempts to develop this breadth in two main ways (see below). The ‘core game’ is called ‘Word Strike’ where learners have to pick the word on the arrow which most closely matches the word on the target. The second is called ‘Word Drop’ where a bird holds a word card and the user has to decide if it relates more to one of two other words below. Significantly, they carry out these tasks before any kind of association between form and meaning has been established. The meaning of unknown items can be checked in a monolingual dictionary later. There are a couple of other, less important games that I won’t describe now. The graphics are attractive, if a little juvenile. The whole thing is gamified with levels, leaderboards and so on. It’s free and, presumably, still under development.

The app claims to be for ‘English language learners of all ages [to] develop a more native-like vocabulary’. It also says that it is appropriate for ‘native speaking primary students [to] build and strengthen vocabulary for better test performance and stronger reading skills’, as well as ‘secondary students [to] prepare for the PSAT and SAT’. It was the scope of these claims that first set my alarm bells ringing. How could one app be appropriate for such diverse users? (Spoiler: it can’t, and attempts to make an edtech product suitable for everyone inevitably end up with a product that is suitable for no one.)

Rich, associative lexical networks are the result of successful vocabulary acquisition, but neither Paul Meara nor anyone else in the word association field has, to the best of my knowledge, ever suggested that deliberate study is the way to develop the networks. It is uncontentious to say that vocabulary depth (as shown by associative networks) is best developed through extensive exposure to input – reading and listening.

It is also reasonably uncontentious to say that deliberate study of vocabulary pays greatest dividends in developing vocabulary breadth (not depth), especially at lower levels, with a focus on the top three to eight thousand words in terms of frequency. It may also be useful at higher levels when a learner needs to acquire a limited number of new words for a particular purpose. An example of this would be someone who is going to study in an EMI context and would benefit from rapid learning of the words of the Academic Word List.

The Vocab Victor website says that the app ‘is uniquely focused on intermediate-level vocabulary. The app helps get students beyond this plateau by selecting intermediate-level vocabulary words for your students’. At B1 and B2 levels, learners typically know words that fall between #2500 and #3750 in the frequency tables. At level C2, they know most of the most frequent 5000 items. The less frequent a word is, the less point there is in studying it deliberately.

For deliberate study of vocabulary to serve any useful function, the target language needs to be carefully selected, with a focus on high-frequency items. It makes little sense to study words that will already be very familiar. And it makes no sense to deliberately study apparently random words that are so infrequent (i.e. outside the top 10,000) that it is unlikely they will be encountered again before the deliberate study has been forgotten. Take a look at the examples below and judge for yourself how well chosen the items are.

Vocab Victor appears to focus primarily on semantic fields, as in the example above with ‘smashed’ as a key word. ‘Smashed’, ‘fractured’, ‘shattered’ and ‘cracked’ are all very close in meaning. In order to disambiguate them, it would help learners to see which nouns typically collocate with these words. But they don’t get this with the app – all they get are English-language definitions from Merriam-Webster. What this means is that learners are (1) unlikely to develop a sufficient understanding of target items to allow them to incorporate them into their productive lexicon, and (2) likely to get completely confused with a huge number of similar, low-frequency words (that weren’t really appropriate for deliberate study in the first place). What’s more, lexical sets of this kind may not be a terribly good idea, anyway (see my blog post on the topic).

Vocab Victor takes words, as opposed to lexical items, as the target learning objects. Users may be tested on the associations of any of the meanings of polysemantic items. In the example below (not perhaps the most appropriate choice for primary students!), there are two main meanings, but with other items, things get decidedly more complex (see the example with ‘toss’). Learners are also asked to do the associative tasks ‘Word Strike’ and ‘Word Drop’ before they have had a chance to check the possible meanings of either the prompt item or the associative options.

How anyone could learn from any of this is quite beyond me. I often struggled to choose the correct answer myself; there were also a small number of items whose meaning I wasn’t sure of. I could see no clear way in which items were being recycled (there’s no spaced repetition here). The website claims that ‘adaptating [sic] to your student’s level happens automatically from the very first game’, but I could not see this happening. In fact, it’s very hard to adapt target item selection to an individual learner, since right / wrong or multiple choice answers tell us so little. Does a correct answer tell us that someone knows an item or just that they made a lucky guess? Does an incorrect answer tell us that an item is unknown or just that, under game pressure, someone tapped the wrong button? And how do you evaluate a learner’s lexical level (as a starting point),  even with very rough approximation,  without testing knowledge of at least thirty items first? All in all, then, a very curious app.

One of the most powerful associative responses to a word (especially with younger learners) is what is called a ‘klang’ response: another word which rhymes with or sounds like the prompt word. So, if someone says the word ‘app’ to you, what’s the first klang response that comes to mind?

Guessing meaning from context

In my last post , I looked at the use of digital dictionaries. This post is a sort of companion piece to that one.

I noted in that post that teachers are typically less keen on bilingual dictionaries (preferring monolingual versions) than their students. More generally, it seems that teachers are less keen on any kind of dictionary, preferring their students to attempt to work out the meaning of unknown words from context. Coursebooks invariably promote the skill of guessing meaning from context (also known as ‘lexical inferencing’) and some suggest that dictionary work should be banned from the classroom (Haynes & Baker, 1993, cited in Folse, 2004: 112). Teacher educators usually follow suit. Scott Thornbury, for example, has described guessing from context as ‘probably one of the most useful skills learners can acquire and apply both inside and outside the classroom’ (Thornbury, 2002: 148) and offers a series of steps to train learners in this skill before adding ‘when all else fails, consult a dictionary’. Dictionary use, then, is a last resort.

These steps are fairly well known and a typical example (from Clarke & Nation, 1980, cited in Webb & Nation, 2017: 169) is

1 Determine the part of speech of the unknown word

2 Analyse the immediate context to try to determine the meaning of the unknown word

3 Analyse the wider context to try to determine the meaning of the unknown word

4 Guess the meaning of the unknown word

5 Check the guess against the information that was found in the first four steps

It has been suggested that training in the use of this skill should be started at low levels, so that learners have a general strategy for dealing with unknown words. As proficiency develops, more specific instruction in the recognition and interpretation of context clues can be provided (Walters, 2006: 188). Training may include a demonstration by the teacher using a marked-up text, perhaps followed by ‘think-aloud’ sessions, where learners say out loud the step-by-step process they are going through when inferring meaning. It may also include a progression from, first, cloze exercises to, second, texts where highlighted words are provided with multiple choice definitions to, finally, texts with no support.

Although research has not established what kind of training is likely to be most effective, or whether specific training is more valuable than the provision of lots of opportunities to practise the skill, it would seem that this kind of work is likely to lead to gains in reading comprehension.

Besides the obvious value of this skill in helping learners to decode the meaning of unknown items in a text, it has been hypothesized that learners are ‘more likely to remember the form and meaning of a word when they have inferred its meaning by themselves than when the meaning has been given to them’ (Hulstijn, 1992). This is because memorisation is likely to be enhanced when mental effort has been exercised. The hypothesis was confirmed by Hulstijn in his 1992 study.

Unfortunately, Hulstijn’s study is not, in itself, sufficient evidence to prove the hypothesis. Other studies have shown the opposite. Keith Folse (2004: 112) cites a study by Knight (1994) which ‘found that subjects who used a bilingual dictionary while reading a passage not only learned more words but also achieved higher reading comprehension scores than subjects who did not have a dictionary and therefore had to rely on guessing from context clues’. More recently, Mokhtar & Rawian (2012) entitled their paper ‘Guessing Word Meaning from Context Has Its Limit: Why?’ They argue that ‘though it is not impossible for ESL learners to derive vocabulary meanings from context, guessing strategy by itself does not foster retention of meanings’.

What, then, are the issues here?

• First of all, Liu and Nation (1985) have estimated that learners ought to know at least 95 per cent of the context words in order to be able to infer meaning from context. Whilst this figure may not be totally accurate, it is clear that because ‘the more words you know, the more you are able to acquire new words’ (Prince, 1996), guessing from context is likely to work better with students at higher levels of proficiency than those with a lower level.
• Although exercises in coursebooks which require students to guess meaning from context have usually been written in such a way that it is actually possible to do so, ‘such a nicely packaged contextual environment is rare’ in the real world (Folse, 2004: 115). The skill of guessing from context may not be as useful as was previously assumed.
• There is clearly a risk that learners will guess wrong and, therefore, learn the wrong meaning. Nassaji (2003: 664) found in one study that learners guessed wrong more than half the time.
• Lastly, it appears that many learners do not like to employ this strategy, believing that using a dictionary is more useful to them and, possibly as a result of this attitude, fail to devote sufficient mental effort to it (Prince, 1996: 480).

Perhaps the most forceful critique of the promotion of guessing meaning from context has come from Catherine Walter and Michael Swan (2009), who referred to it as ‘an alleged ‘skill’’ and considered it, along with skimming and scanning, to be ‘mostly a waste of time’. Scott Thornbury (2006), in a marked departure from his comments (from a number of years earlier) quoted at the start of this post, also questioned the relevance of ‘guessing from context’ activities, arguing that, if students can employ a strategy such as inferring when reading their own language, they can transfer it to another language … so teachers are at risk of teaching their students what they already know.

To summarize, then, we might say that (1) the skill of guessing from context may not be as helpful in the real world as previously imagined, (2) it may not be as useful in acquiring vocabulary items as previously imagined. When a teacher is asked by a student for the meaning of a word in a text, the reflex response of ‘try to work it out from the context’ may also not be as helpful as previously imagined. Translations and / or dictionary advice may well, at times, be more appropriate.

References

Clarke, D.F. & Nation, I.S.P. 1980. ‘Guessing the meanings of words from context: Strategy and techniques.’ System, 8 (3): 211 -220

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Haynes, M. & Baker, I. 1993. ‘American and Chinese readers learning from lexical familiarization in English texts.’ In Huckin, T., Haynes, M. & Coady, J. (Eds.) Second Language Reading and Vocabulary Acquisition. Norwood, NJ.: Ablex. pp. 130 – 152

Hulstijn, J. 1992. ‘Retention of inferred and given word meanings: experiments in incidental vocabulary learning.’ In Arnaud, P. & Bejoint, H. (Eds.) Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics. London: Macmillan Academic and Professional Limited, pp. 113 – 125

Liu, N. & Nation, I. S. P. 1985. ‘Factors affecting guessing vocabulary in context.’ RELC Journal 16 (1): 33–42

Mokhtar, A. A. & Rawian, R. M. 2012. ‘Guessing Word Meaning from Context Has Its Limit: Why?’ International Journal of Linguistics 4 (2): 288 – 305

Nassaji, H. 2003. ‘L2 vocabulary learning from context: Strategies, knowledge sources, and their relationship with success in L2 lexical inferencing.’ TESOL Quarterly, 37(4): 645-670

Prince, P. 1996. ‘Second Language vocabulary Learning: The Role of Context versus Translations as a Function of Proficiency.’ The Modern Language Journal, 80(4): 478-493

Thornbury, S. 2002. How to Teach Vocabulary. Harlow: Pearson Education

Thornbury, S. 2006. The End of Reading? One Stop English,

Walter, C. & Swan, M. 2009. ‘Teaching reading skills: mostly a waste of time?’ In Beaven B. (Ed.) IATEFL 2008 Exeter Conference Selections. Canterbury: IATEFL, pp. 70-71

Walters, J.M. 2004. ‘Teaching the use of context to infer meaning: A longitudinal survey of L1 and L2 vocabulary research.’ Language Teaching, 37(4), pp. 243-252

Walters, J.D. 2006. ‘Methods of teaching inferring meaning from context.’ RELC Journal, 37(2), pp. 176-190

Webb, S. & Nation, P. 2017. How Vocabulary is Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press

 

How often do you need to encounter a word before you learn it?

There has been wide agreement for a long time that one of the most important ways of building the mental lexicon is by having extended exposure to language input through reading and listening. Some researchers (e.g. Krashen, 2008) have gone as far as to say that direct vocabulary instruction serves little purpose, as there is no interface between explicit and implicit knowledge. This remains, however, a minority position, with a majority of researchers agreeing with Barcroft (2015) that deliberate learning plays an important role, even if it is only ‘one step towards knowing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 46).

There is even more agreement when it comes to the differences between deliberate study and extended exposure to language input, in terms of the kinds of learning that takes place. Whilst basic knowledge of lexical items (the pairings of meaning and form) may be developed through deliberate learning (e.g. flash cards), it is suggested that ‘the more ‘contextualized’ aspects of vocabulary (e.g. collocation) cannot be easily taught explicitly and are best learned implicitly through extensive exposure to the use of words in context’ (Schmitt, 2008: 333). In other words, deliberate study may develop lexical breadth, but, for lexical depth, reading and listening are the way to go.

This raises the question of how many times a learner would need to encounter a word (in reading or listening) in order to learn its meaning. Learners may well be developing other aspects of word knowledge at the same time, of course, but a precondition for this is probably that the form-meaning relationship is sorted out. Laufer and Nation (2012: 167) report that ‘researchers seem to agree that with ten exposures, there is some chance of recognizing the meaning of a new word later on’. I’ve always found this figure interesting, but strangely unsatisfactory, unsure of what, precisely, it was actually telling me. Now, with the recent publication of a meta-analysis looking at the effects of repetition on incidental vocabulary learning (Uchihara, Webb & Yanagisawa, 2019), things are becoming a little clearer.

First of all, the number ten is a ballpark figure, rather than a scientifically proven statistic. In their literature review, Uchihara et al. report that ‘the number of encounters necessary to learn words rang[es] from 6, 10, 12, to more than 20 times. That is to say, ‘the number of encounters necessary for learning of vocabulary to occur during meaning-focussed input remains unclear’. If you ask a question to which there is a great variety of answers, there is a strong probability that there is something wrong with the question. That, it would appear, is the case here.

Unsurprisingly, there is, at least, a correlation between repeated encounters of a word and learning, described by Uchihara et al as statistically significant (with a medium effect size). More interesting are the findings about the variables in the studies that were looked at. These included ‘learner variables’ (age and the current size of the learner’s lexicon), ‘treatment variables’ (the amount of spacing between the encounters, listening versus reading, the presence or absence of visual aids, the degree to which learners ‘engage’ with the words they encounter) and ‘methodological variables’ in the design of the research (the kinds of words that are being looked at, word characteristics, the use of non-words, the test format and whether or not learners were told that they were going to be tested).

Here is a selection of the findings:

• Older learners tend to benefit more from repeated encounters than younger learners.
• Learners with a smaller vocabulary size tend to benefit more from repeated encounters with L2 words, but this correlation was not statistically significant. ‘Beyond a certain point in vocabulary growth, learners may be able to acquire L2 words in fewer encounters and need not receive as many encounters as learners with smaller vocabulary size’.
• Learners made greater gains when the repeated exposure took place under massed conditions (e.g. on the same day), rather than under ‘spaced conditions’ (spread out over a longer period of time).
• Repeated exposure during reading and, to a slightly lesser extent, listening resulted in more gains than reading while listening and viewing.
• ‘Learners presented with visual information during meaning-focused tasks benefited less from repeated encounters than those who had no access to the information’. This does not mean that visual support is counter-productive: only that the positive effect of repeated encounters is not enhanced by visual support.
• ‘A significantly larger effect was found for treatments involving no engagement compared to treatment involving engagement’. Again, this does not mean that ‘no engagement’ is better than ‘engagement’: only that the positive effect of repeated encounters is not enhanced by ‘engagement’.
• ‘The frequency-learning correlation does not seem to increase beyond a range of around 20 encounters with a word’.
• Experiments using non-words may exaggerate the effect of frequent encounters (i.e. in the real world, with real words, the learning potential of repeated encounters may be less than indicated by some research).
• Forewarning learners of an upcoming comprehension test had a positive impact on gains in vocabulary learning. Again, this does not mean that teachers should systematically test their students’ comprehension of what they have read.

For me, the most interesting finding was that ‘about 11% of the variance in word learning through meaning-focused input was explained by frequency of encounters’. This means, quite simply, that a wide range of other factors, beyond repeated encounters, will determine the likelihood of learners acquiring vocabulary items from extensive reading and listening. The frequency of word encounters is just one factor among many.

I’m still not sure what the takeaways from this meta-analysis should be, besides the fact that it’s all rather complex. The research does not, in any way, undermine the importance of massive exposure to meaning-focussed input in learning a language. But I will be much more circumspect in my teacher training work about making specific claims concerning the number of times that words need to be encountered before they are ‘learnt’. And I will be even more sceptical about claims for the effectiveness of certain online language learning programs which use algorithms to ensure that words reappear a certain number of times in written, audio and video texts that are presented to learners.

References

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

Laufer, B. & Nation, I.S.P. 2012. Vocabulary. In Gass, S.M. & Mackey, A. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp.163 – 176). Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Nation, I.S.P. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Krashen, S. 2008. The comprehension hypothesis extended. In T. Piske & M. Young-Scholten (Eds.), Input Matters in SLA (pp.81 – 94). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters

Schmitt, N. 2008. Review article: instructed second language vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research 12 (3): 329 – 363

Uchihara, T., Webb, S. & Yanagisawa, A. 2019. The Effects of Repetition on Incidental Vocabulary Learning: A Meta-Analysis of Correlational Studies. Language Learning, 69 (3): 559 – 599) Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330774796_The_Effects_of_Repetition_on_Incidental_Vocabulary_Learning_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Correlational_Studies

Lexical sets

Digital flashcard systems like Memrise and Quizlet remain among the most popular language learning apps. Their focus is on the deliberate learning of vocabulary, an approach described by Paul Nation (Nation, 2005) as ‘one of the least efficient ways of developing learners’ vocabulary knowledge but nonetheless […] an important part of a well-balanced vocabulary programme’. The deliberate teaching of vocabulary also features prominently in most platform-based language courses.

For both vocabulary apps and bigger courses, the lexical items need to be organised into sets for the purposes of both presentation and practice. A common way of doing this, especially at lower levels, is to group the items into semantic clusters (sets with a classifying superordinate, like body part, and a collection of example hyponyms, like arm, leg, head, chest, etc.).

The problem, as Keith Folse puts it, is that such clusters ‘are not only unhelpful, they actually hinder vocabulary retention’ (Folse, 2004: 52). Evidence for this claim may be found in Higa (1963), Tinkham (1993, 1997), Waring (1997), Erten & Tekin (2008) and Barcroft (2015), to cite just some of the more well-known studies. The results, says Folse, ‘are clear and, I think, very conclusive’. The explanation that is usually given draws on interference theory: semantic similarity may lead to confusion (e.g. when learners mix up days of the week, colour words or adjectives to describe personality).

It appears, then, to be long past time to get rid of semantic clusters in language teaching. Well … not so fast. First of all, although most of the research sides with Folse, not all of it does. Nakata and Suzuki (2019) in their survey of more recent research found that results were more mixed. They found one study which suggested that there was no significant difference in learning outcomes between presenting words in semantic clusters and semantically unrelated groups (Ishii, 2015). And they found four studies (Hashemi & Gowdasiaei, 2005; Hoshino, 2010; Schneider, Healy, & Bourne, 1998, 2002) where semantic clusters had a positive effect on learning.

Nakata and Suzuki (2019) offer three reasons why semantic clustering might facilitate vocabulary learning: it (1) ‘reflects how vocabulary is stored in the mental lexicon, (2) introduces desirable difficulty, and (3) leads to extra attention, effort, or engagement from learners’. Finkbeiner and Nicol (2003) make a similar point: ‘although learning semantically related words appears to take longer, it is possible that words learned under these conditions are learned better for the purpose of actual language use (e.g., the retrieval of vocabulary during production and comprehension). That is, the very difficulty associated with learning the new labels may make them easier to process once they are learned’. Both pairs of researcher cited in this paragraph conclude that semantic clusters are best avoided, but their discussion of the possible benefits of this clustering is a recognition that the research (for reasons which I will come on to) cannot lead to categorical conclusions.

The problem, as so often with pedagogical research, is the gap between research conditions and real-world classrooms. Before looking at this in a little more detail, one relatively uncontentious observation can be made. Even those scholars who advise against semantic clustering (e.g. Papathanasiou, 2009), acknowledge that the situation is complicated by other factors, especially the level of proficiency of the learner and whether or not one or more of the hyponyms are known to the learner. At higher levels (when it is more likely that one or more of the hyponyms are already, even partially, known), semantic clustering is not a problem. I would add that, on the whole at higher levels, the deliberate learning of vocabulary is even less efficient than at lower levels and should be an increasingly small part of a well-balanced vocabulary programme.

So, why is there a problem drawing practical conclusions from the research? In order to have any scientific validity at all, researchers need to control a large number of variable. They need, for example, to be sure that learners do not already know any of the items that are being presented. The only practical way of doing this is to present sets of invented words, and this is what most of the research does (Sarioğlu, 2018). These artificial words solve one problem, but create others, the most significant of which is item difficulty. Many factors impact on item difficulty, and these include word frequency (obviously a problem with invented words), word length, pronounceability and the familiarity and length of the corresponding item in L1. None of the studies which support the abandonment of semantic clusters have controlled all of these variables (Nakata and Suzuki, 2019). Indeed, it would be practically impossible to do so. Learning pseudo-words is a very different proposition to learning real words, which a learner may subsequently encounter or want to use.

Take, for example, the days of the week. It’s quite common for learners to muddle up Tuesday and Thursday. The reason for this is not just semantic similarity (Tuesday and Monday are less frequently confused). They are also very similar in terms of both spelling and pronunciation. They are ‘synforms’ (see Laufer, 2009), which, like semantic clusters, can hinder learning of new items. But, now imagine a French-speaking learner of Spanish studying the days of the week. It is much less likely that martes and jueves will be muddled, because of their similarity to the French words mardi and jeudi. There would appear to be no good reason not to teach the complete set of days of the week to a learner like this. All other things being equal, it is probably a good idea to avoid semantic clusters, but all other things are very rarely equal.

Again, in an attempt to control for variables, researchers typically present the target items in isolation (in bilingual pairings). But, again, the real world does not normally conform to this condition. Leo Sellivan (2014) suggests that semantic clusters (e.g. colours) are taught as part of collocations. He gives the examples of red dress, green grass and black coffee, and points out that the alliterative patterns can serve as mnemonic devices which will facilitate learning. The suggestion is, I think, a very good one, but, more generally, it’s worth noting that the presentation of lexical items in both digital flashcards and platform courses is rarely context-free. Contexts will inevitably impact on learning and may well obviate the risks of semantic clustering.

Finally, this kind of research typically gives participants very restricted time to memorize the target words (Sarioğlu, 2018) and they are tested in very controlled recall tasks. In the case of language platform courses, practice of target items is usually spread out over a much longer period of time, with a variety of exposure opportunities (in controlled practice tasks, exposure in texts, personalisation tasks, revision exercises, etc.) both within and across learning units. In this light, it is not unreasonable to argue that laboratory-type research offers only limited insights into what should happen in the real world of language learning and teaching. The choice of learning items, the way they are presented and practised, and the variety of activities in the well-balanced vocabulary programme are probably all more significant than the question of whether items are organised into semantic clusters.

Although semantic clusters are quite common in language learning materials, much more common are thematic clusters (i.e. groups of words which are topically related, but include a variety of parts of speech (see below). Researchers, it seems, have no problem with this way of organising lexical sets. By way of conclusion, here’s an extract from a recent book:

‘Introducing new words together that are similar in meaning (synonyms), such as scared and frightened, or forms (synforms), like contain and maintain, can be confusing, and students are less likely to remember them. This problem is known as ‘interference’. One way to avoid this is to choose words that are around the same theme, but which include a mix of different parts of speech. For example, if you want to focus on vocabulary to talk about feelings, instead of picking lots of adjectives (happy, sad, angry, scared, frightened, nervous, etc.) include some verbs (feel, enjoy, complain) and some nouns (fun, feelings, nerves). This also encourages students to use a variety of structures with the vocabulary.’ (Hughes, et al., 2015: 25)

 

References

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

Erten, I.H., & Tekin, M. 2008. Effects on vocabulary acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically-unrelated sets. System, 36 (3), 407-422

Finkbeiner, M. & Nicol, J. 2003. Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (2003), 369–383

Folse, K. S. 2004. Vocabulary Myths. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Hashemi, M.R., & Gowdasiaei, F. 2005. An attribute-treatment interaction study: Lexical-set versus semantically-unrelated vocabulary instruction. RELC Journal, 36 (3), 341-361

Higa, M. 1963. Interference effects of intralist word relationships in verbal learning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 170-175

Hoshino, Y. 2010. The categorical facilitation effects on L2 vocabulary learning in a classroom setting. RELC Journal, 41, 301–312

Hughes, S. H., Mauchline, F. & Moore, J. 2019. ETpedia Vocabulary. Shoreham-by-Sea: Pavilion Publishing and Media

Ishii, T. 2015. Semantic connection or visual connection: Investigating the true source of confusion. Language Teaching Research, 19, 712–722

Laufer, B. 2009. The concept of ‘synforms’ (similar lexical forms) in vocabulary acquisition. Language and Education, 2 (2): 113 – 132

Nakata, T. & Suzuki, Y. 2019. Effects Of Massing And Spacing On The Learning Of Semantically Related And Unrelated Words. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41 (2), 287 – 311

Nation, P. 2005. Teaching Vocabulary. Asian EFL Journal. http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/sept_05_pn.pdf

Papathanasiou, E. 2009. An investigation of two ways of presenting vocabulary. ELT Journal 63 (4), 313 – 322

Sarioğlu, M. 2018. A Matter of Controversy: Teaching New L2 Words in Semantic Sets or Unrelated Sets. Journal of Higher Education and Science Vol 8 / 1: 172 – 183

Schneider, V. I., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E. 1998. Contextual interference effects in foreign language vocabulary acquisition and retention. In Healy, A. F. & Bourne, L. E. (Eds.), Foreign language learning: Psycholinguistic studies on training and retention (pp. 77–90). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum

Schneider, V. I., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E. 2002. What is learned under difficult conditions is hard to forget: Contextual interference effects in foreign vocabulary acquisition, retention, and transfer. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 419–440

Sellivan, L. 2014. Horizontal alternatives to vertical lists. Blog post: http://leoxicon.blogspot.com/2014/03/horizontal-alternatives-to-vertical.html

Tinkham, T. 1993. The effect of semantic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. System 21 (3), 371-380.

Tinkham, T. 1997. The effects of semantic and thematic clustering on the learning of a second language vocabulary. Second Language Research, 13 (2),138-163

Waring, R. 1997. The negative effects of learning words in semantic sets: a replication. System, 25 (2), 261 – 274

Knowble – a review

Knowble, claims its developers, is a browser extension that will improve English vocabulary and reading comprehension. It also describes itself as an ‘adaptive language learning solution for publishers’. It’s currently beta and free, and sounds right up my street so I decided to give it a run.

Users are asked to specify a first language (I chose French) and a level (A1 to C2): I chose B1, but this did not seem to impact on anything that subsequently happened. They are then offered a menu of about 30 up-to-date news items, grouped into 5 categories (world, science, business, sport, entertainment). Clicking on one article takes you to the article on the source website. There’s a good selection, including USA Today, CNN, Reuters, the Independent and the Torygraph from Britain, the Times of India, the Independent from Ireland and the Star from Canada. A large number of words are underlined: a single click brings up a translation in the extension box. Double-clicking on all other words will also bring up translations. Apart from that, there is one very short exercise (which has presumably been automatically generated) for each article.

For my trial run, I picked three articles: ‘Woman asks firefighters to help ‘stoned’ raccoon’ (from the BBC, 240 words), ‘Plastic straw and cotton bud ban proposed’ (also from the BBC, 823 words) and ‘London’s first housing market slump since 2009 weighs on UK price growth’ (from the Torygraph, 471 words).

Translations

Research suggests that the use of translations, rather than definitions, may lead to more learning gains, but the problem with Knowble is that it relies entirely on Google Translate. Google Translate is fast improving. Take the first sentence of the ‘plastic straw and cotton bud’ article, for example. It’s not a bad translation, but it gets the word ‘bid’ completely wrong, translating it as ‘offre’ (= offer), where ‘tentative’ (= attempt) is needed. So, we can still expect a few problems with Google Translate …

One of the reasons that Google Translate has improved is that it no longer treats individual words as individual lexical items. It analyses groups of words and translates chunks or phrases (see, for example, the way it translates ‘as part of’). It doesn’t do word-for-word translation. Knowble, however, have set their software to ask Google for translations of each word as individual items, so the phrase ‘as part of’ is translated ‘comme’ + ‘partie’ + ‘de’. Whilst this example is comprehensible, problems arise very quickly. ‘Cotton buds’ (‘cotons-tiges’) become ‘coton’ + ‘bourgeon’ (= botanical shoots of cotton). Phrases like ‘in time’, ‘run into’, ‘sleep it off’ ‘take its course’, ‘fire station’ or ‘going on’ (all from the stoned raccoon text) all cause problems. In addition, Knowble are not using any parsing tools, so the system does not identify parts of speech, and further translation errors inevitably appear. In the short article of 240 words, about 10% are wrongly translated. Knowble claim to be using NLP tools, but there’s no sign of it here. They’re just using Google Translate rather badly.

Highlighted items

NLP tools of some kind are presumably being used to select the words that get underlined. Exactly how this works is unclear. On the whole, it seems that very high frequency words are ignored and that lower frequency words are underlined. Here, for example, is the list of words that were underlined in the stoned raccoon text. I’ve compared them with (1) the CEFR levels for these words in the English Profile Text Inspector, and (2) the frequency information from the Macmillan dictionary (more stars = more frequent). In the other articles, some extremely high frequency words were underlined (e.g. price, cost, year) while much lower frequency items were not.

It is, of course, extremely difficult to predict which items of vocabulary a learner will know, even if we have a fairly accurate idea of their level. Personal interests play a significant part, so, for example, some people at even a low level will have no problem with ‘cannabis’, ‘stoned’ and ‘high’, even if these are low frequency. First language, however, is a reasonably reliable indicator as cognates can be expected to be easy. A French speaker will have no problem with ‘appreciate’, ‘unique’ and ‘symptom’. A recommendation engine that can meaningfully personalize vocabulary suggestions will, at the very least, need to consider cognates.

In short, the selection and underlining of vocabulary items, as it currently stands in Knowble, appears to serve no clear or useful function.

Vocabulary learning

Knowble offers a very short exercise for each article. They are of three types: word completion, dictation and drag and drop (see the example). The rationale for the selection of the target items is unclear, but, in any case, these exercises are tokenistic in the extreme and are unlikely to lead to any significant learning gains. More valuable would be the possibility of exporting items into a spaced repetition flash card system.

The claim that Knowble’s ‘learning effect is proven scientifically’ seems to me to be without any foundation. If there has been any proper research, it’s not signposted anywhere. Sure, reading lots of news articles (with a look-up function – if it works reliably) can only be beneficial for language learners, but they can do that with any decent dictionary running in the background.

Similar in many ways to en.news, which I reviewed in my last post, Knowble is another example of a technology-driven product that shows little understanding of language learning.

Automated exercise writing – the case of en.news

Last month, I wrote a post about the automated generation of vocabulary learning materials. Yesterday, I got an email from Mike Elchik, inviting me to take a look at the product that his company, WeSpeke, has developed in partnership with CNN. Called en.news, it’s a very regularly updated and wide selection of video clips and texts from CNN, which are then used to ‘automatically create a pedagogically structured, leveled and game-ified English lesson‘. Available at the AppStore and Google Play, as well as a desktop version, it’s free. Revenues will presumably be generated through advertising and later sales to corporate clients.

With 6.2 million dollars in funding so far, WeSpeke can leverage some state-of-the-art NLP and AI tools. Co-founder and chief technical adviser of the company is Jaime Carbonell, Director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, described in Wikipedia as one of the gurus of machine learning. I decided to have a closer look.

Users are presented with a menu of CNN content (there were 38 items from yesterday alone), these are tagged with broad categories (Politics, Opinions, Money, Technology, Entertainment, etc.) and given a level, ranging from 1 to 5, although the vast majority of the material is at the two highest levels.

I picked two lessons: a reading text about Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional hearing (level 5) and a 9 minute news programme of mixed items (level 2 – illustrated above). In both cases, the lesson begins with the text. With the reading, you can click on words to bring up dictionary entries from the Collins dictionary. With the video, you can activate captions and again click on words for definitions. You can also slow down the speed. So far, so good.

There then follows a series of exercises which focus primarily on a set of words that have been automatically selected. This is where the problems began.

Level

It’s far from clear what the levels (1 – 5) refer to. The Zuckerberg text is 930 words long and is rated as B2 by one readability tool. But, using the English Profile Text Inspector, there are 19 types at C1 level, 14 at C2, and 98 which are unlisted. That suggests something substantially higher than B2. The CNN10 video is delivered at breakneck speed (as is often the case with US news shows). Yes, it can be slowed down, but that still won’t help with some passages, such as the one below:

A squirrel recently fell out of a tree in Western New York. Why would that make news?Because she bwoke her widdle leg and needed a widdle cast! Yes, there are casts for squirrels, as you can see in this video from the Orphaned Wildlife Center. A windstorm knocked the animal’s nest out of a tree, and when a woman saw that the baby squirrel was injured, she took her to a local vet. Doctors say she’s going to be just fine in a couple of weeks. Well, why ‘rodent’ she be? She’s been ‘whiskered’ away and cast in both a video and a plaster. And as long as she doesn’t get too ‘squirrelly’ before she heals, she’ll have quite a ‘tail’ to tell.

It’s hard to understand how a text like this got through the algorithms. But, as materials writers know, it is extremely hard to find authentic text that lends itself to language learning at anything below C1. On the evidence here, there is still some way to go before the process of selection can be automated. It may well be the case that CNN simply isn’t a particularly appropriate source.

Target learning items

The primary focus of these lessons is vocabulary learning, and it’s vocabulary learning of a very deliberate kind. Applied linguists are in general agreement that it makes sense for learners to approach the building of their L2 lexicon in a deliberate way (i.e. by studying individual words) for high-frequency items or items that can be identified as having a high surrender value (e.g. items from the AWL for students studying in an EMI context). Once you get to items that are less frequent than, say, the top 8,000 most frequent words, the effort expended in studying new words needs to be offset against their usefulness. Why spend a lot of time studying low frequency words when you’re unlikely to come across them again for some time … and will probably forget them before you do? Vocabulary development at higher levels is better served by extensive reading (and listening), possibly accompanied by glosses.

The target items in the Zuckerberg text were: advocacy, grilled, handicapping, sparked, diagnose, testified, hefty, imminent, deliberative and hesitant. One of these ‘grilled‘ is listed as A2 by English Vocabulary Profile, but that is with its literal, not metaphorical, meaning. Four of them are listed as C2 and the remaining five are off-list. In the CNN10 video, the target items were: strive, humble (verb), amplify, trafficked, enslaved, enacted, algae, trafficking, ink and squirrels. Of these, one is B1, two are C2 and the rest are unlisted. What is the point of studying these essentially random words? Why spend time going through a series of exercises that practise these items? Wouldn’t your time be better spent just doing some more reading? I have no idea how the automated selection of these items takes place, but it’s clear that it’s not working very well.

Practice exercises

There is plenty of variety of task-type but there are,  I think, two reasons to query the claim that these lessons are ‘pedagogically structured’. The first is the nature of the practice exercises; the second is the sequencing of the exercises. I’ll restrict my observations to a selection of the tasks.

1. Users are presented with a dictionary definition and an anagrammed target item which they must unscramble. For example:

existing for the purpose of discussing or planning something     VLREDBETEIIA

If you can’t solve the problem, you can always scroll through the text to find the answer. Burt the problem is in the task design. Dictionary definitions have been written to help language users decode a word. They simply don’t work very well when they are used for another purpose (as prompts for encoding).

2. Users are presented with a dictionary definition for which they must choose one of four words. There are many potential problems here, not the least of which is that definitions are often more complex than the word they are defining, or they present other challenges. As an example: cause to be unpretentious for to humble. On top of that, lexicographers often need or choose to embed the target item in the definition. For example:

a hefty amount of something, especially money, is very large

an event that is imminent, especially an unpleasant one, will happen very soon

When this is the case, it makes no sense to present these definitions and ask learners to find the target item from a list of four.

The two key pieces of content in this product – the CNN texts and the Collins dictionaries – are both less than ideal for their purposes.

3. Users are presented with a box of jumbled words which they must unscramble to form sentences that appeared in the text.

The sentences are usually long and hard to reconstruct. You can scroll through the text to find the answer, but I’m unclear what the point of this would be. The example above contains a mistake (vie instead of vice), but this was one of only two glitches I encountered.

4. Users are asked to select the word that they hear on an audio recording. For example:

squirreling     squirrel     squirreled     squirrels

Given the high level of challenge of both the text and the target items, this was a rather strange exercise to kick off the practice. The meaning has not yet been presented (in a matching / definition task), so what exactly is the point of this exercise?

5. Users are presented with gapped sentences from the text and asked to choose the correct grammatical form of the missing word. Some of these were hard (e.g. adjective order), others were very easy (e.g. some vs any). The example below struck me as plain weird for a lesson at this level.

________ have zero expectation that this Congress is going to make adequate changes. (I or Me ?)

6. At the end of both lessons, there were a small number of questions that tested your memory of the text. If, like me, you couldn’t remember all that much about the text after twenty minutes of vocabulary activities, you can scroll through the text to find the answers. This is not a task type that will develop reading skills: I am unclear what it could possibly develop.

Overall?

Using the lessons on offer here wouldn’t do a learner (as long as they already had a high level of proficiency) any harm, but it wouldn’t be the most productive use of their time, either. If a learner is motivated to read the text about Zuckerberg, rather than do lots of ‘busy’ work on a very odd set of words with gap-fills and matching tasks, they’d be better advised just to read the text again once or twice. They could use a look-up for words they want to understand and import them into a flashcard system with spaced repetition (en.news does have flashcards, but there’s no sign of spaced practice yet). More, they could check out another news website and read / watch other articles on the same subject (perhaps choosing websites with a different slant to CNN) and get valuable narrow-reading practice in this way.

My guess is that the technology has driven the product here, but without answering the fundamental questions about which words it’s appropriate for individual learners to study in a deliberate way and how this is best tackled, it doesn’t take learners very far.