Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickcarlino | Hacker News Reader

Steve from LingQ once mentioned in passing on a Vlog that they have done studies where they gave students vocabulary lists (plus a vocabulary list free control group) before giving them a reading passage to study in a foreign language and they found that the vocabulary list group had worse outcomes. Does anyone happen to know which study this is? It has always stuck with me but I’ve never actually been able to pin down the exact study he was talking about.

View on HN

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281..., perhaps?

"A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Using Traditional and Contextualized Methods for Enhancing Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge in an EFL Classroom" where those who were given traditional vocabulary lists performed worse.

Good find. The description of the actual experimental conditions is incredibly vague, but it sounds to me a bit like the control group only got the vocabulary list with definitions and didn't read the short story, whereas the experimental group only read the short story and didn't get any definitions. Then the experimental group was able to successfully complete ≈10 of 15 fill-in-the-blank questions vs the control groups ≈8.

That is an okay experiment to compare the two teaching methods, but doesn't address the question of what happens when you combine them by reading a text with an accompanying vocabulary list. I would be rather surprised if additional access to definitions actually hurt learning. Like, what are dictionaries for, then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com