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INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Vocabulary is an important language element that links four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing together and makes communication flow smoothly. Reality shows that many students have fairly good knowledge of grammar but are hardly able to express themselves properly because of their vocabulary deficiency. Vocabulary learning, therefore, becomes central to language acquisition, and interest in its role in second language learning has grown rapidly in recent years. Specialists now emphasize the need of systematic and principled approach to vocabulary by both the teacher and the learner (Decarrico, 2001; Nation, 1990). One of the concerns in vocabulary is how to help students increase their retention of learned vocabulary items. Many Vietnamese students experience considerable difficulty retaining English words that they have learnt in their previous lessons. Long lists of words noted down from reading texts, listening passages, vocabulary or grammar sections in the course books are of limited help to them if they do not know how to learn, remember and use these words. That most words which have been learnt are forgotten soon and then become dead is one of the reasons for students’ difficulty in communication, both in the oral and written forms. To ensure a good communicative task performance, the ground work is to ascertain a good lead-up and preparation for learners’ intake of vocabulary. So far there has been little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of meaningful practice in vocabulary retention, so whether meaningful practice increases students’ retention of vocabulary during the teaching and learning process is the question that the author tries to answer. Retention is defined as “an ability to recall or recognize what has been learnt or experienced; memory” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1992:773). Although I have not found any definition of vocabulary retention in the literature, I, for the purpose of this study, can define it as the “storage of vocabulary in the memory, which becomes available for use when needed”. So retention of vocabulary is the ability to recall words that have been learnt or encountered for online communication .


2. Aims of the study Given the role of vocabulary retention in helping students to communicate more effectively in English, I set out the aim of this study as to find out techniques or activities that can help ma\y students to memorize words better. These students are non-English major ones and have four class meetings a week. However, they cannot retrieve the words which they have learnt in previous lessons for online communication when needed. In other words, they soon forget words they have just acquired. The main aim of this study therefore is to investigate the impact of meaningful practice on vocabulary learning and retention, or to put it differently, the extent to which meaningful practice helps to retain vocabulary for my students at the university and provide some teaching implications. 3. Scope of the study There is a wide range of language activities which can be used to improve students’ retention of vocabulary. However, in the current study, I set the limit of investigating the impact of two meaningful activities of guessing new words through context and using dictionary on students’ learning and retention of English vocabulary because with the timeframe of 12 weeks it is supposed to be infeasible to conduct a research study on a larger scale which can produce very convincing results. Participants in this study were non-English major second year students of Hanoi University of Business and Technology who were considered at the intermediate level of English and working with Business English course book “Business Objectives” by Vicki Hollet. This study was implemented amongst 2 groups which included 4 intact classes with 111 students altogether for a duration of three months. 4. Method of the study This study was conducted by quasi-experimental method with 2 classes of the experimental group and two classes of the control group . It was quasi-experimental because the students of the experimental group and the control group were not randomly assigned, and therefore were not of equal proficiency levels of English. In fact, they were intact groups (Wiersma, 1995). The duration of the experiment was 12 weeks and 2 vocabulary tests were administered


to measure students’ retention of vocabulary. The results of the tests were analyzed by using Paired Samples T-test to find out the gain for each group and Independent t-test to compare the gains of the two groups. 5. Organization of thesis This thesis is comprised of three parts. Part 1 is the introduction which presents the rationale for the research topic, aims, scope, and method of the study. Part 2 is the development which consists of two chapters. Chapter one reviews theoretical background to teaching and learning vocabulary in a second language including factors which affect vocabulary acquisition process. This chapter also reviews some meaningful practice activities which are initiated by different researchers. Chapter two reports the study in terms of data collection and analysis. Part 3 is the conclusion which discusses the major findings and limitations of the research, and suggests teaching implications for further study.


DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 1 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning 1.1 The importance of vocabulary in second language learning In order to progress in foreign language learning, learners need to be able to understand what they are encountered with I verbal communication, that is they need to acquire a certain amount of words. In the very first part of his book on vocabulary, McCarthy (2000:2) wrote: “It is the experience of most language teachers that the single, biggest component of any language course is vocabulary. No matter how well the student learn grammar, no matter how successfully sounds of L2 are mastered, without words to express the wide range of meaning, communication in an L2 just cannot happen in any meaningful way”. This claim might be an overestimate of the role of vocabulary, and many language teachers can argue that an appropriate way of communication is far more important than words, or in other words, HOW we say something is more important than WHAT we say. However, one’s communication ability in general depends a lot on his/her vocabulary size, because “words are the tools we use to think, to express ideas and feelings, and to learn about the world” (Johnson and Johnson, 2004:1), to communicate about something very concrete to something very abstract. The support for the important role of vocabulary can be found in works of Nation and Coady (1988), Gu (1994), Nassaji (2003) and Alexander (2000). In her book “Understanding Vocabulary” (2000:16), Alexander wrote: “Comprehension improves when you know what the words mean” and “words are the currency of communication. A robust vocabulary improves all areas of communication — listening, speaking, reading and writing”. These all show that the success of a student in becoming proficient in any language depends in part on the extent and richness of his/ her vocabulary, so vocabulary teaching should be part of the syllabus, and vocabulary should be taught on a well-planned and regular basis. 1.2 What it means to know words?


“The main problem with vocabulary teaching is that only a few words and a small part of what is required to know a word can be dealt with at any one time” (Nation, 2005). Only a small amount of information about a word is presented and acquired at a teaching time. This limitation apparently has negative effects on learners’ vocabulary knowledge. In many situations they can recognize a word when it is written but do not know how to pronounce it correctly, or vice verse; and even when they have a word in mind they do not know how to use it properly. Knowledge of a word is not just restricted to knowing its single meaning but this requires comprehension of the word form, meaning, grammar and collocation… so that the language learners can generate it for their need. However, which aspects of these should be focused on during the teaching and learning process depends on the target learners’ schemata and learning burden. 1.2.1 Form Words come in two forms: oral and written. The former refers to the word’s pronunciation whereas the latter refers to the word’s spelling. “Unfamiliarity with correct pronunciation can result in the learner failing to understand words in connected speech that he clearly understands in written English” (Gairns and Redman, 1986:50); therefore, when introducing new words to language learners, the teacher should pay careful attention to both of these forms and provide them with certain general guidelines that will assist them in predicting the pronunciation of new lexis. For example, there are letters and spelling which usually conform to a particular pronunciation, e.g. au / :/ in because, automobile, automatic; a /æ/ in happy, sack, parent; sh / / in wash, English, sharing… . However, there are so many exceptions in English pronunciation (Swan,1980; Gimson and Ramsaran,1982). The complex relationship between sound and spelling in English makes it really difficult for foreign language learners to tackle the pronunciation of new vocabulary. Thus, alongside with introducing general guidelines, the teacher should also provide fairly specific rules for English pronunciation. Nation (2005) recommends quick ways of drawing attention to the form of the word , e.g.(a) writing the word on the board, (b) showing how the spelling of the word is like or unlike the spelling of known words, (c) giving stress pattern of the word and its pronunciation, (d)


getting the learners to repeat the pronunciation of the word, and (e) pointing out any spelling irregularity in the word. 1.2.2 Meaning With regard to the meaning of a word, Diamond and Gutlohn, (2006:1) claim that: it “not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world." This means that besides its core meaning in the particular context that students are working out, the word should be introduced to the learners in different discourse contexts so that they can gradually comprehend all aspects of its meaning. There are two types of word meaning: lexical and grammatical meaning. Lexical meaning gives meaning of the words. Grammatical meaning is the functions of a word in relation with other words with which it is used. Participles, articles and/or preposition are usually used with their grammatical meaning. Cities are big (1) differs from The cities are big (2) by the article the. The first sentence gives information of all cities in general whereas the second sentence talks about some certain cities that are identified by both of the speaker and listener. If the word the stands alone it gives no information at all, but when combined with other words in sentence (2) it carries very important meaning. That which meaning(s) of a word should be introduced to students at a teaching time depends on students’ need and their language background knowledge. The teacher has to balance the amount of time spent on meaning-focused input and meaning-focused output so that he/she can both guide his/her students to get the meaning of the words correctly and get them involved in a process of semantic processing that facilitates learning and retention. 1.2.3 Grammar and word formation Learning grammar of vocabulary is learning the rules that enable students to build up different forms of a word or even different words from that word (e.g. sleep, slept, sleeping; employ, employed, employment, unemployment, employer, employable…). When students learn about the parts of words, prefixes and suffixes, and about root words, they are able to table out many new words. Grammatical patterns of a word helps learners to recognize whether it suits the language situation or not, and use it correctly. When students are given a task that requires


them to use the correct tense of a verb, they have to utilize their knowledge of grammar to fulfil the task. Correct grammar of words helps to function better their pragmatic use and convey message clearer in communication. 1.2.4 Collocation The relationship of collocation according to McCarthy (1990: 12) is fundamental in the study of vocabulary. Collocation is defined as “the way in which some words are always used together, or a particular combination of words used in this way”, for example: commit a crime, for the sake of, accept responsibility… Hill (1999) explains that many learners with ‘good vocabularies’ have problems with fluency because their ‘collocational competence’ is very limited. Collocational competence is the ability to accurately combine chunks of language thus enabling production of fluent, accurate, and stylistically appropriate speech. Lewis (2000) asserts that about 70% of English language is made up of these chunks of lexicon that co-occur together in order to produce natural sounding language. For example, when students encounter the word “risk”, they should be introduced the whole chunk “take a risk”. From intermediate level, teaching should aim at increasing students’ collocational competence, both inside and outside the classroom. 2. Factors affectin