Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2 vocabulary

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Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2
vocabulary

• Rick de Graaff, Machteld Moonen, Gerard Westhoff
• IVLOS, Institute of Education
• Utrecht University, The Netherlands
• h.c.j.degraaff_at_ivlos.uu.nl
• m.l.i.moonen_at_ivlos.uu.nl

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Example 1

• Place the words in each row in a logical order
  and explain why
• stunning, splendid, gorgeous
• exciting, breathtaking, interesting
• embarrassing, outrageous, shocking

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Example 2

• Which words belong together?Form 3 groups and
  place the words in each group in a logical order
• Thrilling, risky, prohibitive, dangerous, unsafe,
  expensive, frightening, pricey, bloodcurdling

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Example 3

• You have participated in a survival trip and
  broke your leg. Write a complaint letter to the
  agency using the following words if possible
• Thrilling, risky, prohibitive, dangerous, unsafe,
  expensive, frightening, pricey, bloodcurdling

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Task definition

• A task is an activity which requires learners to
  use language, with emphasis on meaning, to attain
  an objective, and which is intended to lead to or
  stimulate acquisition
• (Bygate, Skehan Swain, 2001)

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Task effectiveness

• Involvement load? (Laufer Hulstijn, 2001)
• Need
• Search
• Motivation

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Task effectiveness task scope?

• Willis (1996)
• Exposure
• Use
• Motivation
• instruction

• Westhoff (2004)
• Exposure
• Focus on meaning
• Focus on form
• Output interaction
• Strategy use

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Task effectivenessCognitive psychology/
connectionism

• Distributed representation
• Connection strengths
• Spreading activation
• Learning Concept formation
• building strengthening sets of features

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3 Components of a task

• Assignment
• Content
• Mental actions

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The Multi-Feature Hypothesis Retention and
ease of activation are enhanced by tasks that
elicit mental actions involving

• more features,
• more different categories of features,
• in great frequency,
• in life-like combinations,
• simultaneously.

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Examples of features

• Semantic
• Syntactic
• Morphologic
• Collocative
• Pragmatic
• Associative
• Affective

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The study

• Dutch secondary education
• N49, age 12
• Quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design
• Spanish vocabulary school subjects
• Two tasks, differing according to MFH
• Tests cloze and translation

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Research questions

• Differences in mental actions on content
  features?
• method think-aloud protocols and retrospective
  interviews
• Differences in retention after task performance?
• method vocabulary tests

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Preliminary results Q 1

• Example think-aloud protocol, control
• Eh, lets see whats still left, physics, fi
  física or something like that, on miércoles, I do
  physics, física, and I do physics once more on
  jueves in any case, jueve, what was it like?
  Jueves then I do it from 14 to 15 I do once more
  physics and then Ive got only one left
  geography, geografía, I put that on jueves the
  15th and 16th hour.

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Preliminary results Q 1

• Example think-aloud protocol, experimental
• Ethics or geography, geography that is more
  suitable for a cab driver mathematics no, a cab
  driver does have to, hes got a meter,
  mathematics should be there, because they also
  have to return change they have to be able to
  count, oh no, now I write it down in Dutch,
  matemáticas or something like that. Geography
  also belongs to cab driver, or not, Im not sure
  anymore geografía.

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Preliminary results Q 2

• ANCOVA over-all effect for condition
• Experimental group ourperforms control group
• But effect only significant at immediate
  post-test

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Discussion

• Multi-feature hypothesis as key for task
  effectiveness?
• Effects of time-on-task and motivation?
• Task-based testing for research purposes?
• Also suitable for acquisition of language
  structure?