WORD RETENTION: MOST EFFECTIVE EXERCISES AND OPTIMAL NUMBER OF ENCOUNTERS

Today online activities have become essential. Therefore, creating online interactive exercises to maximize a student’s engagement with vocabulary items combined with repeated encounters would enable learners to independently acquire new L2 (foreign language) words.

I examined how learning L2 words was affected by a) reading only, reading with a dictionary, reading followed by vocabulary exercises (four types of exercises), b) their combinations with different numbers of encounters. L2 learners (n=185) from 10 intact classes at Haifa University at the intermediate proficiency level were exposed to 30 target words during 11 weeks of regular studies. Reading followed by vocabulary exercises (four types) yielded the best results and required fewer encounters than the other task types. These data were published in Language Teaching Research (2011, 2014) in the articles by Batia Laufer and me. However, what has never been published is the comparison of long-term word retention subsequent to each type of four vocabulary exercises (a. filling in blanks in sentences with the words provided in a word bank, b. matching target words with their definitions or synonyms,
c. supplying L2 translations for the L1 (native language) equivalents of the target words in sentences, d. supplying L2 translations for the L1 equivalents of the target words in isolation). I concluded that what learners do with the word may be more important than how many times they encounter it.