1. Computer Assisted Vocabulary Acquisition

Computer Assisted Vocabulary Acquisition

In this age of computers, the area of English Language Teaching has also felt its impact. Computers are being used for language teaching ever since 1960's. Dr. Groot (1996) is a senior lecturer at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). He currently teaches and supervises research in second language acquisition. He is the author of the following methodology. CAVOCA (Computer Assisted VOCabulary Acquisition) is a computer programme that is meant for vocabulary acquisition. It has been designed on the basis of generally accepted theories concerning how the mental lexicon is structured and operates. In a natural (L1) word acquisition process, several stages may be recognized. They cannot always be clearly distinguished because learning a word gradually develops with repeated exposure. The CAVOCA programme takes the learner systematically through the sequence of mental operations which make up the acquisition process.

Deduction:

The word to be learned appears on the screen for a few seconds. It is used in three sentences, presented in order of contextual richness. The first sentence contains only a few clues as to the meaning of the word. It mainly serves to draw the learner's attention to its morphological composition, spelling, syntactic function and so forth. The second sentence contains more clues as to the meaning. The third sentence is so contextually rich that the meaning becomes entirely clear. Every sentence is followed by a multiple choice question to be answered by the learner with four options as to the possible meaning, the correct alternative being a (near) synonym. After each sentence, the learner is given immediate feedback (whether the meaning he inferred was right or wrong) to avoid the wrong meaning from being retained. After the third presentation of the word, the key to the multiple choices item is given as final feedback for the learner. This method of presenting the new word is meant to trigger off a cognitive process of what might be called “graded contextual disambiguation.”

Usage:

To further illustrate its exact meaning, two sentences are presented in which the word is either used correctly/appropriately or not. The learner chooses and the computer gives feedback, explaining why the use of the word in question in that particular context is correct or incorrect. The computer points out and corrects any mistakes. A diversity of operations to be performed on a word is likely to lead to better storage of a word and, as a result, more retrieval routes are opened up (Chun and Plass 1996).

Examples:

The learner is presented with a number of authentic L2 passages selected from large databases containing the words just learned. An additional objective of this section of the program is to increase the learner's motivation for learning word. The learner recognizes that he/she (better) understands the authentic L2 passage with the understanding of the meanings of words learnt. This experience will serve as a specific illustration of the general principle of the importance of vocabulary for understanding authentic L2 reading texts.

Lexical Retrieval:

In this section, which also serves as a self-assessment test, the learner's active knowledge of the word is elicited. The learner is presented with 25 sentences, each with one word missing. These sentences have been selected especially so that the blank can be filled by one word only, that is, one of the words covered in the module. Once the 25 sentences have been completed, the learner's score appears on the screen and mistakes are pointed out, if there is any.

The Experiment

CAVOCA methodology attracted the attention for three reasons.

• This is the latest methodology in acquiring vocabulary.

• This is the first technology- based methodology in acquiring vocabulary.

• This has provided scope for the researcher to develop software

Dr. Groot’s computer programme could not be activated to get the real sense of going through the programme. I have developed software compiling the entire database following the first two sections of Dr. Groot’s programme namely, Deduction and Usage. In the third section, I have deviated from the original program in the sense that, instead of Examples, Antonyms have been included to reinforce and ensure long term retention. In the section of Lexical Retrieval, the learner's active knowledge of the word is elicited.

Given below is an extract from my software. As the entire programme runs to several pages, I have given only one example of how a word can be acquired through all the four stages. This screen shot shows that the learner has chosen the answer “comfort” which is the correct answer.

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