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Task effectiveness and the Task effectiveness and the acquisition of L2 vocabularyacquisition of L2 vocabulary

Rick de Graaff, Machteld Moonen, Gerard Westhoff

IVLOS, Institute of EducationUtrecht University, The Netherlands

h.c.j.degraaff@ivlos.uu.nlm.l.i.moonen@ivlos.uu.nl

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Example 1: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: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: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 definitionTask 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 effectivenessTask effectiveness

Involvement load? (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001):

Need Search Motivation

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Task effectiveness: task scope?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 effectiveness:Task effectiveness:Cognitive psychology/ connectionismCognitive psychology/ connectionism

Distributed representation Connection strengths Spreading activation

Learning = Concept formation = building & strengthening sets of features

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3 Components of a task3 Components of a task

Assignment Content Mental actions

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The Multi-Feature HypothesisThe Multi-Feature Hypothesis

Retention and ease of activation are Retention and ease of activation are enhanced by tasks that elicit enhanced by tasks that elicit mental mental

actionsactions involving: involving:

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

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Examples of featuresExamples of features

Semantic Syntactic Morphologic Collocative Pragmatic Associative Affective

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The studyThe study

Dutch secondary education N=49, 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 questionsResearch 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 1Preliminary results Q 1

Example think-aloud protocol, control:

Eh, let’s see what’s 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 I’ve got only one left geography, geografía, I put that on jueves the 15th and

16th hour.

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Preliminary results Q 1Preliminary 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, he’s 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, I’m not

sure anymore geografía.

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Preliminary results Q 2Preliminary 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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DiscussionDiscussion

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?