Homograph Acquisition

Running head: HOMOGRAPH ACQUISITION

Elaborate Processing and Homograph Acquisition:An Educational Tool Proposal

    Nicole Lee

    Jill Laing

    Steven Mercier

    Joshua Weinberg

    Wanling Zhang

HUDK 4029 Cognition and Learning

                                                         Professor Barbara A. Tversky

    Teachers College, Columbia University

May 5, 2009

Introduction             A common challenge facing language educators is the teaching of homographs - that is, words that are spelled in exactly the same way, but which differ in meaning or derivation. The challenge of homograph education is perhaps compounded even further when students are not native speakers of the language in which the words are being presented. In this paper, we propose the use of a tool designed to facilitate homograph education based on the dual-code theory and depth of processing; in particular, we hope to demonstrate how the tool may be used to aid students in acquiring the subordinate meanings of homographs, or their less-frequently-used meanings. First, we provide a review of the literature pertinent to our tool, along with relevant research questions. Next, we propose the tool within the method section of the paper. Then, we present hypothetical results and a discussion of how to interpret the results and improve the tool if our expected outcomes were not achieved.

 

Review of the Literature

    Prior to examining methods for facilitating students' acquisition of homographs, this paper will focus on homograph instruction as a subject of inquiry within the realm of corpus linguistics. Wang Ming-Tzu and Nation (2004) examined homography within Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL), which consists of a 570-word subset made up of word families from the Academic Corpus.  The Academic Corpus covers 28 separate subject areas, divided among the four main divisions of commerce, law, science and the arts. In order to produce quantifiable measurements of homography for words within the AWL, Wang Ming-Tzu and Nation (2004) developed a semantic relatedness scale by which the various meanings of a word could be evaluated for how closely they relate to one another. The researchers determined that polysemes, i.e. words possessing multiple meanings, should be treated as having a central underlying meaning, and that educators would do well to encourage students to look for connections between word definitions; it is suggested that by so

doing, students will engage in deeper-level processing and possibly acquire the multiple definitions more easily.     Other studies on polysemy have yielded additional evidence that focusing on subordinate word meanings can be crucial to meaning acquisition. Simpson and Krueger (1991) conducted a follow-up experiment on the lexical ambiguity of homographs, and their results supported Simpson and Burgess' (1985) study, in addition to offering new insight on the phenomenon.  Participants were undergraduate psychology students who volunteered for the study.  The experiment examined the selective access of dominant and subordinate meanings of homographs in sentence contexts.  They discovered that when students were given sentences that were strongly biased in favor of either the dominant or subordinate homograph meaning, they were able to correctly identify the meaning of the homographs.  However, when given an ambiguous sentence, the dominant homograph remained active and was chosen over the subordinate.  Researchers concluded that although both lexical meanings can be retrieved, based on frequency, the dominant meaning usually remains open for selection.  However, context is ultimately influenced by lexical choice.  Other researchers such as Tabossi (as cited in Simpson & Krueger, 1991) have gone further to emphasize that "context will constrain lexical access only if it activates critical features of the relevant homograph meaning" (p. 637).  Simpson and Krueger (1991) support this by presenting and contrasting strong-context and weak-context sentences (containing homographs).  In other words, priming will take place when salient features of the intended homograph are integrated into context.  As an example, consider two sentences for the homograph spring: "This is a broken and rusty old spring," and "The mechanic thought it was a bad spring." The meaning of spring in the first sentence is more context-embedded based on the priming effects of "broken," "rusty," and "old" versus "mechanic" (1991).  

    A good student of language learns how to resolve such ambiguity. To facilitate this kind of learning, our tool seeks to aid students in encoding their memories of the meanings of homographs with greater recollective distinctiveness. Such elaborate encoding should serve as a hedge against the ambiguities of homographs. The results of a series of five learning experiments published by Gallo, Meadow, Johnson and Foster (2008) suggest possibilities for enhancing the memory encoding of words with recollective distinctiveness. In the study by Gallo et al.(2008), subjects were asked to study words by turns either shallowly, or deeply. For shallow processing, subjects were asked to make a mental note of whether a word presented to them during the experiment contained an e.  For deep processing, subjects were asked to determine if the word could be considered pleasurable. The results of these experiments confirmed the recollective distinctiveness hypothesis. This hypothesis specifies that deep processing produces a distinctiveness characteristic that subjects may use in order to recall (with better than chance accuracy) if they had performed deep or shallow processing on a target word (p. 1095). 

    The experimental results of Gallo et al. (2008) show an expected superiority of deep processing over shallow processing in a study of short 5-to-7 letter words. This superiority extends both to the area of recognition and to distinctive memories formed during the encoding (p. 1100). The enhancements made to experiments 4 and 5 are also significant, in that they again increased accuracy in subject scores. In experiments 4 and 5 subjects were asked to hear and then transcribe words to paper. Gallo et al. (2007) cite previous publications and experiments showing that transcription increases the recollective distinctiveness effect and decreases false recognition scores, possibly by encoding the additional cognitive and motor operations required by transcription (p. 1105). Experiments 4 and 5 clearly show the use of the transcription technique further reduces false positives and boosts recognition scores (p. 1107).

    The Gallo et al. (2007) study follows up previous work by Gallo et al. (2004) wherein subjects were found to make fewer false recognition errors when lexical learning tasks were coupled with images, as opposed to lexical learning alone, thus showing some evidence for recollective distinctiveness as an effect related to the dual-code theory. Although images were not employed in

any experiments within the Gallo et al. (2007) study, the paper cites the previous study by its authors, in which a combination of images and lexical content did facilitate further recollective distinctiveness by virtue of dual coding (p. 1098).

    All five experiments show disassociation between the respective experimental methods. For this reason, it is possible to calculate the effect of these methods when applied separately. The Gallo et al. (2008) paper suggests that a tandem approach for the activation of recollective distinctivness in a language oriented learning task would be effective. Therefore, creating a learning environment in which students must identify and associate the relevant meaning (possibly in the form of an image) with the relevant homograph and transcribe an example sentence on paper would appear to be a maximal method of encoding recollective distinctiveness as the semantic portion of a learning task. Such a method would be well supported by the experimental work documented in Gallo et al. (2008). 

   In addition to the mnemonic benefits involving images and semantic association, research has found that self-reference elaborations can also result in better memory. In Forsyth and Wibberly's (1993) study, the self-reference effect (SRE), which occurs when individuals show superior memory for information that pertains to the self-schemas, was demonstrated in a classroom experiment. In this study, an incidental memory procedure was administered to 58 undergraduate and graduate students in Social Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. At the beginning of the experiment, participants were asked to number a blank sheet of paper from 1 to 20. The instructor then read a list of 18 adjectives aloud and asked participants to circle the number corresponding to the adjective if they felt it was self-descriptive. If, for instance, participants thought that Item 6, “loyal,” described them, then they would circle the number 6 on their sheet of paper. When the self-rating task was completed, the instructor talked about miscellaneous matters for 1 minute, then asked the participants to list, in any order, all of the adjectives they could remember. When participants finished the incidental recall task, the instructor distributed the list of items. The participants counted and recorded the total number of adjectives that they circled during the self-rating task, the number of self-reference words recalled, and the number of non-self-referent words recalled. They then calculated the percentage of self-referent adjectives recalled and the percentage of non self-referent adjectives recalled.

    The result effectively demonstrated mnemonic superiority of the SRE. Subjects recalled only an average of 42.5% of the non-self-referent words as compared to 56.0% of the self-referent terms. The findings documented that subjects’ memory for self-referent items was superior to their memory for items that were not self-referent. The argument was that self-referent information was processed at a deeper level than the nonreferent information. For instance, a question “Does the word have more than two syllables?” was a shallow-processing question as opposed to “Does the word describe you?” and would not lead to particularly durable memories. In contrast, self-referent encoding required much deeper processing, and therefore led to better memory.      The mnemonic superiority of SRE was extensively discussed by Symons and Johnson (1997). The authors' meta-analysis confirms the expected SRE in memory, with self-referent encoding strategies yielding superior memory relative to both semantic and other referent encoding strategies.  The paper reviewed evidence and experiment models to demonstrate that the content of self-schematic domains can have a wide variety of motivational, affective, and mnemonic consequences. Based on observations, the major benefit of self-reference lies not in its ability to invoke elaborative processing per se, but rather its likelihood to spontaneously create matching between encoding and retrieval conditions. In sum, this effect distinguishes the self-reference task from other tasks and may be the primary reason why it promotes memory more than other kinds of processing in the typical incidental learning situation.        Incidental learning of vocabulary and the effects of context have been studied by various researchers. Brown, Waring, and Donkaewbua (2008) are an example of researchers who used a

variety of contexts to conduct a study to determine whether or not foreign language students could incidentally learn new English vocabulary from reading, reading while listening, and listening to stories. They had 35 Japanese students studying English literature (ages 18-21) participate in this experiment. The participants were considered pre-intermediate or intermediate English speaking students. The participants were told that they were taking part in a vocabulary learning strategy program and that they would be using background knowledge, context, and co-text to infer meanings of unfamiliar words. They would also have to write some comments on their feelings after reading or listening to a story. Brown et al. (2008) used graded readers with a 400 word count, which was also considered a high-beginner level. The three readers chosen were: The Elephant Man, One-Way Ticket, and The Witches of Pendle. The researchers substituted words with unrealistic (made up) words throughout each story; each real word removed was a common concept known to the learners (e.g., happy). Some words were repeated more frequently than other words; the highest level of frequency was 20 times and the lowest was 2. The students were divided into three groups. Each group participated in a reading, reading-while-listening, and listening task in order to account for student preference and retention. For instance, Group A listened to the story of The Elephant Man in week 2. In week 4, Group A read the story called One-Way Ticket. Finally, in week 6, Group A read and listened to The Witches of Pendle. None of the groups did the same task simultaneously. During the listening only task, participants were provided approximately 6-7 pictures related to the story since each text had pictures.      In order to evaluate the participants, Brown et al. (2008) gave a multiple choice test that prompted recognition and a meaning-translation test that required learners to come up with the definition of a word (or a synonym) using their native language (Japanese). The meaning-translation test was always given immediately after the story was listened to, read, or read and listened to. The multiple choice test was given the following week. After three months, each group took both tests again.     Brown et al. (2008) found that after 3 months participants were still able to remember word meanings when prompted via the multiple choice test. However, the students had less success being able to recall the meanings of the words on the meaning-translation test. They concluded that retention rates for the meaning-translation test were probably lower because it was harder for the students to access the meaning without a cue. They also confirmed that the more frequently a word was used in a text, the more likely it was that students would learn the word. In addition, the researchers asked the students to provide their own insight regarding their experiences. The majority of the students stated that they preferred the reading-while-listening activity more because it was more comfortable to them. Accordingly, some students mentioned that the reading-while-listening section allowed them to focus on content without having to "chunk" (p. 157) on their own. Finally, the researchers posited that listening was a problem for the learners because of their "inaccurate perception of pronunciation" (p. 157) for these students were not being exposed regularly to native speakers of English as this was a foreign language setting.          Hyde and Jenkins (1973, as cited in Anderson, 1980) propose that intentional learning has no greater impact on a learner than incidental learning. They state that it is a matter of how the material is processed. Brown's et al. (2008) study allowed participants to learn new words in context. The effects of context, or encoding effects, have proven to influence memory (Anderson, 1980). In addition, Brown's et al. study provides evidence that those who are recalling vocabulary are able to do so when properly cued. Moreover, the participants mentioned they had difficulty listening to the text, which confirms Anderson's (1980) claim that speech recognition is problematic because of segmentation; for these particular students, segmenting speech in English is particularly difficult. These results impacted our decision to incorporate context into our educational tool.      In consideration of the foregoing, helping students learn how to distinguish between the dominant vs the subordinate meanings of homographs clearly lies in the area of facilitating deeper processing during the encoding of new information. The tool proposed below seeks to achieve just these effects and simultaneously answer the research questions specified below:

 

    1).  What is the effect of our educational tool on the ability of students to disambiguate homographs?

    2).  What is the effect of increasing frequency of the subordinate homograph meanings within 

           source materials provided to students?

    3).  To what degree is learning homograph disambiguation facilitated by integrating images in 

           a text based educational tool?

    4).  What additional effect will students' transcribing homograph words have on their ability to 

          disambiguate homographs?

 

Method and Tool Proposal

 

    The educational tool we propose is an interactive series of tasks created to help students disambiguate homographs by building on the vocabulary that they have already learned, including homograph definitions that are considered dominant (the most frequently employed definitions of homographs). The educational tool proposed would be designed primarily for intermediate to advanced ESL students of high school age and older, in a U.S. classroom-based setting. This tool is most useful in a classroom setting with a teacher as a facilitator, and may also be adapted for one-on-one tutoring sessions. At the current time, this tool is not useful as a self-study resource; however, if this tool were to become available online, set up in such a way as to ensure a strict order for the execution of the tasks, this would also be useful.  The steps to be followed by students are as follows.   

 

1. Pre-test

2. Listen to paragraph being read

3. Read a paragraph silently

4. Teacher assistance: Call attention & figure out definitions of homographs 

5. Read and listen: paragraph is the same as in steps 2 and 3

6. Pull images of the subordinate homograph out of a box to match to words in the paragraph.

7. Student exercises (repeated with 10 or more sentences) :

    a. Get a cloze sentence (sentence with a blank)

    b. Using the previously selected images t0 represent the subordinate meanings of homographs,   

        match pictures to fill in sentences

    c. Fill in the blank for sentences in 5a.

    d. Write self-referential sentences using the words in the subordinate meaning 8. Post-test

 

    Each of the above series of tasks is predicated on principles already discussed in the literature review. However in the following section, we have provided both an elaboration for each task in the series and citation of the experimental work upon which each task is predicated.

1. Pre-test       Evaluation of students' abilities occurs both at the beginning and the end of the program. This allows for an evaluation of the tool itself.  The evaluation consists of a set of twenty (20) or more test sentences. Students will categorize the set of sentences according to meaning. Sentences contain dominant, subordinate, ambiguous, and distractor vocabulary. Each sentence has a definite answer that must be placed in one of  three categories; meaning 1, meaning 2, other. Ambiguous sentences (such as: "I'm sure that will be a good date.") belong in both meaning categories. The below table demonstrates an example of an expected outcome for this task.

[Insert table]

 2. Listen to paragraph being read

    Nation (2001) and Schmitt (2008) acknowledged that learning vocabulary through meaningful and interesting contexts is beneficial to the learners. Therefore, the educational tool begins with a short story. Within the story, homographs are interspersed so that the dominant meaning (or previously taught meaning) is used once and the subordinate meaning (the new definition for the students to learn) is used at least 3 more times throughout the text. Frequency is one critical factor for assisting students in learning new vocabulary (Brown et al., 2008; Nation, 2001; Read, 2004; Schmitt, 2008). Nation (2001) posited that a word must be encountered between a range of 5 and 20 times before it is learned.  

    Students listen to the short story containing subordinate and dominate homographs. This story may be read to the students either by the teacher or an audio recording. Schmitt (2008) argues that listening in general assists students with picking up new vocabulary incidentally. In addition, Chang and Read (2006) found that listening twice to a text was more effective than introducing vocabulary prior to the listening task. However, some students learning a second language have difficulty with the phonology of a language (Brown et al., 2008). It can be argued that they are probably having problems processing verbal input, which in turn would affect the "phonological store" component based on the Baddeley theory of verbal working memory (Anderson, 1980; Baddeley, 1986). In other words, students may not be able to store the phonological form of verbal input if they are having trouble

identifying the words they are hearing. Bearing such considerations in mind, the listening portion of the tool provides an opportunity to first hear the text being read in order to familiarize them with the phonological aspect of the text being presented, and allow them time to recognize some of the homographs that they had previously learned.  

3. Read a paragraph silently      Next, students read the text they just heard silently to themselves. Reading silently is one way of allowing students time to sort through the text. Some students prefer to read silently and at their own pace, especially if the student has a higher reading proficiency level (Brown et al., 2008). Slower readers may benefit from silent reading as it allows them time to reread or refer back to portion of the text that they did not understand (Walczyk, Wei, Griffith-Ross, Goubert, Cooper, and Zha, 2007). 

 

4.  Teacher assistance: Call Students' attention to the target words in the text. 

    After the second task has been completed, the teacher has the opportunity to ask the students if they have any questions about the vocabulary, with a particular focus on the subordinate or dominant meanings of the homographs. 

    Attention refers to the concentration of the mental powers upon an object. Based on Schmidt’s (1990) noticing hypothesis with regard to second language learning, awareness (through attention) is necessary for noticing, which in turn is essential for learning. Given the obvious differences between first language (L1) acquisition and second language (L2) learning, it is commonly noted that adult L2 learners benefit from some form of explicit instruction. For this reason, we believe this section of 'consciousness raising’ executed by the teacher is necessary in drawing learners’ attention to the formal properties of language. Explicit instruction "leads to greater and faster gains, with a better chance of retention and of reaching productive levels of mastery" (Schmitt, 2008, p. 341). 

   5.  Read and listen

    In this task, there is a reading-while-listening component. Students will read and listen to the same paragraph introduced to them previously. Reading while listening to a text is especially helpful for vocabulary learning (Amer, 1997; Brown et al., 2008; Schmitt, 2008). In particular, it allows non-native speakers of English to become familiar with the prosody of the language and, for less proficient readers, it allows working memory to focus on text comprehension without decoding of text getting in the way (Brown et al.).   6. Pull subordinate homograph images out of a box to match to words in the paragraph.

    One implication of the dual-code theory (as outlined by Anderson (1980)) is that a greater depth of memory encoding can be achieved by using images in association with a lexical task (p. 108). Additionally, the work cited by Gallo et al. (2008) points to an enhancement of the recollective distinctiveness of a memory when utilizing images in the encoding portion of a learning activity (p. 2006). For this reason, we have chosen to integrate images into our word association task at this critical point in the encoding process. Introducing this extra depth of association allows learners a

greater scope of content from which to draw on, in the recollection portions of this educational tool. 

 

7. Student exercises (repeated with 10 or more sentences) :

    a. Students receive cloze sentences, i.e. sentences with one word replaced by a blank). 

    Students will be presented with certain sentences based on the short story they have already read. This step is based on Tulving and Thompson's (1973) encoding-specificity principle, which states that the probability of a test item's recall is dependent on the similarity of its encoding in a test to its encoding during a study period.  Moreover, as recognition is often superior to recall, it is hoped that there will be a greater likelihood of students' absorption of the homograph meanings if the students are presented with material that is associated with recent past experience. In addition, there exists much evidence that the manner in which students are primed during homograph education has a direct effect on recall and recognition. While conducting a lexical ambiguity test with homographs, Swinney (1979) found that both dominant and subordinate meanings of a word were activated within 400 milliseconds of participants being exposed to homographs, after having read and having been primed with the homographs in unambiguous sentences (i.e. sentences in which the meaning of the homograph is clearly either the dominant or the subordinate meaning). After 700 ms, however, only the meaning related to the prime was selected.  In another study of homograph perception, Gadsby, Arnott and Copland (2008) found that participants exhibiting a low capacity for working memory as defined by Baddeley (1986) worked harder  to "inhibit irrelevant information" (Gadsby et al., p. 216) in the form of words unrelated to the homographs with which they were presented.  By presenting participants with opportunities to demonstrate knowledge of the words presented, we endeavor to see which definitions have been retained from the priming in steps 1 through 3 and thus determine the effect of priming in the teaching of homographs. 

    b. Using pictures that represent the subordinate meanings of homographs, match pictures to     

        cloze sentences

    Using images in conjunction with preparatory word-study allows as a richer context for memory retrieval by virtue of the dual-code theory.  The work of Gallo et al. (2008) has shown that such deep encoding enhances accuracy and reduces false positive identification in word recognition testing (p. 1109).  This elaboration of encoding will afford students a greater context from which to distinguish the dominant and subordinate meanings of a homograph. 

    c. Fill in the blank for sentences in a.

    Having heard the homographs spoken aloud in the listen and read-along exercise, the act of writing the homograph adds a final dimension of processing to the set of tasks which comprise the educational tool. This final act adds a set of procedural memory motor routines that further deepen and elaborate the processing associated with the subordinate meaning of the homograph. As previously mentioned, the Gallo et al. (2007) study shows significant promise in suppressing false recognition by elaborate processing of this type (p. 1108).

    d. Write self-referential sentences using the words in the dominant meaning, or engage in a free talk with a partner using these words in association with themselves.

    The self-reference effect (SRE) refers to the research finding that free recall of linguistic items is superior when those items have been processed with reference to the self, rather than others or other things (Forsyth & Wibberly, 1993; Singh, 1995; Symons & Johnson, 1997).  Evidence demonstrates that the content of self-schematic domains can have a wide variety of motivational, affective, and mnemonic consequences due to the superior elaborative and organizational properties of SRE. This effect distinguishes the SR task from other tasks and may be the primary reason why it promotes memory more than other kinds of processing in the typical incidental learning situation. Forsyth and Wibberly (1993) obtained a self-reference effect for oral presentation of adjectives in classroom conditions. For this reason, we have chosen to engage our learners in written or oral tasks where they are encouraged to process vocabulary items in a deep level by associating the to-be-learned-words with their own experiences.

 

8.  Post-test

    Students take the same test administered in step 1 and are evaluated according to a procedure specified below.  Results of the evaluation will determine the number of students who fall into categories of: improvement, no improvement, and regression.  These categories are defined in the following hypothetical results section.

HYPOTHETICAL RESULTS:    The results of the pre and post-tests are to be used as a measure of the relative performance of the educational  tool. Such an analysis will help to answer research question #1: "How effective is our educational tool at helping students learn to disambiguate homographs?" Taking a set of student scores in aggregate, the offset in student performance between the two tests yields three mean score offsets for each of three catgeories. These categories are: ability to disambiguate homographs, ability to recognize the subordinate meaning, ability to detect sentences as distracters. 

Three evaluation cases are listed as follows:

    Net Improvement

    Students match the sentences correctly and demonstrate a good understanding of the dominant and 

    subordinate meanings of homographs. Students further demonstrate the correct preference for 

    dominant and subordinate meanings of homographs. Students correctly identify distractor sentences 

    as outside categories.

     No Improvement

    Students demonstrate uncertainty with regard to the meanings of dominant and subordinate 

    homographs. 

     Regression

    Students are unable to discriminate the distracter sentences consistently. Students consistently place 

    distracter sentences into either the dominant or subordinate categories.  Students demonstrate little 

    or no ability to disambiguate between dominant and subordinate homograph meanings.

    

     It is hoped that proper administration of the education tool would yield a net improvement in a cohort of students. Such a question however remains open until there is sufficient use and evaluation of the educational tool. Having acknowledged this point, it is the opinion of the authors that a language learner of an intermediate skill level is bound to show some degree of improvement with language practice of any kind. For this reason, if the evaluation of the educational tool were to show either no improvement or regression, this unexpected result could point to the presence of confounds, such as improper administration of the tool, test, learning environment, or poorly qualified students.

    Having specified these broad hypothetical results of an evaluation of the educational tool. We now shift discussion to the performance of individual students and how our performance metrics relate to the different task-elements of the educational tool.

DISCUSSION:    This educational tool has been created to help non-native English speaking students expand their vocabulary knowledge, with particular reference to homographs. As educators, we hope for a positive outcome; that is students’ learning the subordinate meanings of the homographs. However, we also must consider the possibility of how we can improve the tool in the chance that students do not perform as we expect.

    If a student shows improvement in all categories, this indicates that our tool is operating optimally. Contrarily if a student shows no improvement, any hypothesis about what might be changed in our tool is conjectural because no improvement provides no data for analysis. Moreover, no improvement results could be related to confounds such as the external environment, students' ability to focus, how the tool was administered, or the test itself. Finally, an overall regression may indicate some misapplication of either the tool or the student selected for its application.     There are four additional cases in which students can be grouped, the first two being that a student: 1) improved in ambiguity but regressed in unambiguous sentences and distractor sentences, or 2) improved in ambiguity and distractor sentences but regressed in unambiguous sentences. These cases could be an indication that the student did not understand the test instructions or the test instructions were unclear. Improvement of the tool in these cases would be predicated on a review of the test instructions and the way the test is administered.      Another case, in which a student regresses in ambiguity, but improved in unambiguous sentences and distractor sentences could be explained by having too many uses of the subordinate meaning in the reading material or the student's preference for dominant meanings when given an ambiguous sentence. In this case, a student's response could be affected by the frequency of the subordinate homographs. Improvement of the tool would either require a reduction or an increase of the frequency of subordinate meaning sentences, relative to the dominant meaning sentences, in the reading material. The amount of reduction or increase is dependent of course, on the students' performance in the test. Moreover, the systematic modification of the frequency of subordinate meaning sentences in the reading materials, and the results thereof, will help to answer the research

question #2: "What is the effect of increasing frequency of the subordinate homograph meanings within source materials provided to students?"     If a student is unable to consistently discriminate the distractor sentences, this may indicate that the distractor sentences are too close in word choice or meaning to the target homographs. The creation of suitable distractor sentences is critical to the evaluation of students' achievements, without penalizing them for original thinking. Improvement of the tool in this case might call for the creation of a better set of distractor sentences. Another possibility for tool improvement in this case, could take the form of using different images in the dual-coding tasks, systematically modifying the images used might help to answer research question #3: "To what degree is learning homograph disambiguation facilitated by integrating images in  a text based educational tool?" 

    Overall, this tool might be improved by adding more explicit instruction between each of the steps. For instance, after the listening task, the teacher could read each subordinate word in a sentence from the text and have the students write the word. This will increase the elaboration of processing and allow the tool to answer research question #4: "What additional effect will students' transcribing homograph words have on their ability to disambiguate homographs?" Other improvements could take the form of: increasing pairwork, allowing them time for verbal communication, and giving students a composition assignment.

CONCLUSION:

     In conclusion, this educational tool is devised to help students learn to disambiguate homographs. Although this tool has not yet been empirically tested, it is solidly based on theory and empirical studies that have shown methods for improvement in word recognition and learning. Consideration has been given to identifying those tasks that can be systematically altered to tailor the education tool for better results in the educational environment. Moreover, the systematic tailoring of the educational tool can enhance our understanding of the dynamics of learning by providing data that answers the important research questions specified herein, while at the same time helping students tackle one of the most difficult areas of language acquisition. 

[REMOVE THESE ORPHANS BEFORE FINAL SUBMISSION]  

This spring I will take four classes.

This is a broken and rusty old spring.

ambiguous: The mechanic thought it was a bad spring.

distractor: This fall, I will take an English class.

Average scores which indicate overall improvement show that our tool is operating optimally. No improvement indicates a need to adjust the some relevent aspects of the tool. While regression may indicate some drastic misapplication of either the tool or the students selected for its application.

    Scores in range C may be an indication that the student does not yet possess the requisite understanding of the dominant meanings of homographs, a concept on which our tool is predicated. Our students require a strong foundation on which to build the subtlety of word-play that homographs evidence.

    One possible outcome for this tool is that the students will learn at least 80-100% of the subordinate homograph definitions and retain the dominate meaning that they previously knew. Another outcome would be categorized as false recognition or a successful association between the distractor and one of the homograph definitions. For example, the learner showed an understanding of the association between a metal spring and a spring that illustrates body movement (see Appendix #).     The third possible outcome would be that the learner show partial to no improvement. For partial improvement, students would get 70-79% of the matching items correct. If the learner gets 69% or less correct on the post-test, then it is considered no improvement.

[END REMOVE ORPHANS BEFORE FINAL SUBMISSION]

 

 

References

 

Amer, A. (1997). The effect of the teacher's reading aloud on the reading comprehension of EFL students.         English Language Teaching Journal, 51(1), 43-47.  

Anderson, J. (1980). Cognitive psychology and its implications (6th ed.). New York, NY: Worth                Publishers.  

Baddeley, A.D. (1986). Working memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 

Brown, R., Waring, R., & Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading,                    reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2),                  136-163. 

 

Chang, A. C-S., & Read, J. (2006). The effects of listening support on the listening performance of EFL             learners. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 375-397. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (2), 213-238.  

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