Second language learners are faced with the challenging task of remembering many new words. Exactly how learners are supposed to accomplish that task is disputed. Research on lexical processing that has been carried out in cognitive psychology showed that rehearsing words in expanded patterns, that is, with a delay between each rehearsal, leads to high retention rates. This article reports on a study that was devised to test retention in second language vocabulary learning, comparing a uniform versus a graduated delay. The study used an online vocabulary program testing first-year students of German. Results showed that on long-term retention, a uniform delay led to higher retention rates than a graduated delay.
This article presents the concept development, research programming, and learning design of a lexical processing web application, Virtual Vocabulary, which was developed using theories in both cognitive psychology and second language acquisition (SLA). It is being tested with first-year students of German at the University of Victoria in Canada, specifically looking at intervals and time-sets in a large study on spaced retrieval. The findings are being used to refine language-learning software for second language lexical acquisition.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.