Vocabulary Instruction: A Critical Analysis of Theories, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Much is known about the impact of vocabulary instruction on reading skills, word knowledge, and reading comprehension. However, knowledge of the underlying theories that guide vocabulary instruction and their potential impact on teachers’ performance and/or students’ achievement has not been investigated. In this content analysis, articles published in The Reading Teacher and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy between 2007 and 2017 were dissected to identify and code embedded word-learning strategies, grade levels addressed, target student populations, and desired outcomes (receptive or productive vocabulary). Our primary goal was to examine the embedded word-learning strategies within the articles, and to identify the theories on which they were built. Findings showed that a combination of theories guided most strategy recommendations: Social constructivism and sociocultural theories, schema and psycholinguistic theories, motivation theory, and dual coding theory. We also parallel-coded our findings with a recent review of literature on vocabulary instruction by Wright and Cervetti (2017), and found that they corresponded with the original coding. Follow-up quantitative studies can use the salient theories detected in this content analysis to investigate whether knowledge of underlying theories has an impact on teachers’ performance and student vocabulary and reading comprehension achievement.

Schematic Method: A Creative Way to Teach Short Stories

“…Schema induction by the teacher in the pre-reading activities helped the students to answer questions related to literary devices better than Experimental Group 2 and the Control Group (Carrell, 1985;Grabe & Stoller, 2011). These findings also support the findings by Moody et al (2018) which stressed that schema activation is a successful strategy in learning.…”

“…According to Moody et al (2018) aside from the prominence of social constructivism / sociocultural theories, the schema theory also plays a large role in ELL instruction. This may be due to the widely-held belief that the schema theory involves the activation of background knowledge, which has long been recognized as a successful strategy for ELL reading instruction.…”

The Effects of Computer-Assisted Learning Based on Dual Coding Theory

“…Effective vocabulary teaching should be a combination of pronunciation, spelling, word meaning, grammar rules, collocation, internal relations, external relations, and pragmatic rules of words. In this way, with the use of multimedia courseware, students are able to imagine imagens to link the new words with existing knowledge, emotional experience, or real life experience to help them understand and enjoy longer retention of new vocabulary [16]. Mayer explained the concept of cognitive overload in multimedia learning theory [17] and implied that learners should not process too much information which exceeds their available cognitive capacity.…”

Social Media and Its Influence on Vocabulary and Language Learning: A Case Study

“…(Hasannejad, Bahador & Kazemi, 2015). Song and Cheng (2017) and Moody, Hu, Kuo, Jouhar, Xu & Lee (2018) claimed discovery strategies are used to receive the initial information of new words and to understand their lexical meaning, including decision strategies and social strategies. Consolidation strategies are mainly composed of memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and metacognitive strategies.…”