A Study on the Effectiveness of Teaching-Learning Vocabulary in Three Second Cycle Elementary Schools in Addis Ababa: Grade Eight In Focus
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Date
2008-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching and learning vocabulary
in three second cycle elementary schools of Addis Ababa (grade eight in focus). .This is because the
present day high school students’ poor language proficiency is assumed to result particularly from
the absence of effective vocabulary teaching techniques and learning strategies at second cycle
elementary school level. Hence, the writer decided to examine how effectively vocabulary was
taught and learned just before learners started their high school English course.
Before the actual process of data collection began, preliminary survey was conducted on some of
the common vocabulary teaching techniques prescribed by linguists and language experts. A brief
review was also made on the complex nature of vocabulary knowledge. Because teaching alone
doesn’t guarantee successful learning, there aroused a need to explore the type of learning
strategies learners employ to acquire sufficient English vocabulary.
Then data were collected from 90 systematically chosen students and 6 teachers through
questionnaire, interview and observation. The textbook was also analyzed to see the extent it
encourages to implement a range of vocabulary teaching techniques and learning strategies.
Consequently, the results seemed to indicate that teachers, unlike students, believe vocabulary is not
such a prominent component of language learning to be given more considerable emphasis during
teaching English compared to other aspects. It was also obtained that among a wide rage of
techniques of vocabulary instruction, teaching vocabulary through reading texts, synonymy,
translation and definition were the most commonly used techniques. However, a close inspection of
the actual application of these techniques did not imply effective vocabulary instruction in the
subject schools.
Although students appeared to be relatively interested in learning vocabulary, practically they were
less effective in their effort as they were not able to use a variety of vocabulary learning strategies.
Among the major strategies of learning vocabulary, determination strategies (guessing from context
and using dictionary) seemed to be used better than social strategies (asking people). However,
strategies that promote memory of the previously learned words (memory, cognitive and
metacognitive strategies) were not used efficiently. Hence, it was unlikely that students had
successfully acquired most of the 512 vocabulary items designed in their textbook
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Keywords
Teaching-Learning Vocabulary