Year: 2008
Type: article
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: : This pilot study compared the retention effects of two vocabulary learning tasks in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom: a monolingual English task and a bilingual task translating English to Japanese. According to this partial trial of the Involvement Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001), the English task would result in better retention because deriving the meaning from an English definition involves a greater level of evaluation. In both of the treatment tasks of a pretest-posttest design, the participants matched English words to their definitions. The only difference was the language of the definition in the matching task, Japanese or English. The results were contrary to the hypothesis and the t-test was non-significant: t(16) = 0.48, p =.6. A Rasch Analysis of the pretest and posttest items was informative, however, showing that some of the words were more memorable merely due to distinctive features of the words themselves. Thus, future studies on the issue of monolingual and bilingual task involvement were meaningfully informed by this pilot study.
Author: Andrew Obermeier
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2343529659