The Efficacy of Comprehensible Input as a Means of Learning Vocabulary:A Comparative Study

要旨

ABSTRACT: Structural, functional and communicative methods have dominated language teaching in recent decades. Although fundamentally different, they do share an inductive approach to the learning of vocabulary, eschewing word lists and translation equivalents. The motivation for this derives from assumptions about the process of classroom language learning which are not based on empirical evidence. The use of word lists with translations has been abandoned largely because of its association with deductive. There is, therefore, a need to discover if the rejection of this method of teaching and learning vocabulary is justified. The research project in this paper aims to be a contribution to achieving this end. The purpose was to compare the effectiveness of an inductive approach dependent on learning vocabulary in context with a deductive approach relying on word lists and translations. Two groups of second year university students followed the Longman Functioning in Business course for 14weeks divided into two seven-week periods. Both groups were submitted to both treatments, switching at the halfway mark. At the end of the two periods cloze and sentence completion tests were administered. The results were then subjected to statistical analysis, the findings indicating the greater effectiveness of the deductive approach. The implications of this are discussed.