MétaCan
← all works

Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language: Do Learners Really Acquire Most Vocabulary by Reading? Some Empirical Evidence

2003· article· en· 389 citations· W2166562747 on OpenAlex· 10.3138/cmlr.59.4.567

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian venueIt was published in a Canadian venue.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.294
Teacher spread
0.273 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

In the first part of the paper, I challenge some basic assumptions underlying the claim that reading is the major source of vocabulary acquisition in L2: the ‘noticing’ assumption, the ‘guessing ability’ assumption, the ‘guessing-retention link’ assumption, and the ‘cumulative gain’ assumption. In the second part, I report on three experiments in which vocabulary gains from reading were compared with gains from word-focused tasks: completing given sentences, writing original sentences, and incorporating words in a composition. Results showed that more words were acquired through tasks than through reading.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Canadian Modern Language Review/ La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes
Topic
Second Language Acquisition and Learning
Field
Psychology
Canadian institutions
Funders
Keywords
VocabularyReading (process)Computer scienceLinguisticsNatural language processingWord (group theory)Empirical evidenceVocabulary developmentArtificial intelligenceEmpirical researchMathematicsStatistics
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes