Week 9 Reflection

One of the take-aways from our entire program, I think, is the importance of vocabulary. I have been to several presentations and listened to several lectures on the importance of vocabulary and will not soon forget that at least 98% of the words on a page need to be known for a text to be accurately comprehended. Also, as some of us discussed in SLA last semester, lexical mistakes can be more detrimental to communication than grammatical mistakes because grammatical errors are more obvious and interfere with meaning less than saying the wrong word. For example, if an ESL student said "I buy three book yesterday" we know that he meant "I bought three books yesterday" and very little meaning is lost. However, if the learner said "I buy three book yesterday" but actually meant "sold", the true meaning of the sentence is lost and we have no way of knowing. Vocabulary, however, is tricky to teach because there is no way that a student could learn the thousands of words they will need to become a fluent communicator within the confines of a classroom, even if vocabulary words are dutifully assigned as homework. Also, knowing how well a student understands a word is very hard to determine because there are several different levels of knowing a word. But, as we read this past week, computer applications can provide an excellent resource for vocabulary learning and reading activities. CALL programs can easily recycle vocabulary, create flashcards to enhance student practice, and provide vocabulary exposure through fun and interactive games. The steps that Loucky provided (attending to and assessing important words, accessing word forms, meanings, and usages, archiving, analyzing, anchoring, activating, reviewing/recycling, reassessing, and relearning) make up a helpful list of steps to take when planning computer-aided vocabulary activities.