Two presentations on vocabulary acquisition
Rick Eller; Zack Robertson
For the first part of the presentation, Rick discussed how Rory's Story cubes can be utilized to generate a variety of assessment protocols that can be used in a variety of educational contexts. Rick argued that traditional assessment does not always capture certain aspects of language performance such as creativity, emotional involvement, and co-construction and that the cubes offer a method for operationalizing these areas of assessment.
In the second half, Zack discussed Semantic Clustering Interference (SCI), a psychological phenomenon where vocabulary items from the same semantic category (fruits, sports, etc.) interfere with one another when first encountered by a learner. Zack began by first discussing the nature of SCI and previous research on the topic before discussing the results of a study he conducted at three elementary schools. His results concurred with other studies and implied that presenting new words together in semantic categories may hinder initial retention for beginner level language learners.
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