Three vocabulary learning activities. Results in Brazilian learners of Spanish as a foreign language
Abstract
The article presents the results of an experiment on vocabulary learning. The participants, 61 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and learners of Spanish, were trained with three types of tasks that require a different degree of mental effort, according to the involvement load hypothesis by Hulstijn and Laufer, in order to check whether more effort leads to greater retention. The tasks, ordered from the highest to the lowest effort required, are writing sentences including the stimulus word; selection of the example in which that word can be inserted; selection of the definition corresponding to the word. The results show that the three tasks were effective to facilitate memorization of new words. Writing requires the greatest effort and is the most effective. However, the gradation in the effectiveness of the learning tasks does not always follow the scale of the degree of involvement load. These results partially corroborate to the hypothesis.
Keywords: selection of examples, selection of definitions, Spanish as a Second Language-Foreign Language, vocabulary learning, writing sentences.
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