Groot (2000) Computer Assisted Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

I'm reading this paper as part of a meta-analysis of different approaches to teaching vocabulary. This paper describes a vocabulary teaching system called CAVOCA that is designed around the theory of vocabulary acquisition. It teaches English words through a series of contextual examples. It starts with a multiple choice as shown in the figure, and gradually moves on to more complex contextual examples and the user must indicate whether they are correct or not, with failure leading to detailed explanations. Finally the user sees excerpts from press releases and other paragraph length examples of real world usage.

The paper summarizes a number of experiments that were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of CAVOCA in comparison with a control condition of bilingual word lists. The main variation was between the type of test used to evaluate the subjects knowledge of the vocabulary being studied. When tested in terms of needing to produce a definition or translation of the words, those words studied in bilingual lists were better recalled. However this situation was reversed when vocabulary was tested in terms of fill-in-the-blank cloze tests. In particular delayed tests showed that the words studied in bilingual lists were forgotten more quickly, although I am a little concerned by this comparison as I am not sure how meaningful it is to compar decay rates from levels that are not the same to begin with.

The paper is available at the following link:

http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num1/groot/default.html

I ran the reference list through my scholar system and got a pretty good hit rate, although I can tell there are some mismatches.

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