VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FALCUTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
……………… ***………………….
ĐẶNG THỊ HƯƠNG THE EFFECT OF CONTEXTUALIZED VOCABULARY
PRESENTATION ON 10
TH
FORM STUDENTS’ ENGLISH
VOCABULARY ACQUISITION. AN ACTION RESEARCH
AT TO HIEU HIGH SCHOOL, HAI PHONG.

ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA VIỆC DẠY TỪ VỰNG TRONG NGỮ CẢNH TỚI VIỆC TIẾP
THU TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10. NGHIÊN CỨU HÀNH ĐỘNG TẠI
TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG TÔ HIỆU, HẢI PHÒNG.
THE EFFECT OF CONTEXTUALIZED VOCABULARY
PRESENTATION ON 10
TH
FORM STUDENTS’ ENGLISH
VOCABULARY ACQUISITION. AN ACTION RESEARCH
AT TO HIEU HIGH SCHOOL, HAI PHONG.

ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA VIỆC DẠY TỪ VỰNG TRONG NGỮ CẢNH TỚI VIỆC TIẾP
THU TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 10. NGHIÊN CỨU HÀNH ĐỘNG TẠI
TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG TÔ HIỆU, HẢI PHÒNG. M.A MINOR THESIS
Field: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
Code: 60-14-10
Supervisor: Dr. Lê Văn Canh

HA NOI- 2011
iii

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1: Literature review

1.1. Definition of contextualized vocabulary presentation
5
1.2. A contextualized presentation to vocabulary acquisition
6
1.3. Previous studies on contextualized vocabulary presentation
8
1.4. Guessing or inferencing strategy
9
1.5. Types of contextual clues
12
1.5.1. Structural clues
12
1.5.2. Inference clues
14
1.6. Advantages and disadvantages of contextualized vocabulary presentation
16
to vocabulary acquisition
16
1.7. Activities and exercises for presenting and practicing words in context
16
1.8. The roles of vocabulary knowledge in guessing meaning of the unknown words
17
iv

3.2.1. Students‟ opinions of the usefulness of contextualized vocabulary
presentation
29
3.2.2. Enhancing motivation for vocabulary learning
29
3.2.3. Memorizing words better
30
3.2.4. Preference of contextualized vocabulary activities and exercises
30
3.2.5. The help of contextualized vocabulary presentation to word retention and
using
31
3.3. Discussion
32
3.4. Summary of major findings
32
PART C: CONCLUSIONS

1. Summary of the findings
33
2. Reflection
34
3. Implications
35
4. Limitations and suggestions for further study
35
REFERENCES
36
APPENDICES

vi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND LIST OF TABLES

EFL: English as a Foreign Language
L2: Second language
N: Number
M: Mean
Std. Deviation: Standard Deviation
I: Interviewer
S: Student

LIST OF TABLES Page

Table 1.2: Components of a theory of learning words from context
(From Sternberg and Powell, 1983)
8

language programs, but recently there has been a renewed interest in the nature of
vocabulary and its role in learning and teaching (Richards & Renandya, 2002: 255).A
number of research studies have dealt with lexical problems, namely, problems which
language learners face in vocabulary learning. The research findings have revealed that
lexical problems frequently interfere with communication. As a matter of fact,
communication breaks down when people do not use the right words (Allen, 1983:5).
It is also generally accepted that second or foreign language learners who possess good
word power or knowledge of vocabulary are usually more successful language learners.
Simply put, people with large vocabularies are more proficient users of the target language
than those with limited vocabularies. In fact, there is usually a positive correlation between
one‟s knowledge of vocabulary and his/her level of language proficiency (Luppescu &
Day: 1993).
When teaching vocabulary to the 10
th
form students at To Hieu High school the author
found out that word retention is a big problem to the students. Students tend to forget
words quickly. Another problem is that they may remember words but they do not know
how to use them appropriately. It has often been suggested that learning vocabulary by
using it in contexts should be employed as the main approach to improve vocabulary
knowledge. A number of researchers such as Gairns and Redman (1986) and Oxford and
Crookall (1988) have suggested that to learn words in context is an effective vocabulary
learning strategy.
This has urged the researcher to carry out this action research, which is aimed at finding
out how contextualized vocabulary presentation affects students‟ vocabulary acquisition.
2 the impact or effectiveness of this vocabulary technique on students‟ vocabulary
acquisition and retention. Moreover, a focus group interview was conducted to obtain more
in-depth data about how students assessed their progress when applying guessing strategies
and whether contextualized vocabulary presentation affected students‟ vocabulary
retention and learning.
5. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The study is limited to the examination of how presenting vocabulary in contexts affect
one group of grade 10 students‟ vocabulary acquisition and retention. No intention is made
to generalize the findings.
6. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The results of this action research will help the author to improve her approaches to
vocabulary teaching. Those results can also be helpful to other teachers in the school or in
other schools which are similar to the school where this research was conducted.
7. DESIGN OF THE STUDY
The research consists of three main parts: Part A, Part B and Part C.
Part A: Introduction presents the rationale, the research question, the method of study, the
research procedure, the scope of the study, the significance of the study and the design of
the study.
Part B: Development consists of 3 chapters. Chapter one reviews the literature relevant to
the study including the definition of context and a number of researches in which
contextualized vocabulary presentation has been used to helps students make improvement
in their language study. This chapter also presents some types of contextual clues used to
guess the meaning of unknown word and students‟ vocabulary learning strategies. Chapter
two discusses the method used in the study. It presents a thorough justification for the use
of action research and the research‟s components and program. Chapter three presents the
findings and discussion of the study. This part is apparently important because it justifies
the effectiveness of the research.


PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Definition of contextualized vocabulary presentation:
From the perspective of human verbal communication, Hymes (1974) sees context as a
limiter of the range of possible interpretations, and, on the other hand, a supporter of the
intended interpretation. Context can be seen as information and in turn, information is that
which reduces uncertainly.
Taking a discoursal perspective, Nation and Coady (1988) claim that “context is also
referred to as morphological, syntactic and discourse information in a given test, which can
be classified and described in terms of general features.” (p. 102)
In this study, context is defined as a particular linguistic environment where a particular
word is used and interpreted semantically and pragmatically. In other words, context is the
information that determines the grammatically, semantically and pragmatically appropriate
use of particular words.
Defined as such, contexts play a very important role in the identification of words in text.
A word used in different contexts may have different meaning so simply learning the
definition of a word with out examples of where and when it occurs will not help learners
to fully understand its meaning. If learners are not able to contextualize new words by
connecting them to words and concepts they already know, the words will likely be less
meaningful to them. And then if meaning is not contextualized, it will be difficult for
learners to memorize as well as to use new words appropriately.
If context determines the use and the interpretation of words, presenting words out of
context would be confusing to the students. In other words, contextualized vocabulary
presentation should be considered as one of effective vocabulary teaching technique. The
nature, the advantages and limitations of this technique will be reviewed in Section 1.2
below.
6
7 In other studies, more generic strategies were taught to the students without specific
algorithms. For example, Buikema (Buikema & Graves, 1993), a high school teacher,
developed a 5-day sequence of whole-class lessons teaching children to use context clues.
She began with word riddles and used a riddle metaphor to help her students derive words
from context. They found significant effects for the treatment on two measures of deriving
words from context and on a measure of incidental learning using an Edgar Allen Poe short
story followed by an unexpected vocabulary test. Contextual variables can be labeled as
mediating variables, which can be one or more than one of the following:
The number of occurrences of the unknown word
The variability of contexts in which multiple occurrences of the unknown words appear
The density of unknown words
The importance of the unknown words to understanding the context in which it is
embedded
The perceived helpfulness of the surrounding context in understanding the meaning of the
unknown word
The concreteness of the unknown word and the surrounding context
The usefulness of knowledge in cue utilization
In addition, in learning vocabulary some internal contextual variables should be taken into
account. These can be called contextual clues. They are contextual because they are part of
the word, and they include:
Prefix cues
Stem cues
Suffix cues
Interactive cues (where two or three word parts convey information in combination)
Table 1.2: Components of a theory of learning words from context (from Sternberg and

completed the guessing task, in order to clarify what they had said.
Liu and Nation (1985) were a more optimistic after they studied learners‟ ability to guess
the meaning of nonsense words used to replace real world at regular intervals in written
texts. They conclude that success is determined by the relative density of unknown words.
Where there was only one nonsense word per twenty-five words, they were easier to guess 9 than when there was one every ten words. Liu and Nation estimated that at least 85
percent of unknown words could be guessed by a class of learners working together to pool
their relevant knowledge and skills.
In addition, Xiaolong‟s (1988) research revealed that those learners who were good at
word inference also retain the first-encounter contextual meaning of the contexts in which
they were learnt. The importance of context was also stressed by Honeyfield (1997), who
argued that even with a functional vocabulary of the three thousand most frequently
occurring items in English, learners will still not know around 20 percent of the items they
encounter in an unsimplified text. The problem confronting both teacher and learners is
that no course can provide learners with anything like the vocabulary they will need to
comprehend authentic texts. He suggested that it is therefore of importance to equip
students with strategies for inferring the meaning of unknown vocabulary from the context
in which it occurs rather than getting them to undertake the time-consuming task of
memorizing long lists of words, or looking up unknown words in a dictionary which would
make the reading process unbearably slow and tedious.
Given the evidence that many learners lack the skill of inferring the meaning of unknown
words correctly, there has been surprisingly little research on whether they can be
successfully trained to apply it in their reading.
1.4. Guessing or inferencing strategy
Guessing meaning of unknown words from context most commonly refers to inferring the

some cases to guess from the word itself. They claim that speakers of European and non-
European languages alike can also make use of previous knowledge of English to guess the
meaning of unknown words. They give two examples:
(a) I overslept this morning.
(b) My work varies from week to week.
In the first example, the unknown word consists of parts which are already familiar and the
learner might have met the prefix “over” in other words e.g., overtime. This knowledge
enables the learners to work out the meaning. In the second example, with their knowledge
of the common noun “variety”, it is sufficient for the learner to reduce the meaning of
“varies” and understand the sentence.
11 In support of the idea of inferring word meaning from context, Kruse (1979, cited in
Nunan ( 1991:121) suggests introducing vocabulary items in such a way as to allow
learners to guess the meanings from the context or illustrations:
1. Word elements such as prefixes, suffixes and roots.
The ability to recognize component part of words, word families, and so on is probably the
single most important vocabulary skill a student of reading in EFL can have. It
substantially reduces the number of completely new words he will encounter and increases
his control of the English lexicon.
2. Pictures, diagrams and charts.
These clues, so obvious to the native speakers, must often be pointed out to the EFL
student. He may not connect the illustration with the item that is giving him difficulty. He
may also be unable to read charts and graphs in English.
3. Clues of definition.
The student must be taught to notice many types of highly useful definition clues. Among

Structural clues help to find the kind of meaning of the new word. They are uses to
determine the type of grammatical category of the new word. Structural clues are:
morphology, antonyms, synonyms, hyponyms, definitions, restatement, reference words,
alternatives, punctuation.
Morphology
Learners can derive word meaning by looking at internal, morphological features like
suffixes, prefixes and root words.
Antonyms
When seeing the next pair of words in parallel construction, the meaning of new word can
be assumed. For example: “David was very outgoing as opposed to his older coy sister”. In
this case, coy must be not outgoing, so it means unsociable. 13 Synonyms
The meaning of new word can be found in the same sentence using “be” and a synonym.
For example: “The view at the top of the mountain was surprising, it was incredible”. In
this case, the meaning of the new word is a synonym for “surprising”.
Hyponyms
The relationship between an unfamiliar word and familiar one is that of general concept
accompanied by a specific example (a hyponym). ). For example: “The room contained
lots of furniture: chair, table, air-conditional.” In this case, all of the items are of the same
category and furniture is used as a hyponym; it covers all of the other items which are
listed.
Definitions
Often the writer uses definitions to suggest the meanings of words in the text. For
instance: “Many animals live only by killing others and eating them. They are called
predatory animals”. Basing on the suggestion, readers can infer that “predatory animals”

use inference clues such as comparison and contrast, summary, cause and result, cohesion
to understand the meaning of new word.
Comparison and contrast
Comparison clues are words and phrases that have the same or similar meaning as an
unfamiliar word. Words and phrases such as like, as, and in the same way often signal
comparisons.
Contrast clues are words and phrases that mean the opposite of an unfamiliar word. Words
and phrases such as although, but, yet, however, except and on the other hand signal
contrasts. In the sentence “The large dog seemed menacing, as if it were ready to bite me”,
the word “as” signals the comparison between the clues, “ready to bite me,” and the
meaning of menacing is “threatening.”
Summary 15 When summarizing, the information of the sentence or paragraph is sum up in a word or
phrase. Thanks to the familiar words of the whole sentence or paragraph, reader can
understand the meaning of unknown word. After summarizing the example below, reader
can conclude that “perspiration” means the “wetness comes from the body and causes a
bad smell.”
“Many products are sold to stop perspirations. This wetness comes from our body
whenever we are too warm, or are afraid, and it usually doesn‟t smell very good.”
Cohesion
When reading a linear text, cohesion is maintained through a rich mesh of contextual clues.
The meaning of an unknown word can be indicated by other words in the same sentence or
in adjacent sentences because they regularly co-occur with the unfamiliar word. It is called
“collocational cohesion” by Halliday and Hasan (1976:287).
In conclusion, to make effective guess, learners need to be trained to look for clues in

meanings is a very complex and error-prone process for L2 learners. He found that while
learners are more likely to remember the form and meaning of a word when they have
inferred its meaning by themselves than when the meaning has been given to them, the
same learners are more likely to infer an incorrect meaning of an unknown L2 word in an
L2 text when no cue has been given to its meaning.
1.7. Activities and exercises for presenting and practicing words in context
Nation (2003) suggests introducing some activities and exercises for presenting and
practicing words in context which allow learners to infer the meaning of unknown words
such as: guessing from context and learning the meaning of unknown words from
examples. In these exercises, have students follow very explicit instruction for them to
- copy the sentence where the word is
- underline the word that they do not know the meaning of
- explain in at least five sentences what strategies in the text guide them to the
approximate meaning of the word
- give the meaning
- check the dictionary to see if their approximate meaning is close or not.
- do this exercise with groups, pairs, and individuals. 17 Exercises of this type are aimed at raising students‟ awareness of how the words are used.
In this action research, some types of context clues such as punctuation, antonyms,
synonyms, hyponyms, definitions, restatement, and reference words were distributed and
used to help SS to infer the meaning of new words.
1.8. The roles of vocabulary knowledge in guessing meaning of the unknown words
Many researchers consider vocabulary knowledge to be an important variable that affects
reading comprehension in both first and second language learning (Alderson, 2000; Joshi,
2005; Qian, 2002; Ricketts et al., 2007). A limited vocabulary size, as well as a lack of

exercises. Among the different aspects of vocabulary teaching, emphasis seems to be
placed on denotational meaning rather than connotational meaning, and word building
rather than collocations.
The book also seems to give due attention to teaching vocabulary strategies via activities
which focus on developing skills in dealing with unknown words and using dictionaries.
Unfortunately, however, many of these activities are not properly designed; thus they are
unlikely to achieve their purposes.
1.10. Summary
In this chapter, an overview of approaches to contextualized vocabulary presentation, a
summary of previous studies on guessing strategy, advantages and disadvantages of
contextualized vocabulary presentation to vocabulary acquisition, activities and exercises
for presenting and practicing words in context, the roles of vocabulary knowledge in
guessing meaning of the unknown words and vocabulary in English textbook for 10
th
form
non- English major students have been presented. To infer the meaning of an unknown
word, the reader has to collect a number of clues from the text. A theoretical framework
has been prepared for investigation in the next chapter.
19