VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
**************************************** PHÙNG THỊ LAM
THE IMPACT OF REPETITION AND RECYCLING ON
GRADE 11 STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY RETENTION
IN LONG HAI – PHUOC TINH HIGH SCHOOL

(TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA VIỆC LUYỆN TẬP CỦNG CỐ
ĐỐI VỚI SỰ GHI NHỚ TỪ VỰNG CỦA HỌC SINH LỚP 11
Ở TRƯỜNG THPT LONG HẢI – PHƯỚC TỈNH ) MINOR M.A THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60 14 10
MINOR M.A THESIS
Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60 14 10
Supervisor: ĐỖ BÁ QUÝ, M.A H NI, 2011 iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Certificate of originality…………… ………………………………………………………i
Acknowledgements …… …………………………………………………………………ii
Abstract…………………………………… …………………………………………… iii
Table of content ……………………………………………………………………………iv
List of abbreviations ……………………………………………………………………… v

PART A – INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Aims of the study 2
3. Scope of the study 2
4. Research hypotheses and questions 3
5. Method of the study 3
6. Organization of the study 3

1.1. Context of Study 16
1.2. Why quasi – experimental research 17
2. Participants of the study 18
2.1 Participants 18
2.2 Sampling 18
3. Materials 19
3.1 The course book 19
3.2 The course content 19
3.3 What are relevant activities? 19
4. Data collection instruments 21
4.1 T –Test 21
4.1.1 The purpose of the test 21
4.1.2.What to test 22
4.1.3. Test 22
4.2. Questionnaires 22
4.2.1.Questionnaires for students 22
4.2.1.1.The pre-treatment questionnaire 23
4.2.1.2.The post-treatment questionnaire 23
4.2.2.Questionnaires for teachers 23
5. Procedure of data collection 23
5.1. Schedules 24
5.2. Treatment 24

vi
5.3. Data collecting and processing procedures 25
CHAPTER 3 - DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 26
3.1 Results of the T – Test 26
3.2 The result of pre-test scores of the two groups 26
3.3. The result of post-test scores of the two groups 28
3.4 Summary of the test scores of the two groups in the pretest and posttest 32

pedagogical implications.
3. Scope of the study
In the current study, the author set the limit of investigating possibly – applied activities
that can be carried out at beginning or in the middle of 45-minute periods in such large-sized
classes at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh High school, vung Tau. The activities were related to first
three units (which equal to 18 lessons) of the course book English 11.

4. Research hypotheses and questions
The study is to get the answers to the following questions:
1) To what extent do EFL teachers encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary among
their students?
2) What is the effectiveness of using repetitive and recycling focused activities on enhancing
11
th
- graders’ vocabulary retention?
2

3) What are the students’ attitudes towards using activities in teaching and learning
vocabulary?
5. Method of the study
The study is a quasi-experimental design involving the three components of experiments:
the population (the 11
th
grade students at Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school, Ba Ria Vung
Tau), the treatment (repetitive and recycling focused activities), and the measurement of the
treatment (T-test).
- Questionnaires were delivered to teachers to investigate the ways they encourage repetition
and recycling vocabulary among students.
- Questionnaires were delivered to the subjects before treatment to get to know their own
strategies of memorizing vocabulary.

1.3.2 Meaning
1.3.3 Grammar
1.3.4 Collocation
2. Factors affecting the retention of vocabulary.
2.1 Memory and storage system
2.1.1 The Keyword Method
2.1.2 The Visual Aids on Vocabulary Learning
2.1.3 The Semantic Mapping on Vocabulary Learning
2.2 Frequency of meeting
2.3 Quality of processing
3. Other factors
3. 1 Learning styles
3. 2 Teaching method
4. Repetition and Recycling in Language learning
4.1. The spacing of repetition
4.2. Testing and the Retrieval Practice Effect
5. A review of similar studies
CHAPTER 2 – METHODOLOGY
1.The setting of study
1.1 Context of Study
4

Long Hai – Phuoc Tinh high school is a state-run school located in Long Hai town in Ba
Ria – Vung Tau. The school has a modest educational staff of 71 people who provide
education to 1425 students. The EFL group consists of 9 teachers.
The typical setting of instruction is three 45-minute –long periods of English a week.
Due to the limited time in a correspondence to a wide range of words to teach and
students’ low English proficiency, EFL teachers at Long Hai _ Phuoc Tinh high school often teach
vocabulary in the traditional teacher-centered method. The teachers normally dominate class to explain
words by words. They often employ three following steps in teaching vocabulary. First, teachers have

n
= the required number in the sample
Hence the frequency interval (f) is 84÷56 = 1.5
As a result, the researcher omitted every third name on the list of cases.
3.Materials
3.1 The course book
The English 11 is designed basing on the basic principles of Communicative Language
Teaching. However, the course book do not include sufficient communicative activities for
practice. This demands more work on the part of the teacher in selecting appropriate activities
to attract students.
3.2 The course content
As being stated above, due to the limitation of time and application, the study only deals
with three units among sixteen ones appearing in the current course book English 11, namely
unit 1 “Friendship”, unit 2 “Personal Experience”, and unit 3 “A Party”.
3.3 What are relevant activities?
- Activities that involve brief reading, repetition, making sentences, listing words and so on
are supposed to be relevant to provide background for practicing certain chunks or for
recycling vocabulary, thus aid language processing and ultimately vocabulary retention.
- When designing some extra activities, the researcher took into account all the conditions of
the participants and based on the Taxonomy of Vocabulary Learning Strategies which is
adopted from Schmitt 1997:207.
4. Data collection instruments
4.1 T -Test
The pre-test and post–test employed in the study were designed to measure the effect of
repetitive and recycling-focused activities on students’ ability to retain vocabulary.
4.1.1 The purpose of the test
- The pre-test was given to the two groups in the same week with the primary purpose of
measuring students’ vocabulary size and their level of vocabulary retention.
- The post-test was implemented to assess how effective the tailored activities utilized were. .
6

5.1 Schedules
7

The study was carried out within 6 weeks of the first semester in 2 classes. Each class
work with English of 3 forty-five minute periods a week. So, the schedules were designed
upon 18 periods. The detailed schedule of supplemental activities for both class was in the
appendix 2.
5.2 Treatment
In the first stage, the participants were asked to take a vocabulary pretest. Then a brief
questionnaire is delivered.
In the class hours, both control and experimental group received the usual instruction and
exercises based on the course book. Words and structures were presented to them in a same
traditional manner. Regularly at the beginning of each class, the experimental group joined a
variety of activities designed by the teacher focusing on the production and recycling of the
words that they have learnt before. Six weeks later, students were unexpectedly given a post-
test. The result of the test, then, was drawn out to be compared with the prior test. A follow-up
questionnaire was then administered to investigate students perceptions and attitudes toward
vocabulary learning.
5.3 Data collecting and processing procedures
The following steps were carried out to collect the results from the pretest and the posttest.
Step 1: Doing and marking the pre-test. All test - takers sat at the tests on the same day
under the serious control of the teacher (who is also the researcher). The pre-test took place on
16
th
August, 2011 and the marking process was seriously carried out right after the tests.
Step 2: Conducting a brief minor questionnaire to explore students’ preferred strategies to
memorize vocabulary.
Step 3: Doing and marking the post-test. The post-test took place on 24
th
September, 2011

that after six weeks of enhancing repetition and recycling words in teaching and learning
vocabulary, the students’ vocabulary capacity has been improved significantly.
However, the change in SD of the two classes is different. The SD of 1.3 in pre-test and
1.5 in post test of the control group (students’ test scores varied a lot) showed that absorbing
vocabulary in the traditional approach depended on many other factors beyond teaching-
related ones. whereas steadily low standard deviation in the pre-test and post test scores of
experimental group indicates that the impact of repetition and recycling on students’
vocabulary was positive despite subjective factors.
Furthermore, the comparison between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental
group showed that the groups of low scores in the pre-test (ranged from 1.5 to 4) made more
progress than the group of high scores in the pre-test (ranged from 4.5 to 6.5) in term of scores
9

in the post-test. The low-scored group possessed the average additional score of 3.02 while the
high-scored only achieved 2.00 as the average additional score. This could lead to the
conclusion that the repetition and recycling work efficiently for weak students rather than
strong students.
The correlations between the pre-test and post-test scores in the two groups were rather
strong (r = .74 and .59 respectively). This implies that the implementation of method strategy
(using regular vocabulary – focused activities) might have succeeded in enhancing intrinsic
motivation of some participants and failed to do so to other participants.
3.5 Summary of the test scores of the two groups in the pretest and posttest
In short, the descriptive and inferential statistics show a positive change in the vocabulary
test scores of the two classes in the posttest. The t-test and p-values tell that different scores
must be the result of the teaching method in which repetitive and recycling – focused activities
have been applied to help students improve their vocabulary retention. This implied that
students of experimental group outperformed control group in test and that the teaching
memory strategies was successful in both storing and retrieving.
3.6 Survey results
3.6.1. The pre-treatment questionnaire for students

scores; portrayed the superiority of memory strategies in vocabulary memorizing and
retention. In other words, the better result of the experimental group can be considered the
means to lead to the conclusion that to some extent repetition and recycling bring some
efficiency to the students’ vocabulary retention. Also, it was shown that being over-dependent
on survey tools are open to question, in spite of being widely used. The results indicated that
repetition and recycling strategy applied in the study works far better for weak students in
term of retention. The results also portrayed the superiority of memory strategy use both in
short and long term retention. The next most frequently used strategies were cognitive and
compensation strategies respectively.
As stated in the Introduction chapter, the study addressed three research questions:
1) To what extent do EFL teachers encourage repetition and recycling vocabulary
among their students?
2) What is the effectiveness of using repetitive and recycling focused activities on
enhancing 11
th
- graders’ vocabulary retention?
11

3) What are students’ attitudes towards used activities in teaching and learning
vocabulary?
Through the major findings, it is proved that the study has fully answered the given
research questions. The conclusions therefore can be summarized as follows:
1. For the first research question, most of the teachers in charge of teaching 11
th
grade in
Long hai – Phuoc Tinh high school acknowledged the importance of teaching vocabulary and
started to devote more time to facilitate students’ vocabulary memorizing. As a matter of fact,
only two out of five teachers have been concerned of reviewing vocabulary and prefer to use
social, determination strategies metacognitive strategies and memory strategies as tools to help
students foster vocabulary. However, most of them highly appreciate reviewing vocabulary in

Repetition and recycling undoubtedly lead to different degrees of vocabulary retention.
The retention of vocabulary seems to be related little to the learner's general learning patterns
or cognitive styles of visual, audio or contextual association. However, visual presentation
appears to lead to higher levels of retention and should thus be recommended.
The implications of the findings for incorporating these strategies in teaching will be
discussed in detail. 1) Activities that involve reading, repetition, making sentences… can
provide background for practicing certain chunks or for recycling vocabulary, thus aid
language processing and ultimately vocabulary retention. 2) Involving the activities in each
lesson reinforces previous learning and encourages many learners to sustain their interest and
work. 3) Repetition and recycling can supply students with intense and meaningful practice,
thus make what they previously learn be more vividly experienced and, therefore, better
remembered. 4) As EFL teachers, we have to be aware of the importance of recycling
language for learning. We have to not only mention this in our teaching but also train our
learners how to do it effectively. Learning is remembering and recycling language plays a
central role in creating strong and lasting memories. Therefore, a systematic approach with a
variety of strategies should be a natural part of any language teaching.
3. Limitations of the study
Limitations of the study are something inevitable for some reasons. This was an empirical
study that only included a small number of participants and a small number of teachers
teaching English as a foreign language. A larger sample from different institutions would
definitely yield more generalizable findings. As other studies, the data were collected by using
13

only three instruments which do not reflect a reality because students might have not read the
questions carefully but only circled them.
The subjects of the present study are from one school in Ba Ria- Vung Tau, therefore the
results of the study may not be generalized to all Vietnamese students.
The study focused on grade 11 students; therefore the results of the study may not be
generalized to all levels.
This study definitely will not be the only one in this field and does not offer any conclusive