Nolan Weil
Intensive English Language Institute at Utah State University, USA

An Investigation of Korean Readers’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies

This paper will report on an on-going project at Utah State University where we are looking into reading and vocabulary learning strategies of Korean students attending the Intensive English Language Institute (IELI), a four-level program focusing on English for academic purposes and providing an orientation to the American university system. Focusing exclusively on Korean students has enabled us to address a central limitation of the think-aloud methodology that we employ by permitting us to collect verbal reports in either Korean or English. Thus far, fourteen participants have been enlisted from among Korean students attending level 3 and 4 classes in the Intensive English Language Institute at USU.

Procedures: Upon initial enrollment, participants completed: 1) a survey to provide basic demographic characteristics including English study history, 2) a language strategy use survey, and 3) the Swansea Vocabulary Levels Test. Participants were subsequently trained to think-aloud while trying to work out an understanding of an unfamiliar text.
Participants then completed two experimental tasks. In the first task, they read a 1000 word text and identified words or expressions that interfered with their understanding. Using whatever methods they would ordinarily use, they were to think aloud as they worked out an understanding of the text. Participants had on-line access to Korean-English and English only dictionaries. In the second task, participants read another text under instructions to identify words they felt were important to learn and to think aloud as they made these decisions. As a final step, they were asked to do whatever they would ordinarily do to commit these identified items to memory and to verbalize their thoughts as they did so. During both of these tasks, a digital camcorder positioned over the participants’ right shoulder captured participants actions and verbalizations.

The presenter will discuss results that suggest a number of interesting relationships between vocabulary size and language learning experiences. For example, students with larger vocabularies tended to report: more total hours of high school English instruction in Korea, fewer total hours of English instruction in a hakwon, a greater number of hours per week associating with non-Korean Internationals at USU. Moreover, students with the smallest vocabularies tended to exhibit written and oral repetition strategies when studying vocabulary while students with larger vocabularies exhibited a wider variety of strategies. The strategies of the less successful readers appeared to be more uniform, exhibiting an almost stereotypic quality, in contrast to the strategies of the most successful readers each of which exhibited a unique quality. The presenter will further elaborate on observed differences in strategy use.

Presenter
Nolan Weil is Assistant Professor of ESL at Utah State University (USU) where he teaches courses in academic reading, writing, and oral discourse, as well as various content-based topics courses. His current research interests include vocabulary learning and individual differences in language learning.