Journal Article tied with Brown readings

Recently, I found an interesting article written by Thomas Huckin of the University of Utah and James Coady of Ohio State University titled "Incedental Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language." The article was very interesting, and got me thinking about how I personally picked up my vocabulary from reading, and how students in my class learn vocabulary incedentally.
Much of vocabulary acquisition, as stated in the text, comes from "extensive reading, with the learner guessing at the meaning of the unknown words." Students have to contextualize the words they are learning to fully understand what the word means. Students often times cannot determine the significance of the word simply given the first contextualization of the word. The word must appear several times in several different contexts for the student to fully understand the given vocabulary word. Also, many new vocabulary words in a 2nd Language are recognizable as cognates. These types of words are much easier for students to understand and learn, but students also over generalize meanings given certain words and contexts. There are false cognates and they are most often skipped over by students because they automatically assume the false cognates to be real cognates. Some strategies in teaching have arisen to fix such problems. As educators, we must teach students about certain word-families so that students can better understand the types of words and how they are used in given contexts. We must teach students to be good educated guessers, as that is what most of reading a foreign language is: guessing.

Students also need to be questioned and given feedback with new vocabulary, but also with the a foreign language in general. As Brown states in the feedback text, the best method is not necessarily giving direct feedback and correction, but rather try to get students to self-correct their errors. Educators of foreign language should use positive feedback such as confirmations and encouragements when things are said correctly in class. These will boost the students' confidence, and give them drive to continue learning and speaking in the TL. Personally, I think that teachers should not be so blunt when correcting students, and should do it in the nicest way possible. Students, in my experience, are often very timid in a foreign language classroom, and they can be easily discouraged. Something that was cited from a Brandl text states, "He finds [low-level learners] are more likely to engage in trial and error behavior and randomly guess about a correct answer, while not being able to benefit from any kind of feedback that is given." I have definitely noticed this in my classes while teacher assisting, and I find it very frustrating. The students need to have a foundation within the language before feedback becomes extremely successful. This, however, does not mean that feedback should be elimated, but rather that it should be more creative and thoughtful for lower level foreign language students. Repeating is also a very good method to get students into the habit of saying the correct phrasing. I believe it's most beneficial to have both the students and yourself repeat the correct phrasing.

Furthermore, questioning is a very important part connecting students with feedback and vocabulary acquisition. For vocabulary, we would want to use lots of knowledge based and comprehension based questions, such as "Qué significa 'calle' en Español?" or "Quién es el poeta famoso de Chile que ganó el premio nobel?" Higher level questions, with my experience, can only be used with higher level classes because they involve much higher levels of thinking and speech production. Having students answer Synthesis and Evaluation based questions requires self-assessment and heavy explanation. These types of questions are very beneficial because students are able to critique the language and question why certain parts of the language are how they are. Why isn't this word different? Why would it sound "bad" if the accent were in a different location? Questions like these, when answered in the TL are very beneficial to students for learning and teachers for assessment.