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johnslat · Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 9:05 pm Post subject: Academic Research Articles - DUH

Why do so many academic research articles devote themselves to investigating what any person with even half a brain would know?

"The Effects of vocabulary previewing on Reading Comprehension Ability of Turkish EFL learners
Results of this study indicated that giving prior information through restoring to pre-reading activities might become a useful tool for EFL teachers to facilitate the learner'sreading comprehension ability. The results of this study also, provided empirical answers for the research question posed, and stressed the effectiveness of employment of vocabulary previewing on reading comprehension ability.

http://www.academia.edu/2981756/The_Effects_of_vocabulary_previewing_on_Reading_Comprehension_Ability_of_Turkish_EFL_learners

Well, I suppose it might be that some researchers don't HAVE even half a brain.

"The findingsof this study do not support the theories of Been (1975) , Wilson (1973) , Richards(1985) , Morgan and Rivolucri (1986) and Celce-Murcia (1979) who believed that explicit pretext teaching of vocabulary focuses the learner's attention on details ,which is not useful in terms of reading comprehension."

Jeez - I mean the proper pre-reading introduction of vocabulary found in a text isn't useful??? Come on - I need a much stronger synonym for DUMB.

Regards,
John

Shroob · Joined: 02 Aug 2010 Posts: 1339

HLJHLJ · Joined: 06 Oct 2009 Posts: 1218 Location: Ecuador

...and yet for decades people believed the exact opposite, i.e. that pre-teaching vocab was detrimental to comprehension because it encouraged readers to focus on individual words instead of reading for gist.

It only seems obvious now because others experimented with it in the name of establishing best practice. This paper is just attempting to quantify it.

No doubt there are many accepted 'common sense' ideas about English language teaching that are adhered to now that will be scoffed at in 20 years time.

Shroob · Joined: 02 Aug 2010 Posts: 1339

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

The researchers in many of these cases simply need to conduct a study and write a paper in order to get the title, whether it's MA or PhD. The study described is pretty simple to set up, conduct, and then write up.

Voila! Postgrad degree, better job, more money.

In these cases, it's probably got very little to do with actually adding to the body of knowledge in the field.

Dedicated · Joined: 18 May 2007 Posts: 972 Location: UK

If you read the article, I doubt this has been peer reviewed by anybody.
Even the cover sheet ("submited") says a lot about the level of English. It was carried out at Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Iran and used students of Cambridge PET level (Preliminary English Test).

At that level, any pre-teaching of vocabulary would be beneficial (ie. help the student answer the questions)

Just because something is published these days does not make it reliable research.

HLJHLJ · Joined: 06 Oct 2009 Posts: 1218 Location: Ecuador

Having read it properly now (on my PC, I only skimmed it on my phone before). As far as I can see it doesn't claim to be published, it's a copy of a term paper that was handed in as part of a Masters. It's not even a thesis/dissertation. It seems like a fairly solid, if simple, piece of practice research to me. My guess is it's aim (at least theoretically) would have been to change current teaching practice in a specific situation (e.g. a particular course or institution) to encourage use of more current methods.

Also, a quick, and admittedly half hearted, WOS search only turned up 4 relevant studies on pre-teaching vocabulary, one of which wasn't related to language teaching. There are probably a few more if you tweak the search parameters. So common sense or not, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of empirical evidence for it. It seems like a pretty reasonable area for research if someone was looking to quantify the value of pre-teaching.

It's interesting (to me anyway Embarassed

) that he claims many studies have shown the value of pre-teaching vocab, yet the references he cites don't reflect that. There's plenty of stuff there about enabling activities and pre-reading tasks, but very little that actually addresses the benefits of pre-teaching vocab.

Sashadroogie · Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 8:38 am Post subject:

I dunno. Common sense? Many of m'colleagues in Istanbul didn't even know about the possibility of pre-reading tasks, nor pre-teaching vocab, never mind any question of the validity of such activities. I would say that this paper focuses on an area that would have been new territory, for them at least!