The Effects of Vocabulary Enhancement Exercises and Group Dynamic Assessment on Word Learning Through Lexical Inferencing

Abstract

The study aimed to explore the effect of group dynamic assessment on word learning through lexical inferencing and to compare it to that of vocabulary enhancement exercises. Through purposive sampling, 45 intermediate EFL learners were selected as participants and randomly assigned to three groups. The participants read six texts over a 6-day period and answered comprehension questions for each text. In the second phase of each treatment session, the first group engaged in lexical inferencing of the underlined words within group dynamic assessment framework. The second group did two vocabulary exercises for each target word. The third group engaged in lexical inferencing of target words through group dynamic assessment framework and also did one vocabulary exercise for each target word. Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Wesche and Paribakht in Can Mod Lang Rev 53:13–40, 1996) was used to measure learners’ knowledge of the target words 1 day prior to the treatment and 1 day and 28 days after the treatment. The results showed that in terms of gains in depth and size of vocabulary knowledge the first and the second groups were not significantly different. However, the third group significantly outperformed the first and the second groups. It was concluded that group dynamic assessment is as effective as vocabulary exercises in enhancing word learning through lexical inferencing and that the combination of group dynamic assessment and vocabulary exercises could enhance word learning through lexical inferencing even more.

Appendix: A Sample of the Study Texts (Adapted from https://www.readlistenlearn.net/)

The Deadly Profession of Orchid Hunting

There are not many hobbies that are as respectable as gardening. It’s a quiet interest that’s more popular with the elderly than teenagers or young adults. So, it is, perhaps, surprising to learn that collecting one special type of flower was a dangerous job that cost many professional ‘orchid hunters’ their lives.

It all happened because of the love—some would say the madness—that wealthy, nineteenth-century Englishmen showed for these flowers. Their passion even had a name, ‘orchidelirium’, that suggested mental illness. These fanatics sent orchid hunters to almost every part of the world to try to find new varieties.

But it’s probably better to start a couple of thousand years earlier or you’ll get the idea that orchids are a modern invention. In fact, orchids have a much longer history than just a hundred or so years. In Roman times, they were extremely popular, but were discouraged as Christianity became the religion of the western world. The reason was that the flowers were linked to sex. In fact, their name comes from the Ancient Greek word for testicles which are part of the male sex organ.

In Greek mythology, the creation of the orchid is explained by a story. A young man, Orchis, was partying in the forest. He drank too much and raped a woman who was the servant of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. The god’s followers were so angry about this that they attacked him and tore his body to pieces. Orchis’ father prayed that the gods would bring to life the dead body of his much-loved son, but they changed his corpse into a flower instead.

It was not until many centuries later that orchids were once again center stage. People started to cultivate them in Europe about two hundred years ago. However, there are only about forty orchid families that grow on the continent or in Central Asia and, so, rich gardeners with a special interest in the plants paid for ‘orchid hunters’ to travel all over the world to find new ones. They were not just working in the interests of science. Orchid hunting was very competitive and so the journeys to find them were also secretive. It was quite usual for collectors to lie about where they found new orchids because they could sell them in London for enormous prices.

In those days, very little was known about how to cultivate orchids and most died in Europe after journeys of many thousands of miles from some of the most distant parts of the world because nobody knew how to look after them. In fact, half the number that had been collected actually died before they ever reached Europe. Slowly, however, by getting more information on orchids, gardeners learnt how to keep the plants alive and even to grow them. But there was still great demand for unknown varieties and the highly risky profession of ‘orchid hunter’ was invented.

Of course, the orchid family does not come from one special place. There are around 25,000 species of orchid—that’s twice as many as there are bird species– and they grow just about everywhere. (Orchids have been found in the Arctic circle, by the way, and in southern Argentina, near the Antarctic.)

However, they are most common in hot and wet parts of Asia, where there are nearly three hundred different families, sub-Saharan Africa (with around 250), and in Latin America (where there are approximately 230). But you can come across orchid families in Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and cooler parts of Asia too. And let’s not forget the 100,000 types that gardeners have cultivated by mixing one or more natural orchids.

So, if there were so many orchids in so many different places, why was it so risky to be an ‘orchid hunter’? Part of the answer is to do with the areas of the world where the rarest orchids grew. For instance, eight ‘orchid hunters’ set off in 1901 to find new orchid species in the Philippines: only one returned to Europe alive (although he did bring back seven thousand new species). Five of his friends simply disappeared; another was eaten by a tiger and the seventh was burnt to death when he—somehow—became covered in oil.

In Papua New Guinea, five orchid hunters were taken prisoner but only three were still alive when they were rescued by the Indonesian Army. The other two had their heads cut off. There are many other stories of accidents in Colombia, where well-known ‘orchid hunters’ died of disease, drowning in rivers and seas, and hunger.

But the dangers of the lands where the orchids grew were only part of the story. Another risk was from other ‘orchid hunters’. Competition was so violent that the hunters’ employers often ordered them to do unbelievable things.

For example, one hunter, William Arnold, was nearly killed in a fight with another one. When he wrote to his employer to let him know, he was told to follow the man, collect the same species and then harm his competitors’ orchids so that they died. Obviously, after months of collecting the plants in very uncomfortable conditions, it would make anyone angry to find that all his orchids were dead. Perhaps, angry enough to kill.

Of course, all these stories are historical and looking for orchids in the twenty-first century cannot be as dangerous as it was a hundred and more years ago.

Or can it? Tom Hart Dyke is a plant hunter who was kidnapped by terrorists in Latin America and kept prisoner for 9 months in 2000 and 2001. The group who had captured him demanded 20,000 dollars to let him free. Of course, he was trying to find new species of orchids!