Staff Research Seminar: Errorless learning advantage in second language vocabulary learning

Wednesday 14 March 2012, 1.00PM

Speaker: Danijela Trenkic

In foreign language learning contexts the meaning of new words can be given to learners in advance or the learners could be encouraged to guess the meaning from the context (trial and error). The latter is often considered more progressive and learner-centred. However, learning via trial and error often leads to the creation of errors during encoding (hence, errorful learning), which may lead to strengthening of incorrect associations. Methods that reduce the possibility of making errors during encoding (errorless learning) often result in increased memory performance.

In this study we adapted the errorless learning paradigm to learning new words in a second language. Results suggest that second language speakers benefit more from learning new words via errorless than errorful methods and that this benefit facilitates long-term retention of new vocabulary. Implications for the vocabulary development of oversees University students are considered.

Location: Science Education lab A/D017