Abstract/Summary

This study explored the strategy use of 12 high-school learners of English within a vocabulary teaching intervention which exposed three groups of learners to one of three types of oral vocabulary explanations: L2 explanations; codeswitched explanations (CS); and contrastive focus-on-form explanations (CFoF) giving cross-linguistic information. Unlike previous studies of vocabulary interventions, which have tended to focus solely on quantitative outcome measures and therefore give arguably limited insights into why different interventions have the impact that they do, the study implemented stimulated recall interviews to explore strategy use in order to better understand the learning outcomes from the intervention. A qualitative analysis was undertaken to explore how learners used strategies and whether patterns of use emerged by intervention group and proficiency level. Compared with the CS and L2 groups, learners from the CFoF group attended more specifically to the target words and engaged in more metacognitive reflection and evaluation of the explanations, leading potentially to deeper processing and hence greater vocabulary gains. Such strategy use also seemed, however, to explain their smaller gains in listening comprehension. Finally, strategic behaviour was found to be related to levels of vocabulary knowledge and listening proficiency. The value of exploring qualitative data on strategy use for evaluating the effects of an intervention is discussed, alongside the theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings.