SECOND LANGUAGE VOCABULARY LEARNING IN PRIMARY EDUCATION: VALIDATING THE MODEL TECHNIQUE FEATURE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study explores the effect of three activities on ESL vocabulary acquisition. Three groups of students in their sixth year of Primary Education participated. Each group worked new vocabulary with a different activity. The first group used reading plus flash cards; the second did the same through reading plus filling the gaps; the third one worked with a crossword. Each activity meets a different number of criteria within the so-called Technique Feature Analysis (Nation and Webb, 2011). This model is specifically designed to explain the lexical processing in a second language. After the activities were done, the participants’ receptive and productive knowledge was tested. The results suggest that this model is sensitive to receptive vocabulary knowledge in second language, while it is not to productive knowledge.