This study was designed to find out the effects of learning and testing contexts on foreign word learning by incidental learning paradigm in accordance with the theory of levels of processing. It was to identify the effects of two learning contexts (f...
This study was designed to find out the effects of learning and testing contexts on foreign word learning by incidental learning paradigm in accordance with the theory of levels of processing. It was to identify the effects of two learning contexts (foreign word-native word paired context and sentence context) and two testing contexts in recall and recognition (word context and sentence context). In learning, half of the learning sentences required affirmative response and half required negative.
80 high school boys learned 30 foreign words with dictionary for 20 minutes and were tested immediately after learning, for 10 minutes in recall and also for 10 minutes in recognition 40 students learned with foreign-native paired word sheets and 40 other students with sentence sheets. In recall test, out of those who learned with paired word sheets, 20 student s were presented recall sheets merely printed with the target words, and 20 students were presented recall sheets printed with the sentences with underlined target words. Out of those who learned with sentence sheets, 20 students recalled with word recall sheets and 10 students recalled with the same sentences as they had learned and 10 students with the different sentences from those which they learned. Recognition was made in the same method as recall.
Following hypotheses were raised according to the levels of processing model, the degree of encoding elaboration and the characteristics of recall and recognition, examined and proved to be true.
a) The recall and recognition scores in the condition of learning sentence contexts are higher than those in the condition of learning native-foreign paired word contexts.
b) The effects of recall on learning contexts are greater than those of recognition.
c) When the learning contexts and the testing contexts are the same.
the recall and recognition scores are higher than when different.