Yesterday I was sitting across from Mark (18) and May (15), a brother and sister I've taught for three years now. We were discussing what they should learn and how, now that they were back after a short break.  I felt that they had excellent communicative competence for people in their situation (Taiwanese in Taiwan) but needed work on grammar. Mark said he needed more vocabulary. Vocabulary building is an area I've taken an interest in lately, so we started discussing how to proceed. I suggested we read short texts, extract fve-word lists of interesting vocabulary items, and spend a week reinforcing knowledge and retention of that week's list.

I asked each of them to scan that day's passage and make a list of five words he or she would like to learn, words that looked useful. May carried out the task as directed. Mark simply wrote down every word he didn't know or wasn't sure of. I asked Mark to select from his list of ten five words he thought would be useful to him. He selected the five least useful words in the list. I gave him my recommendations based on general applicability, pointing out that the words he'd chosen were specific to a field of study and not likely to pop up in most of his reading, writing or conversation.

Next, I asked them to copy down the sentences in which the selected vocabulary appeared. They'd managed a couple each when the bell rang.

Over the course of the afternoon and evening I continued to ponder the problem of learning and retaining vocabulary. Having  developed an exhaustive model of language acquisition, and having just that day finished reading How Languages Are Learned (Lightbown and Spada, 1999), I knew that anything learned in class was going to go out the window unless it continued to present itself for consideration for some time afterward. The students and I had already agreed that over the course of the week I would send them daily links to online material containing the target vocabulary. This meant that focus on the target items would last a week. Come the next class, new items would be selected and new material linked. Having made a dent in Second Language Research Methods (Seliger and Shohamy, 1989), I was primed to think of documenting and analyzing the process and results.

Some time after 1 AM, I found myself filling in a handwritten research log with details of the afternoon's class and plans for a six-month experiment in vocabulary acquisition. The more I wrote and the more I thought (last night, this morning and this afternoon), the more excited I became and the closer I came to designing a really interesting and productive experiment.

As planned so far, the experiment has several parameters. A lot of narrowing and focusing are required, but I think I'm ready to put my ideas out there and see what people think.

I will try a specific treatment on a specific pair of students. For each session there were will be a pre-test, a post-test, and delayed post-tests. Since the tests themselves may contribute to results, I will randomly vary the number and intervals of the delayed post-tests for each session. The study will conclude with a comprehensive sixth-month post-test on all selected vocabulary. I expect to be able to determine whether and for how long (up to six months) the treatment is effective.

The treatment will consist of the student's selecting ten vocabulary items from a scan of a passage, the student and teacher's refining the list to five frequently occurring items, and the student's reading, over the course of the week between classes, additional materials containing the target items. The number and intervals of the out-of-class readings will vary randomly so that the effects of various configurations and densities can be at least roughly factored.

Even as I write this, I can see glitches. The main one is that if there is a single sixth-month delayed post-test for the entire study, later sessions will be represented by shorter intervals.

Hmmm.