Etymology

2.1 Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge

Depth of vocabulary knowledge refers to how well a learner knows a word

in terms of several lexical aspects such as form, meaning and use. One of the few longitudinal studies that sheds more light onto the incremental nature of increasing the depth of vocabulary knowledge was that of Schmitt. His study tracked three advanced L2 university students’ knowledge of 11 words over the course of one academic year with respect to spelling, associations, grammatical information and meaning. Schmitt conducted three interviews where he used different measurements for each knowledge type: writing for a test for spelling, providing three words in response to a target word stimulus for association and knowing the target word’s word class and use for grammatical information.
The results of spelling test show that learners have improved their spelling across the study period. Schmitt explains that the learners had little problems regarding spelling even when they did not know the meaning of words. As a result,
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he suggests that spelling might be one of the first acquired aspects of vocabulary

knowledge.

Moreover, learners’ scores for associations indicate a gradual improvement as they become more native-like over time. Regarding the grammatical information aspect, only one participant shows a steady growth in grammatical knowledge which might be due to the fact that this participant spent extra time looking up words in the dictionary.

The development of the word knowledge types does not follow a particular order rather some knowledge aspects seem to develop before others. Moreover, mastery of nouns and verbs seems to come before adjectives and adverbs. Accordingly, the current study highlights the incremental nature of the depth of vocabulary knowledge where learners become more proficient in learning the target language over time.[9]
More heat than light has been generated with respect to the incremental learning of multiple word knowledge aspects through extensive reading. Pagoda and Schmitt provide a good example to capture degrees of not only the knowledge of meaning but also other types of lexical knowledge such as spelling and grammatical characteristics. For this purpose, they conducted a case study of a 27-year old learner of French. The task was to read four graded readers with roughly a total of 30,000 words over a period of a month.
The subject was given 133 words which contained 70 nouns and 63 verbs and was tested before and after the reading treatment. The pre- and post-tests of the learner’s orthography, meaning and grammatical behaviour of words were done in a one-on-one interview similar to the measurement approach carried out by Schmitt. The length of the spelling task was nearly 90 minutes while the administration of meaning and grammar tasks lasted two and a half hours.
The results suggest that extensive reading helped to improve aspects of vocabulary knowledge. There was considerable growth of the spelling part for all nouns and most verbs. That is, the learner at Time 1 scored 98 out of a total 266 spelling points, and higher with 159 out of 266 points at Time 2. In the meaning
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facet, there was an improvement though to a lesser degree for both noun and verb

classes. Specifically, the analysis of the interview revealed that the learner obtained scored 22 out of 266 at Time 1 and 63 out of 266 at Time 2. At the same time, the overall growth in grammatical knowledge was very small. The rate of nouns learned was 18 out of 142 at Time 1 but improved to 60 out of 142 at Time 2. However, the number of verbs learned at Time 1 was only five out of 126 and 26 out of 126 at Time 2. It should be noted that Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests showed significant gains of p<.001 in all types of word knowledge but especially in verb class.
Pigada and Schmitt concluded that extensive reading influenced the learner’s growth in terms of orthography, meaning and grammatical types of lexical knowledge, ―translating to a pick-up rate of about one of every 1.5 words tested‖ . However, they were quick to warn that it was rather difficult to believe that the learner had complete mastery of these three types of word knowledge given that only 6% of the target words were learned. The researchers’ contribution is valuable regarding the incremental development of vocabulary aspects of the learner when encountering new words in reading texts.
We may conclude that Pigada and Schmitt’s study has provided us with insights concerning the gradual process of learning vocabulary. That is, spelling was found to be improved before other facets of lexical knowledge such as meaning and grammatical mastery of words In the same manner, Webb conducted a study exploring the effect of multiple exposures on the depth of vocabulary knowledge. The study used ten tests to measure 121 learners’ vocabulary knowledge aspects such as orthography, associations and the meaning-form link. The participants were Japanese university students of English in their second year; they had been learning English for at least seven years. Prior to administering the tests the learners were divided into four groups and were then required to read a number of pages in a vocabulary reading comprehension task. The number of target words on each page was 1, 3, 7 and 10 for groups 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. The time of the task was controlled, depending on the number of target
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words that occurred in each group, where group 1 had four minutes, group 2 had

12 minutes, group 3 had 28 minutes, and group 4 had 40 minutes. Upon completion of the task, the members of the four groups took a surprise vocabulary test to compare the group scores in order to establish the effect of exposure on the development of vocabulary learning. The results suggest an overall growth in all aspects of vocabulary knowledge. 3It is evident that the growth of vocabulary knowledge is dependent on the number of encounters with the target words in context, which further support provided by the effect of multiple exposures in the incremental process of vocabulary learning. Means and standard deviations of learning conditons on dependent measures encounters 0 encounters 1 encounter 3 encounters 7 encounters 10 encounters.[11]
Note. standard deviations are in standard deviations are in italics, Maximum score . 10, Key. PO . productive knowledge of orthography; RO . receptive knowledge of orthography; RRM . receptive recall of meaning and form; RM . receptive knowledge of meaning and form; PA.productive knowledge of association; RA.receptive knowledge of association; PS.productive knowledge of syntax;RS.receptive www.ccsenet.org/ijel International Journal of English Linguistics Vol. 4, No. 6; 2014 74 knowledge of syntax; PG.productive knowledge of grammar; RG.receptive Knowledge of grammar.