Some Implications of Controlling Contextual Constraint: Exploring Word Meaning Inference by Using a Cloze Task

Transcription

1 Some Implications of Controlling Contextual Constraint: Exploring Word Meaning Inference by Using a Cloze Task Abstract 20 vs Keywords: Lexical Inference, Contextual Constraint, Cloze Task 1. Introduction Second language (L2) learners are required to have enough vocabulary knowledge for practical communication. In Japanese school education, students have to learn more than 3000 words for six years to develop their communication abilities (Ministry of Education, Culture,

2 Sports, Science & Technology, 2009). In order to acquire vocabulary knowledge, strategies for vocabulary learning are divided into two types (e.g., Bolger, Balass, Landen, & Perfetti, 2008; Chen & Truscott, 2010; Nation, 2013; Paribakht & Wesche, 1999; Wesche & Paribakht, 2009): (a) intentional vocabulary learning, and (b) incidental vocabulary learning. However, it is very difficult for L2 learners to learn the meaning of each new words intentionally like learning word pairs (e.g., Nation, 2013). To reduce the learning burden of intentional vocabulary learning, effective and efficient incidental vocabulary learning methods are needed for Japanese EFL learners. Many previous studies have revealed some advantages of incidental vocabulary learning. Nation (2013) suggested that the most useful vocabulary strategy is inferring the meanings of unknown words from contextual information. To identify the appropriate meaning of an unknown word in context, the readers have to find useful cues from contextual information surrounding the unknown word. It is easy for readers to guess the meaning of an unknown word in strongly constraining sentence (i.e., a sentence which strongly constrains a meaning of the target word) because the sentences give the readers much helpful contextual information to infer a meaning of the unknown word (e.g., Frishkoff, Perfetti, & Collins-Thompson, 2011). Although the importance of contextual constraint in the field of vocabulary learning has already been revealed in previous studies, most studies have not shown how to control the strength of contextual constraint. When teachers make a sentence controlling contextual constraint, however, some criteria to control the strength of contextual constraints are not always useful to make controlled sentences (see Chapter 2 for more details). For example, if a teacher judges that a certain sentence is a

3 strongly constraining sentence, it is necessarily for students easy to guess the meaning of the target word for students. In other words, teachers need to be aware of some of the implications of make controlled contextual constraint in order to make more accurate and useful controlled constraining sentences for vocabulary learning in classroom English. Therefore, the present study aims to report some implications of controlling the strength of contextual constraint based on the results of the success rates and answers of a cloze test. 2. Guessing Word Meaning From Context Clues Most L2 readers encounter unfamiliar words, and they sometimes ignore many of these words (e.g., Paribakht & Wesche, 1999). However, if the unfamiliar words were important in order to understand the context, and if the readers could infer the meaning of these words, the readers attempted to identify the meaning of these unfamiliar words in a given context (e.g., Nation, 2013). This is called lexical inferencing, which is one of the tools available to the readers encountering unknown words. Previous studies have revealed some factors which influence successful lexical inferencing: (a) contextual cues are helpful for readers, (b) contextual cues are familiar to readers, (c) cues are located in the word itself or the immediate context, (d) the readers can recognize the cues surrounding the unknown words in context, (e) L2 proficiency is high enough to accurately guess the meaning of the word and comprehend the context, and (f) the readers have background knowledge or topic familiarity relevant to details in the context. These factors were divided into two types, contextual factors from (a) to (d), and learner factors (e) and (f). Wesche and Paribakht (2009) reported that contextual cues

4 were categorized into three types, word, sentence, and discourse (see Table 1). Table 1 Knowledge Sources Use in L2 Lexical Inferencing Word Knowledge Sentence Knowledge Discourse Knowledge Word Association Word Collocation Word Morphology Word Form Sentence Meaning Sentence Grammar Punctuation Discourse Meaning Formal Schemata Association of the target word with another familiar word or a network of words. Knowledge of words that frequently occur with the target word. Morphological analysis like grammatical inflections, stem and affixes. Knowledge of formal (orthographic or phonetic) similarity. The meaning of part or all of the sentence containing the target word. Knowledge of syntactic properties of the target word. Knowledge of rules of punctuation and their significance. The perceived general meaning of the text surrounding the target word. Knowledge of the macro stru cture of the text, text types and discourse patterns and organization. Text Style & Register Knowledge of stylistic and register variations in word choice. As mentioned above, successful lexical inferencing involves many factors. The most important among them is contextual information which has a great influence on lexical inferencing as reviewed in Table 1. However, when the teachers or researchers judge the strength of contextual constraint, the criteria for deciding the strength of contextual constraint are still ambiguous. Griffin and Bock (1998) defined the weakly constraining sentences as semantically uninformative and providing no meaningful context; whereas, strongly constraining sentences were designed to have predictable words in those contexts. In order to make more accurate and useful controlled constraining sentences, some implications of controlling the strength of contextual constraint need to be defined. Therefore, the current study aims to explore some implications of controlling the strength of contextual

5 constraint based on the results of the success rates and answers of a cloze test. 3. Method A total of 20 Japanese graduate students participated in this study. They are master s students in education, and their majors were not biased toward a particular academic field. They have received a formal English language education for eight or more years. On the basis of Griffin and Bock (1998), the weakly constraining sentences were designed to be semantically uninformative and provide no meaningful context. On the other hand, the strongly constraining sentences were designed to have predictable words in those contexts. In order to construct weakly and strongly constraining sentence pairs, a total of 25 target words were selected based on the previous studies (Elston-Güttler & Friederici, 2005; Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008). After selecting 25 target words, the contextual sentences were selected and revised with reference to several monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and the researcher formed pairs of one strongly and one weakly constraining sentence for each target word based on the criteria of the study of Griffin and Bock. A total of 25 sentences constructed to be weakly and strongly constraining sentence pairs were prepared, therefore a total of 50 target sentences were used in this cloze task. These sentences were composed with as many high frequency words as possible to ensure their comprehensibility for the participants, ranging from levels 1-3 based on the basic words list (JACET, 2003). The target word in contextual sentences was replaced by a blank space (e.g., in the case of the target word blood: According to the figure of

6 family tree, my cousin and I are related by ). The cloze task was conducted individually in order to avoid discussion among the participants. They performed the task with paper and they were asked to write as many appropriate words as they could think of (i.e., cloze response) in Japanese or English. The participants were asked to fill in the blanks. When they finished the task, they returned the paper to the researcher. The participants were asked to mark the unknown words. They were permitted to use their own dictionaries if they wanted to know the unknown words. There was no time limit for the task. The correct answers in this task were established as only the meanings of the target words (e.g., If the cloze sentence is According to the figure of family tree, my cousin and I are related by, the answer is blood or the synonym of blood like family background, descent or lineage ). At the beginning of the analysis, the ratings scores were analyzed with a two-tailed t test to compare the difference between the guessability rates in the sentence pairs of the strongly and weakly constraining sentences. Moreover, in order to verify the difference between the sentence pairs of each target word, a two-tailed t test was also conducted for each target word. To conduct qualitative analysis, the average success rates of each sentence pair were presented. To judge which sentences satisfy the condition of strongly or weakly constraining sentences, these criteria were used on the basis of previous studies: (a) the success rate for the most common completion of the strongly constraining sentences was greater than 70%, and (b) the success rate for the most common completion of the weakly constraining sentences was less than 30%

7 (e.g., Griffin & Bock, 1998). Based on these criteria, the sentences which did not complete the requirements were analyzed qualitatively from two points of view: (a) the reasons why the success rates did not fulfill the criteria, and (b) the way to revise the sentences. 4. Results and Discussion 4.1 Success Rates of Sentence Pairs The purpose of the cloze task was to examine the cloze responsibility in the contexts. The overall results are shown in Table 2. Table 2 The Rates of Guessability of the Meaning in the Sentence Pairs Contextual sentences M SD Max Min 95%CI Strong constraint [0.46, 0.69] Weak constraint [0.07, 0.22] Note. CI refers to confidence interval. The results of the two-tailed t test showed a significant difference between the sentence pairs of strongly and weakly constraining sentences, t(24) = 7.59, p <.001, d = 1.82, Mdiff = 0.42, 95%CI [0.30, 0.53]. That is, the results indicated that there are significant differences of the guessability of the meanings of the target words between strongly and weakly constraining sentences. Furthermore, the two-tailed t test was also conducted for each target words sentence pairs in order to verify the difference between the sentence pairs of each target word. The results in Table 3 indicated that some sentences have no differences between the sentence pairs of the strongly and weakly constraining sentences (i.e., the target words

8 appeal, blood, game, lamb, and price). It is also revealed that the success rates of certain sentence pairs were reversed (two target words cloud and tracks). The next sections will conduct qualitative analysis on these results. Table 3 The Results of the Success Rates and Two-tailed t Test Target words t (19) p SD Strong constrain Weak constraint 1 appeal blood body ** bomb ** business ** cause * chicken * cloud * column ** cover ** debt * examination * game home ** lamb limit ** medicine ** office * plant * position * price sentence ** title * tracks ** umbrella * Note. *p <.05, ** p <.01.

9 4.2 The Problems and Solutions of Making Contextual Constraint The results of success rates in Table 2 indicated that some sentences did not satisfy the criteria of contextual constraining sentences. The sentences were presented in Table 4. Table 4 The Sentences Did Not Satisfy the Criterion of Contextual Constraining Sentences Target Word Sentence Type SR appeal For poor children in the developing countries, the NPO made a strong appeal. S 0.00* blood Even if Kamon is common in noble families, it doesn t mean they have S 0.05* common blood. body The lady cried out when she saw the man s headless body. S 0.65 bomb With original ideas, Steve Jobs always earned a bomb. S 0.65 cause This book tells us that the soldiers fought for a great cause. W 0.35 chicken In the farm, many eggs developed into chickens. S 0.50* cloud The sport cars drove in front of the audience, raising a dust cloud. S 0.25* cloud Yesterday, in the most areas of China, the strong wind raised the cloud. W 0.55* debt Since your father gave me so much money, I feel a great debt. S 0.30* examination We ve decided to accept their offer after careful examination. S 0.60 game Last week, we bought some tools used to catch game. W 0.55* home The old man lived in a nursing home. S 0.65 lamb What would you like for dinner, beef, pork or lamb? S 0.05* medicine In the future, cancer will be treated by modern medicine. S 0.60 office The position of the company s president is the most important office. S 0.45* plant To produce more cars, the company established a new plant. S 0.20* position The artist asked the model to change her position. S 0.65 position Tom and Cathy sit in an uncomfortable position. W 0.40 title Since the president retired from the company, he felt a weight has S 0.65 been lifted from his shoulders, and he was removed from his title. tracks On the snow, the police officer who followed the thief found his tracks. S 0.65 umbrella These countries have developed under the U.S. military umbrella. S 0.50* Note. * = the number ± average.10 over. SR = Success rates. S = Strongly constraining sentence. W = Weakly constraining sentence.

10 From these results, the length of a sentence does not affect the success rates. Even if the researcher judged certain sentences to be strongly constraining sentences, the success rate was sometimes low (e.g., the target words were appeal, blood, chicken, cloud, debt, lamb, office, plant, and umbrella). The reverse results were also observed in weakly constraining sentences (e.g., the target words cloud and game). The following especially focuses on the sentences which did not satisfy the criteria yet yielded unexpected results and analyses qualitatively the reasons why they did not fulfill the conditions. Wesche and Paribakht (2009) classified knowledge source use of lexical inference as: (a) word knowledge, (b) sentence knowledge, and (c) discourse knowledge. Based on this study, some failure sentences were divided into the two following types: (a) Word collocation Because this study placed the plank space in the controlled cloze sentences at the end of each sentence, the strongly and weakly constraining sentences using cloud were affected by the awkwardness of the word collocation. Frantzen (2003) indicated that unclear and unnatural contexts cause L2 readers difficulty guessing unknown words. Wesche and Paribakht (2009) also suggested that readers sometimes lack the ability to guess the accurate meaning of unknown words. The native speaker who checked the target sentences of this research pointed out the strangeness of the target sentence pairs using cloud and, in fact, the current success rates of both sentence were low. (b) Word association This effect was especially observed in the target sentences

11 using chicken. In the target sentence, chicken was used to mean chick, not a bird. These meanings were related as paradigmatic association, like the relation of animal and dog. It is a little hard for readers to guess the meaning of chick, because it could be bird in this sentence. Therefore, word association like paradigmatic association sometimes causes failure in the guessing expected meaning in the target sentences. (c) Prejudice Another effect in this study is considered to be as prejudice, because the researcher had already read the cloze sentences filled in the target blanks. For example, when the researcher read the sentence using appeal For poor children in the developing countries, the NPO made a strong appeal, she thought the meaning of appeal (in this case, request) was enough to guess. However, the participants answered using words like policy, system, guide, support, fund, house or school. Because of this researchers prejudice, it is considered that the success rates of both of these strongly and weakly constraining sentences were quite low. Based on these consideration, this study concludes that, in addition to the linguistic factors discussed in previous studies (e.g., Wesche & Paribakht, 2009), they need to be reminded of the cause of prejudice when teachers judge or make controlling contextual constraint. 5. Conclusion The current study revealed that some implications of controlling the strength of contextual constraint. The overall results suggested that the researcher could not control the strength of contextual

12 constraint in a way they expected. From a qualitative analysis of unexpected sentences, prejudice is important factor to control the strength of contextual constraint, in addition to linguistic factors like word association and word collocation. Therefore, this study suggests that linguistic factors and prejudice need to be considered when the teachers use controlled contextual constraint in classroom English, apart from other criteria to make controlling contextual constraint (e.g., Griffin & Block, 1998). These findings are very suggestive, but certain limitations should be taken into account. First, this study used a relatively small number of participants, so a larger number of participants is required in order to generalize this conclusion. In addition, collecting more data of students proficiency levels may give more clear findings in the field of guessing unknown words in context because L2 proficiency affect the ability to guess successful lexical inferencing (e.g., Nation, 2013; Wesche & Paribakht, 2009). As a pedagogical implication, it is important to show the controlled contextual constraint in advance to a third party. Although linguistic factors like word association or word collocation can be examined by themselves, prejudice can only be inspected by a third person. If teachers make controlled contextual context with their own prejudices, it is assumed that the guessability of the context will differ between the teachers and students. Therefore, when teachers get students to guess an unknown word meaning in context, these steps are needed as follows: (1) the teachers should ask a third party to infer or check the controlled constraining sentence or text in advance (i.e., pilot test), (2) the teachers should revise the sentence based on the results of a pilot test, and (3) the teacher should present the revised

13 sentence to the students and ask them to infer the unknown word meaning from the controlled constraining sentence. References Bolger, D. J., Balass, M., Landen, E., & Perfetti, C. A. (2008). Context variation and definitions in learning the meanings of words: An instance-based learning approach. Discourse Processes, 45, Chen, C., & Truscott, J. (2010). The effects of repetition and L1 lexicalization on incidental vocabulary acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 31, Elston-Güttler, K. E., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). Native and L2 processing of homonyms in sentential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, Frantzen, D. (2003). Factors affecting how second language Spanish students derive meaning from context. The Modern Language Journal, 87, Frishkoff, G. A., Perfetti, C. A., & Collins-Thompson, K. (2011). Predicting robust vocabulary growth from measures of incremental learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15, Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (1998). Constraint, word frequency, and the relationship between lexical processing levels in spoken word production. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, JACET. (2003). JACET list of 8000 basic words. Tokyo: JACET. Klepousniotou, E., Titone, D., & Romero, C. (2008). Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,

14 and Cognition, 34, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology. (2009). Koutou-gakkou gakushushidou youryou kaisetsu gaikokugo-hen eigo-hen. [Comments of the course of study for high school foreign languages]. Tokyo: Kairyudou. Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning vocabulary in another language. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Paribakht, T. S., & Wesche, M. B. (1999). Reading and incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition: An introspective study of lexical inferencing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, Wesche, M. B., & Paribakht, T. S. (2009). Lexical inferencing in a first and second language: Cross-linguistic dimensions. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Acknowledgement I wish to express a debt of gratitude to Professor Hiroshi Ota, who gave me very useful comments and suggestions during the process of completing my paper. I also would like to express my great thanks to Mr. Joel Simkin and Mr. Richard Bales, who are English teachers in Tokyo Kasei University. They kindly and carefully checked and edited the grammar and style of the English in this paper.