An investigation of different text levels on L2 learners' vocabulary learning rates in an extensive reading program

Abstract

This study investigated whether different text levels would affect L2 learners’ vocabulary learning rates and further examined the correlation between the frequency of word occurrence and learning rates in two different task conditions. A group of 31 year-11 senior high-school students read five level 1 graded readers, a total of 28,796 words, and then moved on to read five level 3 graded readers, 54,676 words, during a 13-week period. One hundred and twenty-five target words were selected from the 10 graded readers, 51 words from level 1, and 74 from level 2 texts. A vocabulary test containing two test methods was administered to students: a 125-item form-meaning matching test and a 42 item contextualized translation test. Twenty-one low-frequency words from each level text were selected to examine the frequency of word occurrence and learning rates. The meaning matching test results demonstrated that the learning rate at level 1 was significantly higher than those of level 3 in the post-test. The attrition rate of level 1 texts was also higher, which led to no significant difference in learning rates in the delayed post-test. A similar learning pattern can be said for the contextualized translation tests. Positive but statistically insignificant correlations between the frequencies of occurrence of 21 target words were found in the post-tests but were stronger in the delayed post-test in both meaning matching and translation tests. Overall, the learning rates for both level 1 and level 3 texts were very high. Four reasons for the higher learning rates were explained. Pedagogical implications are discussed.