Words Analysis Skills: The Role of Age, French Proficiency and Exposure
Birgit Harley and Gladys Jean
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Vocabulary knowledge is known to be crucially important for reading and for dealing with academic content in a second language. Yet, for classroom learners, mastering enough vocabulary to read with understanding and enjoyment does not come easily. One way of gaining access to many new words in the second language is to use word analysis skills. In this research, our goal is to assess the French word analysis skills of students in early and late immersion and core French programs, in order to provide useful diagnostic information for teachers and a solid basis for the development of relevant classroom materials.
Participants
To permit analysis of vocabulary skills across grades and programs, six groups of students in a school board in southern Ontario took part in the study, for a total of 246 participants altogether. Three of the groups were in an early French immersion program that had begun in Kindergarten: one group in grade 6, a second group in grade 8, and a third group in grade 10. Two further groups of students were in grades 8 and 10 of a late immersion French program which had begun in grade 7, and a final group was in a core French program at the grade 10 level.
The Tests
Two pencil-and-paper tests were developed for the study. The first is a four-part French Vocabulary Skills Test, designed to probe several aspects of students word analysis skills in French: (1) understanding of the meaning of a number of affixes in French; (2) the ability to provide other words in the same family as a stimulus word; (3) the ability to determine a words part of speech from its suffix; and (4) skill in converting L2 English words into their cognate form in French (i.e., in instances where reliable correspondence "rules" exist for the suffixes involved). The second test is designed to measure vocabulary knowledge in French. Based on research originally carried out by Meara (1994), this self-report French Vocabulary Recognition Test consists of a list of 100 possible words in French, some of which (about 35%) are not real words. The students task is to cross out any words on the list that they do not know well enough to say what they mean.
Findings and Interpretation
Figure 1 presents the mean scores (in percentages) of each group of students on the four parts of the vocabulary skills test. (The groups are ordered according to the amount of exposure to French, with the least exposure, i.e. core French, at the top of the figure.) It appears from Figure 1 that within each of the six program groups, the highest scores are consistently on Part 1 designed to assess understanding of French affixes, and the lowest scores are consistently on Part 4 which calls for the production of cognates in French. A general tendency is also evident in early immersion for the main increase on all parts of the test to occur between grades 6 and 8, and for this increase to be closely matched by the rise in late immersion French scores from grade 8 to 10. Also apparent from Figure 1 is that on all four parts of the vocabulary skills test, the scores of both early and late immersion French students by grade 10 are roughly twice as high as those of grade 10 core French students who have had much less exposure to French.
Within-program comparisons. Within both early and late immersion, there are signs, as would be expected, of progress across grades in vocabulary skills. The mean scores of the grade 8 early immersion students are significantly higher than those of the grade 6 students on all four parts of the test, but between grades 8 and 10 in early immersion the differences in means, though they tend to favour the grade 10 early immersion students, are not statistically significant. Within the late immersion French program, the grade 10 students mean scores on the four parts of the test are significantly higher than those of the grade 8 students
Within-grade comparisons. Comparisons across programs within the same grade level provide an indication of the effects of different amounts of classroom exposure to French on the development of vocabulary skills. The mean scores of the grade 8 early immersion students on all parts of the vocabulary skills test (Figure 1) are statistically significantly higher than those of the grade 8 late immersion French students with less overall exposure to French. At grade 10, the mean scores of early immersion, late immersion, and core French students can all be compared: grade 10 early and late immersion French students mean scores on the four parts of the test are no longer significantly different from one another despite the greater prior exposure to French of the early immersion students. However, grade 10 core French students, with much less past exposure to French, score significantly lower than both grade 10 immersion groups.
Vocabulary knowledge. Turning now to the French Vocabulary Recognition Test that the six groups of students also completed, the group means on this test are shown in Figure 2. It indicates a general pattern within each immersion program of increasing scores at higher grades. These within-program differences across grades are in each case statistically significant. When grade level is held constant, early immersion students with more exposure to French perform better on the vocabulary recognition test than their peers in late immersion at grades 8 and 10, and the grade 10 late immersion students in turn perform better than core French students at the same grade level. Finally, concerning the relationship between French vocabulary knowledge and word analysis skills, a correlation analysis was performed on the two set of scores and it was found that the two tests were strongly correlated (Pearson corr. = .88, p < .01).
In general, the findings of this study indicate that amount of classroom exposure to the second language certainly has a bearing on the development of word analysis skills in that language, but that the relationship is not straightforward. We find the grade 10 core French students lagging behind the early and late immersion French groups in their French vocabulary skills, as would be expected given the greater prior exposure of the early and late immersion French students to the second language. However, the grade 10 core French students did not differ from grade 6 immersion students on Parts 2 and 4 of the vocabulary skills test (i.e., on the parts measuring the ability to produce words in the same family as a given French word and the ability to apply appropriate conversion rules in translating cognate words from English into French). This is an important indication that relative maturity counts in the core French students favour with respect to such skills, overriding to some extent the disadvantage of much less overall exposure.
An advantage for relative cognitive maturity is also indicated in a number of the comparisons between early and late immersion French students. Despite their greater overall exposure to French, for example, the grade 6 early immersion students are outperformed by the grade 10 late immersion students on all parts of the vocabulary skills test. Moreover, by grade 10 the late immersion students appear to have substantially caught up with the grade 10 early immersion group, indicating more rapid progress in word analysis skills for the late immersion students even though their intensive exposure to French began much more recently in grade 7.
The findings in this study are in line with earlier first and second language research showing that the development of word analysis skills is positively associated with the maturity of the learner (Hancin-Bhatt & Nagy, 1994; Nagy, Diakidoy, & Anderson, 1993; Tyler & Nagy, 1989, 1990). Given the relationship of this type of awareness to academic progress in the second language, we need to ask whether more focused instruction designed to enhance word analysis skills would be useful in the French-as-a-second-language classroom, and if so, when it should be introduced.
By grade 8 in early immersion and grade 10 in late immersion French, students are achieving average scores equivalent to 75% of the maximum on Part 1 of the vocabulary skills test. The skill assessed in this part of the test (understanding of the meaning of various affixes) no doubt serves them well in their reading of texts in French. The fact, however, that early immersion students progress in word analysis skills appears to slow down between grades 8 and 10, without reaching a ceiling on any part of vocabulary skills test, and allowing the late immersion French students to catch up to a large extent, suggests that there may be a useful role for focused instruction on all aspects of vocabulary skills around the grade 8 level. In particular, the value of an emphasis on correspondences between English and French needs to be assessed given the low scores on Part 4 of the French Vocabulary Skills Test.
In sum, the findings of this study lead to the conclusion that the merits of introducing focused instruction on word analysis skills in French should be investigated in all three types of programs sampled here. This instruction would need to be meaningfully integrated with substantive content rather than restricted to isolated exercises if students are to appreciate the value of such skills for French reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition and use.
References
Hancin-Bhatt, B., & Nagy, W. (1994). Lexical transfer and second language morphological development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 15, 289-310.
Meara, P. (1994). LLEX: Lingua vocabulary tests v. 1.4. Swansea: Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Wales.
Nagy, W. E., Diakidoy, I.-A., & Anderson, R. C. (1993). The acquisition of morphology: Learning the contribution of suffixes to the meanings of derivatives. Journal of Reading Behavior, 25, 155-170.
Tyler, A., & Nagy, W. (1989). The acquisition of English derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 649-667.
Tyler, A., & Nagy, W. (1990). Use of derivational morphology during reading. Cognition, 36, 17-34.
Acknowledgements
The study described in this report was made possible by a research grant to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to Doug Hart for carrying out the statistical analyses and to the teachers and school board personnel who welcomed us into their classes. Special thanks go to the students who obligingly wrote our tests.
About the Authors
Birgit Harley, a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE/UT, has conducted a number of detailed studies of immersion students' French language development.
Gladys Jean (MA in second language education from OISE/UT) is doing research on vocabulary acquisition. She is a former FSL teacher and an author of textbooks.