Since the main purpose of this research is to describe the impact of the self-Collection -Strategy in enhancing self-directed English vocabulary learning in EFL students, this literature review examine the main constructs considered for this study, as well as the research studies carried out related to each one of them.
The constructs considered are Vocabulary, Vocabulary Acquisition, Vocabulary Teaching, Self-directed learning, Self-directed Vocabulary Learning (SDVL); vocabulary learning strategies (VLS); Vocabulary Self-Collection strategy (VSS); it includes a review of some research reports about the use of self-Collection -Strategy for learning vocabulary and some more have done regarding self-directed vocabulary development; why this strategy was selected, teachers and students´ roles; all above focus on what this research imply.
Vocabulary
According to Jing Wu (2013) "Vocabulary usually represents one of the biggest challenges in FL learning" (18) but the term has a variety of meanings, for example, Oxford Dictionary (1989) defines vocabulary as the total number of words that make up a language. Likewise, in the Longman dictionary (1995), vocabulary is defined as all the words that someone knows, learns or uses. Hatch and Brown (1995) consider "vocabulary" as a list or set of words for a particular language that an individual speaker of a language might use. Some teachers use the term to mean sight-word vocabularies, referring to students’ instant recognition of words in print; other refer to words students understand as their meaning vocabularies or students’ understanding of words that they hear in the spoken language.
Vocabularies include conceptual awareness of words that goes beyond a simple dictionary meaning. Students’ vocabulary knowledge is a building process that occurs over time as they make connections to other words; learn synonyms and antonyms of the word; use the word accurately within the context of the sentence (Snow, Griffin, & Burns, 2005).
Within this research, the term vocabulary was used to refer to words but not merely slot-fillers which simply fill in the pre-assigned function slots determined by structures of language. Rather, they are building blocks of a successful communication, in Wallance (1982) words "knowing a word in a target language is to recognize it in its spoken and written forms, to relate it appropriately with other concepts, to use it in an appropriate grammatical way, to spell it correctly and to be aware of its connection" (127).
Vocabulary Acquisition
Vocabulary has been the object of large amount of research study in recent times, particularly on issues related to acquisition and learning, it is one of the main components in Teaching English as a Foreign Language since English language learners need a larger exposure to the language in which vocabulary knowledge is a key indicator of overall language ability and significantly relevant to the development of all language learning skills.
Vocabulary acquisition is strongly correlated with reading comprehension (Anderson & Freebody 1981; Nation 1990, 2001, 2006; Read 1997, 2000) and quality writing (Astika 1993; Laufer 1994; Laufer & Nation 1995;; Lee & Muncie 2006). Without a large vocabulary base and precise vocabulary knowledge, learners are most likely to be in trouble when they intend to create a smooth communication.
There is a lot of research related to vocabulary acquisition in EFL field, for instance, Sánchez Luján study (2013) describes the procedures and results of a research project on how implementing a self-monitoring strategy influences students' vocabulary acquisition and self-efficacy in a group of adolescent, English A1 learners from a state school.
In the study data was gathered by the use of journal logs, a checklist, oral and written interviews. The results show that "the strategy was beneficial and provided significant results since the students initiated a process of reflection about the role they should take in vocabulary learning as well as the implications regarding the strengthening of their self-efficacy". (p. 159)
Since the results on that study were positive and significant, the researcher decided to look for a different strategy to encourage students’ vocabulary acquisition and contribute to empower vocabulary learning.
After brainstorming a lot of ideas, this study focused on provide a better understanding of whether the use of self-Collection -Strategy influences the self-directed vocabulary improvement of learners.
Vocabulary Teaching
According to McCarthy (1990) and Thornbury (2004), there are many ways in which vocabulary can be formally presented in the classroom. The way and the quantity of words to be offered depends on the level of the learners, the difficulty of the items, their "teachability" and whether the items are being learned for production or for recognition only.
Teaching new words in the EFL classroom is a challenge task for most of teachers. "Teachers are not only responsible for their own use of language; they also feel constrained to focus on vocabulary study so that our learners are exposed to rich, expressive language" (Allen, 1999, p.1). It is easy to assume that by teaching vocabulary in the classroom, or even by the simple exposure to the language, learners will learn and remember the words taught.
Hence, this study was aimed on French (1983) words when summarize in two ideas the most important aspects to keep in mind when teaching vocabulary. Firstly people are best able to learn a word when they feel a personal need from that word and secondly teachers can create in students’ minds the feeling that certain English words are needed. Therefore, it is essential for teachers to assist the students in building their own vocabulary through the learning of language strategies that suit them best for learning words, in this way they can gain independence and become responsible for their own learning, enhancing their vocabulary development.
Self-directed Learning
Knowles (1975) defines SDL as a process in which individuals take an active role and initiative in identifying their learning needs, setting learning goals, recognizing available resources for learning, selecting and applying appropriate learning strategies, and assessing learning outcomes.
Garrison (1997) suggests a bi-dimensional model of SDL in which he states that SDL is accomplished when the learner use the two dimensions: self-management, it is related to how learners manage the learning resources and the achievement of their learning goals; self-monitoring refers to the monitoring of learners’ collection of learning strategies and motivation, which is related to the students’ engagement level in reaching a goal. It implies that the teacher accept the responsibility to help students acquire discipline-specific knowledge and develop a set of SDL competencies to facilitate student learning by providing reinforcement, negotiating an agreement for evaluation criteria, goals and strategies, with learners.
The teacher act as a manager of the learning experience instead of a knowledge provider, helping learners locate resources, and creating an atmosphere of openness and trust to promote better performance in self-directed vocabulary learning (Lowry, 1989).
Therefore, it is important for teachers to instruct learners on how to become more autonomous in their process of learning. It is commonly recognized in today’s world that autonomous and self-regulated learners will be at an advantage in continuing to learn and adjust throughout their lives as technology and information develop rapidly and continuously. To foster learner autonomy, then, is a profitable practice, yet teachers are skeptical about teaching learners to become more autonomous, especially at a young age. Indeed, Cameron (2001) points out that teachers tend to underestimate the potential for self-regulation in young learners, from this point of view in this research, it was crucial for the researcher to reformulate the way in which children were taught in order to incorporate practices that lead to autonomy development, providing learners with the necessary tools to become more independent and take charge of their own learning.
Self-directed Vocabulary Learning (SDVL)
Most of students often complain about their vocabulary learning with such remarks as "anxiety". "dullness", "ineffectiveness" and even "painfulness" .Students disliked looking up assigned words in the glossary or dictionary and writing down definitions to memorize, teachers’ explanation of vocabulary in class is generally limited to a particular context only for the purpose of reading comprehension.
Besides, the time in class is unavoidably limited and so teachers are often unable to focus on vocabulary in more depth. As a result, a large amount of remaining work on vocabulary learning is left to students’ out-of-class time.
According to a study on Chinese college students’ SDVL: Enhancing self-directed Vocabulary Learning: Research and Practice (Wu, 2011), around 68% of the students declared that the time they spent on vocabulary learning out of class was more than double that spent in class.
Successively, the strict requirements are laid on learner autonomy, unfortunately in most of Colombian schools students depend too much on their teachers and are used to being passive recipients so that they seriously lack autonomy. The majority of them involve commonly in rote memorization with word lists and mechanical drills during their SDVL. That is, they seldom think of or utilize more useful and appropriate vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) due to the lack of strategy knowledge, resources and tools.
With only automatic repetitions, the depth of processing and elaboration of words are obviously limited at different stages of vocabulary learning, long-term word retention is hard to achieve, to say nothing of good word transfer. This way of learning vocabulary in self-direction without accurate strategies is most likely to result in a decrease of learning interest, motivation and efficiency.
From this view, this research defined SDVL as an approach aimed to help individuals to be active participants in their own learning process; in which educators should promote a self-directed view of learning by instructing students on self-regulation processes and, on strategies that favor students’ awareness and commitment to their learning process, for this case the use of self-collection strategy.
It emphasized in learner‘s innate self-directed ability to select appropriate strategies to facilitate their own learning process. It implies an individual‘s commitment control to achieve learning goals.
Although there are numerous works on vocabulary knowledge and learning (Yan 2006; Jiao 2007; Meng 2007) and some more on enhance Self-directed English vocabulary learning, many researchers have claimed the need to develop student´s interest in new words is closed related to reading strategies; (Hui Deng &Yinjuan Shao 2011), conclude that students are self-directed and well automate in their vocabulary learning with the affordance of different strategies.
However, few studies make a thorough investigation of the enhancement of SDVL from a comprehensive aspect like in this case. The idea in carry out this research was to foster student development of self-directed vocabulary learning from the need to develop students’ curiosity on new and interesting words with the implementation of the self-collection strategy and consequently promote word consciousness as one of its critical components for teaching vocabulary.
Vocabulary learning strategies
Bearing in mind that learning vocabulary is essential for all language learners and facing new age challenges for education in which learning independently outside the classroom is a key to acquiring new words, vocabulary learning strategies become immensely valuable.
Vocabulary strategies are needed to further ensure that the vocabulary learning process continues after classes, as Nation (2008) emphasizes "learners’ jobs are far more important than the teachers’ in learning vocabulary" The fact that learners have a greater responsibility in learning words at home and by themselves can be understood when one considers the limited amount of time that teachers can expend in class for learning and practicing new words, for this reason learners should try and "make the most of opportunities to use the language, to deliberately learn vocabulary" and "to eventually take on responsibility for their own vocabulary learning" (6-7).
But becoming an independent learner is not easy for everyone. According to a study (Meng 2007), some of the strategies need to be initiated and explicitly instructed, students need to be prepared to learn independently outside class but teachers has to provide the students with accurate tools that they can use; they need to have the knowledge about the mechanisms (processes, strategies) used in order to learn vocabulary as well as steps or actions required to find out the meaning of unknown words, to retain them in long-term memory, to recall them at will, to discover and consolidate their meaning more effectively and to use them in oral or written mode in short, they need to know how to use vocabulary learning strategies independently, Rubin (1987).
One way through which vocabulary learning can be facilitated is by the use of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) hence, this study outlines VLSs as a way to empower language learners to be more self-directed, regulated, and autonomous and as a method to help language learners to discover and consolidate the meaning of the words more effectively. This is why this research focused on the possibility for teachers to instruct students in self-collection strategy and support them in becoming more efficient and independent learners and promote a lively interest in words in a learning community that enjoys playing with words, focus on strategic resources of their own so that they can cope with the plethora of words they must learn whether at home or in class, constructs on individual interests as well as curriculum needs, and emphasizes self-efficacy in word learning.
Classification of vocabulary learning strategies. Although vocabulary learning strategies is a relatively new area of study, several classifications of vocabulary learning strategies have been proposed (Bialystok, 1981; Rubin, 1987; Ahmed, 1989; O'Malley and Chamot, 1990;Oxford,1990; Sanaoui, 1995; Gu and Johnson, 1996;Schmitt , 1997; Lin, 2001). However, this project was focused on Nation´s (2001) taxonomy of strategies, which is organized around three broad categories, where aspects of vocabulary knowledge have been separated from sources of vocabulary knowledge and learning processes.
Taking into account Nation (2001) Taxonomy of Vocabulary Learning Strategies, the researcher decided to include self-collection strategy in the general strategy category: planning: choosing what to focus on and when to focus on it, specifically in choosing words.
This type of strategy allows the teachers to motivate the students to learn new words by promoting a "long term acquisition and development of the vocabulary with the goal of integrating new content words into students’ working vocabularies. (Rudell, 2005:166)
With an expanding curiosity in words, it is important to foster students´ autonomy by helping them to become motivated to learn new words on their own.
Vocabulary Self-Collection strategy (VSS)
Lots of research has argued that Vocabulary self-collection is a strategy that can help the students to identify clue terms in a text or passage. For instance, Martin (2002) claims that: "The Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS) is an interactive-learning instructional strategy that promotes word consciousness, as students are actively engaged in identifying important words from their reading to share with members of their class." (88)
For this research the VSS was recognized as an approach in which learners should discover and construct new word knowledge dynamically in an authentic environment based upon their existing mental lexicon and working by themselves. It was an interesting scheme that helped English teachers trigger a self-direction sense on their students as well as the increase of their motivation to attempt to find an effective way for the students to learn vocabulary independently as well as successfully.
According to Haggard, 1986, this strategy helps students increase their vocabulary so that they can become better readers, promotes the long-term acquisition of language in an academic setting and helps students, to be able to learn a few key terms in depth rather than knowing many more superficially. It implicates having students choose the words they want to learn, chat about their rationale for selecting words, and agree upon words for a classroom collection.
Why Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy? Theoretically, vocabulary self-collection strategy can be used to improve the students’ achievement of vocabulary. (Duffelmeyer, 1977; Johnson, Toms-Bronowski, and Pittelman, 1981). It assumes that learners should discover and construct new word knowledge actively in an authentic environment based upon their existing mental lexicon, working in a self-directed way.
Self-selection of vocabulary enhances students’ motivation and achievement in learning new words. Therefore, this study included two features which differ from traditional instruction: use of student-generated not preselected word lists, and emphasized on student experience and world knowledge. Students' rationale for selecting certain words adds to their understanding of the process for learning them. For this reason, in the development of this project the participants built their vocabulary knowledge through active participation in word discussions among the whole class.
The findings were useful as a valuable input or feedback increasing the effectiveness of the students’ vocabulary achievement and accordingly focus on some of the major benefits of using VSS, that students engage in their own learning, discover how to recognize unfamiliar or interesting words from their readings, develop their vocabularies, and become word conscious.
As seen from above, the finding of this study indicated information and strong evidences in order to support the importance of using vocabulary self-collection strategy in developing self-directed vocabulary learning.
State of the art
This study was carried out with one group of students who had never made a conscious use of self-collection strategy and that were not motivated to use it before, which was evident in the classes and reported in the questionnaire about the use of strategies given at the beginning of the implementations. Having this fact in mind, the teacher’s attitude and contribution to the development of this strategy in students is of outmost importance.
One of the most interesting examples in which the strategy was used successfully is related to a research study conducted by Harmon and Hedrick (2005), they claimed that teachers must "encourage independent learning by allowing students to self-select terms to be studied" (35).
The participants of the study were 94 eighth graders and six adult readers from middle and high school. In the outcomes of the study, the authors presented important principles that focus on how to improve vocabulary instruction for struggling middle and high school students. This study researched students' decision-making as they self-selected important words from expository texts. Data sources involved students' written responses containing their word selections and reasons for selecting words from eight informational passages, student interviews, and word selections of adult readers. They studied the students' reasons for their word selections and compared their words with those selected by adult readers in the outcomes the authors mention that students of varying reading abilities can self-select important words in an expository passage.
This specific study drove to the conclusion that in order to help our students to acquire the learning strategies is important to work with them in a very dynamic, inductive, and cooperative way as to engage them in the process. After analyze the results of that research, the researcher in this project resolved to emphasize on how to improve not only vocabulary instruction but self-directed vocabulary learning.
Likewise, Ruddell & Shearer (2011) research study "Teaching Vocabulary through Vocabulary self-collection Strategy" studied the use of VSS with middle school students in academic year 2010-2011, they found that self –collection strategy had been an effective means for "increasing the depth and breadth of student vocabulary knowledge and for develop students’ ability to be strategic independent word learners" (p.161). According to the authors this strategy was an effective way to help students to learn independently and take part of their own teaching and learning process, promoting critical thinking, in consequence teaching learning process becomes dynamic.
A recent study directed in a multicultural room in A Christian school located in Austin, Texas by Gregersen, L 2013; studied the effectiveness of adapting the strategy in a second grade classroom, the participants of the study were 11 boys and 12 girls from different nationalities, all were from middle- or upper-level income families. In the study data collection process included teachers´ journals, video recording, pretest and posttest; the researcher established that students showed progress in using context, learning meanings, and using new words in writing and speaking. She found that Vocabulary Self-Collection had a positive effect on primary students’ knowledge of words and also enlarged their enthusiasm for improve their vocabulary acquisition.
Based on the previous discussion, and following Grave’s (2006, 2008) ideas of a long term vocabulary program from the need of developing word awareness as one of its critical components of teaching vocabulary, is important to mention that VSS has been used with intermediate, middle, and secondary students within cooperative group settings, but the strategy may be modified for students in the different grades as the teacher directs and guides them through the whole process.
In this case, the researcher decided to implement the use self-collection strategy with elementary students, helping students learn about words as a way to build linguistic awareness, which in turn fosters both language learning and literacy development.
Bearing in mind that most of students come to school with vastly different funds of knowledge about words and that vocabulary knowledge is significantly related to reading comprehension, decoding, spelling, and school achievement, in K and elementary years, fostering word learning should be a high-priority goal to help some children "catch up".
Hence, this strategy was aimed to offer an effective approach to help students understand the meanings of new words, use them in conversations and writing, and make personal connections with words for authentic tasks.
Teachers’ role
In using the VSS it is important that teachers locate their role as facilitators for learning by model the process of collecting words, provide guided practice within reading groups and other instructional contexts and offer reliable encouragement to students to use VSS during independent reading.
Students’ role
The use of Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy is very important in building vocabulary it refers to the raising questions by individual student, for this reason is important that students take the responsibility for their own learning and enhance the aesthetic experience in order to activate relevant prior knowledge and develop their metacognition by questioning and consequently, lead to better comprehension.
Students were involved in the process of collecting words on their interest, advantages or pleasure and make personal connections words while reading. Students had to learn how to make decisions about the importance of concepts and how to use context to determine word meaning being proactive in class included being actively involved in class development.
As discussed above, there are a lot of theories and perspectives about vocabulary learning, some of them differ in some issues as well as present some common aspects among them.
The previous theoretical framework and literature review gave the researcher important elements to have in mind as a base to the entire research study. The next chapter will show the type of study developed, and also the setting, participants, and instruments to collect and analyze data.