Depth of processing and vocabulary learning

http://www.vocabulary.co.il/


http://www.vocabulary.com/

These two websites offer various activities which are designed to build vocabulary skills and to motivate English language learners to learn through fun practice. The vocabulary activities include word search, matching, crossword puzzle, and hangman.  Users choose the category (animals, cars, architecture, and winter weather) that will be used in the word exercise. It is important to note that there are vocabulary word exercises for all levels of English (easy, medium, hard). www.vocabulary.co.il can also help build vocabulary skills for exams such as TOEFL, the GRE, the SAT, and PSAT. Moreover, these two websites provide students with unlimited access, repeated practice opportunity (individualized instruction), build-in review of materials, contextualized vocabulary introduction with pictures and audio (helps improving various pronunciation issues).

Discussion of the websites in terms of depth of processing: The idea of Craik and Lockhart (1972) that the chance of new information being stored into long-term memory is not determined by the time that it is held in short-term memory rather by the depth with which it was initially processed is often discussed in SLA. It is accepted that tasks involving greater depth of processing lead to greater gains in short-term and long-term vocabulary retention. These two websites offer various productive tasks which require learners to engage in deeper processing of the words and this sets the expectation that these words will be retained better. Many SLA studies have suggested that learners benefit more from using the target words productively in original contexts than encountering them through reading texts.