Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

- m this question the following three possibilities were used by Dodson to teach the laoguage content of three presented sentences: 1. Audio-visual semanticizing of the three TL (Foreign Language) sentences where the teacher also uses actions, objects and qualites to reinforce clarity of meaning. 2. The teacher gives the pupils first the MT (Mother Tongue) equivalent then shows them the corresponding pictures. 3. Here the FL sentences are associated with the MT eguivalents without being supported by pictures. The results may well be of great importance for us as the experiment involved primary and secondary school pupils as well. Ttie pictures as a means of semanticizing did not play a satisfactory role. They caused difficulties especially for ttie primary school pupils as 20 ?s of them misinterpreted ttie pictures in spite of being given telp by ttie tendier. The test showed that meaning does not develop very greatly for those children who were not capable of immediate recognition and Hint, many of these children will never hit upon the right meaning no matter how often the picture is shown or what ttie teacher does to clarify the procedure (Dodson 1967: 9/10). Another phenomenon well known by a lot of teachers was also confirmed by the experiments i. e. though some pupils were able to imitate ttie sentence well the meaning, liowever, was not quite clear to them. For most children there was a correlation between mastering the form and content. The pupils who grasped the content were better at aquirlng ttie form too. Which experiment group has mastered both form and content ttie best? It was the group which was taught according to ttie second variant i. e. using the MT equivalent and pictures as mental support. This group proved to have the longest retentioo. Ttie second guestion Godson examined was: Which is the best combination of stimuli to get the best results in imitation exercises? Four different combination of stimuli were used: 1. Combination: FL spoken word, picture an FL written form 2. Combination: FL spokeo word, picture 3. Combination: FL spoken word, semanticizing in ttie mother tongue, picture, FL written form