Word Roots in English: Learning English Words through Form and Meaning Similarity

Abstract

The research first proposes a vocabulary learning technique: the word part technique, and then tests its effectiveness in aiding vocabulary learning and retention. The first part of the thesis centers around the idea that the knowledge of the first 2000 words language learners already possess may give them easier access to words of other frequency levels because the root parts of the low frequency new words share form and meaning similarities with the high frequency known words. The research addresses the issue at two stages: to quantify the information concerning the number of words able to be accessed through the analysis of the word roots, and to analyze the pedagogical usefulness of the accessible words. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Klein, 1966) was used as the source to show the possible formal and meaning connections among words. All the words in the first 2000 word list were first looked up individually and all the cognates provided under each of these words were collected and placed under each of the high frequency words if they meet the requirement that their roots share more than one letter and/or more than one phoneme with the roots of the first 2000 known words. After the data was roughly gathered, three criteria were applied to filter the data, namely, the frequency criterion, the meaning criterion and form criterion. In applying the frequency criterion, words with frequency levels lower than the tenth thousand were removed from the data. In applying the meaning criterion, hints were given to show the semantic relations between the higher frequency words and the first 2000 thousand words. The hints were then rated on the scale for measuring meaning transparency. Words that were rated at level 5 on the scale were considered inaccessible; words that were rated at levels 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, and 3a were considered easy to access. In applying the form criterion, calculations were done for each semantically accessible word to show their phonological similarity and orthographic similarity in relation to the known word. The words whose phonological or orthographical similarity scores were larger than 0.5 were considered to be phonologically or orthographically easy to access. Finally the "find" function of Microsoft Word was used to check the data by picking up any words that might have been missed in the first round of data gathering. The above procedures resulted in 2156 word families that are able to be accessed through the meaning and form relations with the first 2000 words in their root parts. Among the 2156 word families, 739 can be accessed easily and are therefore more pedagogically useful and 259 can be accessed, but with difficulty. 21 pedagogically useful form constants were selected because they can give access to more unknown lower frequency words than other form constants. In the second part of the thesis, an experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the word part technique in comparison with the keyword technique and self-strategy learning. The results show that with the experienced Chinese EFL learners, the keyword technique is slightly inferior to the word part technique and the self-strategy learning.