The author conducted the research with the hope that students could improve their vocabulary retention. So how the retention is shown? First it is shown through the number of words they can remember after each lesson, then through results of the tests.
3.1.1. Information from the observation
In order to make the study more reliable and more valid, the author took an observation of actions and attitudes of the students at the class of Hotel and Restaurant TCNVDL K13 during the time she applied the content-based instruction method in teaching vocabulary.
Normally, the procedures used by the author can be summarized as follows:
At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher asked the students to work small groups and assigned each group a small research task and a source of information to use to help them fulfill the task. The tasks were often interesting topics, small reading/
conversations containing the number of vocabulary that were going to be taught later. Then once they finished their task, they formed new groups to share and compare their information. Next, there was time for students to bring their product as the result of this information sharing session. This could be some conversations, small tests, games… Sometimes, the steps could be changed to make the lesson more flexible. While observing the class, the author saw that the students‟ attitude and class atmosphere were quite different from beginning to the end. For the first two weeks students seemed to be not enthusiastic enough to take part in the lesson.
Perhaps, as usual students were not interesting in the vocabulary lessons and the method was new to them. They still worked in groups as the author asked but most of the tasks were carried by good students. The situation seemed better in the following weeks, students might be familiar to the ways of working introduced by
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the author. Most of the students were ready to take part in the activities, as the result they understood the context or topics clearly and got more information so their vocabulary memorization increased naturally.
These show the students‟ attitude and class atmosphere while the author applied the new method in teaching vocabulary, the detail number will be shown in the next part.
3.1.2. Result of the continuous monitoring
While conducting the research, one of the duties of the author was writing diary to take notes the students‟ actions and attitude to the lesson, especially the numbers of words they could remember after the lesson. After each lesson the author checked students‟ short-term memory of vocabulary in different ways such as: games, short paper/ oral tests, or small competitions between groups/ rows of table. Most of students liked these activities because there was a competition between them.
Sometimes, after two or three lessons the author widened the topic to the words learnt before to see how many old words students can remember. The requirements could be only saying/writing words, making sentences/ short conversations about one topic, or translating sentences/ short paragraphs.
The number of words that students can remember after each lesson was illustrated in the figure below:
Figure 2: The level of vocabulary memorization
45%
30% 30%
40%
64%
75%
70%
60%
50%
32%
25%
52%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6
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As shown in the figure 5, the percentage of vocabulary memorization was presented in the vertical direction and the time of observation in horizontal one. In each week the lessons 1 and 2 are painted in blue and violet. There were 12 lessons in 6 weeks.
In weeks 1 and 2, students could retain 25-32% of the vocabulary they leant. After 2 weeks of treatment the author applied the method of content-based instructions, we can see no advance here. Perhaps, the reason is that students did not get used to the new way of teaching, they did not have the connection between words in the context given by teacher. However, from week three to week six, the number of words increases dramatically from 40% to 70-75%. For this time, students were ready to the new method, they have intrinsic motivation to get involved in the vocabulary learning. It is clear that the percentage here is the average number in the class with different levels of ability but in general, the students‟ participating, attitude and vocabulary size show the advantages of the method.
3.1.3. The results of the pre-test, progress-test and post-test
The three tests were administered to measure possible level or vocabulary retention at the beginning, at the middle and at the end of the study.
- Pre-test Figure 3: Result of the pre-test
Quite Good, 32%
Average, 44%
Good, 13%
Bad, 11%
Excellent, 0%
Excellent Good Quite Good Average Bad
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The figure shows that there were five levels in the test results: excellent (9-10 pts), good (8 pts), quite good (7 pts), average (5 to 6 pts) and bad (under 5). In the pre- test no students got the highest score, while the “good” scores accounted for 13%.
Unluckily, the percentage of students got bad marks is nearly the same as that of the good ones. “Quite good marks” accounted for 32% and as we can see the biggest part in the figure is the number of students who got 5-6 points. As shown in the chart, there is considerable variation across the class, with the majority earning marks 5 and 6.
- Progress-test Figure 4: Result of the progress-test
Quite Good, 36%
Average, 38%
Good, 20%
Bad, 6%
Excellent, 0%
Excellent Good Quite Good Average Bad
As can be seen from Figure 2 above, the percentage of „average‟ scores decreases from 44% to 38% whereas the “good” group increases by 8%, though 6% still got bad marks. Such change was promising, though “excellent” result continued to be absent.
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- Post-test Figure 5: Result of the post-test
Figure 5 is truly pleasing to the author in that “excellent” marks made their first appearance with 7% and no students fell below mark 5, despite a small decrease of only 2% for the average group. These results show that positive changes remained modest to our expectations; yet it is evident that CBI did exert its impact on students‟ vocabulary retention, i.e. our 6-week intervention was worth doing.
Quite Good, 41%
Average, 36%
Good, 16%
Bad, 0%
Excellent, 7%
Excellent Good Quite Good Average Bad