The Effect of Vocabulary Exercise Types on L2 Vocabulary Retention

Abstract

This article investigates which type of text-based vocabulary enhancement exercise is most effective for Korean college students' meaning retention of new L2 words. Sixty-four participants divided into three groups according to the three different types of vocabulary exercises with varied levels of mental processing―recognition, interpretation, production―were tested on their retention of 10 target words. The results of the study show that the deeper the vocabulary exercise's mental processing level was, the more effective the exercise was on retention. There was a significant difference between the retention performances of the production type group and the recognition type group, each of which represents the deepest and the shallowest level of mental processing, respectively. The production type was also found to be most helpful for the retention of the words whose parts of speech were other than nouns.