Sustainability of Vocabulary Teaching after Explicit Instruction in Kindergarten Children
This study investigates five-year-old learners’ vocabulary retention through case studies, on a one week, one month, three months, and five months basis. It concerns the vocabulary learning of kindergarten children learning English as a second language (L2). This study attempts to seek answers to the questions of to what extent the presentation of the three different sets of words more effective than the other two is, both on recall and recognition and whether the recall and recognition levels showed differences in the three sets of words in course of time. In the literature, some studies have favoured semantic mapping in which new words are presented and organized in terms of associated lexical meanings. Some other studies have disfavoured semantic mapping. This study has administered three different sets of vocabulary: semantically related, cognates and semantically unrelated words. This study indicated that all participants were more successful with semantically related words on word recall and with cognates on word recognition. The results of this study do not support those which claim that making semantic associations may cause interference and hinder vocabulary learning. This study further suggests that semantically related words should be taught thematically to facilitate vocabulary teaching, particularly on word recall.