Study Design And Results

By Author: Adela
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Language Workshop was implemented as part of an experimental study in a suburban school in southern California. (For a detailed explanation of the study and results, see Townsend & Collins, 2008). The sample for this study (n = 37) consisted of middle school English-language learners with a variety of language backgrounds. The sample was broken into two groups, one with 20 students and one with 17 students, and the groups attended Language Workshop separately. Participants' first languages included Spanish, Gujarati, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Arabic, and participants' English proficiency status ranged from beginning to early advanced. Students were tested before and after their participation in Language Workshop, which consisted of 20 after-school sessions lasting 75 minutes each, and also before and Tag Heuer Replica after a comparable length of time spent in other after-school activities. A number of measures were administered, but the measure aligned with the intervention was a modified form of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997), which ...
... we titled the Measure of Academic Vocabulary (MAV). The MAV was a measure of receptive academic vocabulary knowledge; below is a sample item:
a. I have never seen this word before.
b. I have seen this word before but I don't know what it means.
c. I have seen this word before and I think it means:
d. I can use this word in a sentence (if you answer this part, also answer part c).

There were 20 items in total, and each item was worth a total of 5 points; the maximum score on this measure, thus, was 100. Half of the items were based on target words from Language Workshop and half were also from the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) but were not Language Workshop target words. The MAV was administered in an interview format to capture word knowledge without confounding results with reading and writing abilities. We used (-tests to compare students' growth during the intervention with their growth during a comparable period of time with no intervention, and we calculated Cohen's d as an indicator of practical, or educational, significance of these results. (See Table 2 for data on student growth.) Students made more growth during the intervention, (36) = 2.49, p < 0.05, d = 0.74, and this growth was both statistically and practically significant. In addition, we compared students' growth on the target words with their growth on the no target words. Students made more growth on the target words f(36) = 6.34, p < 0.001, d = 1.05, and this growth was both statistically and practically significant. In other words, students increased their knowledge of the target words in the intervention, which demonstrated that strategies that had previously been shown to be effective with general vocabulary words and younger students are also effective with abstract academic words and adolescent ELLs. Finally, an ANOVA showed that students' growth on the MAV increased with each successive level of English proficiency. Thus, students at advanced levels made the most growth while students at the beginner level made the least growth, F(4,32) = 4.16, p < 0.01, partial r\2 = 0.34 (partial T\2 is an effect size measure with the following conventions for interpretation: 0.02 indicates a small effect, 0.15 indicates a medium effect, and 0.35 indicates a large effect).

Thus, these differences were both statistically and practically significant. Regrettably, we were unable to conduct delayed post testing with the participants to determine whether their learning endured. This is an area Tag Heuer Replica Watches for future research, but the results from the current study suggest the potential for instructional interventions like Language Workshop. Additionally, the current results suggest that ELLs at intermediate and advanced levels of English proficiency, when compared with students at earlier levels of English proficiency, have more of the linguistic resources necessary to build their knowledge of abstract, academic words in English.