Incidental word learning from context occurred equally from a narrative text and an expository text¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 1984 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? The amount of word-meaning learning from context did not differ between the spy narrative and the river-systems exposition. → Nagy 1984

Evidence¶

Nagy 1984¶

Nagy, William E.; Herman, Patricia A.; Anderson, Richard C.; Pearson, P. David. (1984). Learning Words from Context. Center for the Study of Reading, Technical Report No. 319, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED248470

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Discussion of the two-text between-subjects design with 57 eighth graders: learning from context "was not confined to the exposition" but occurred equally from the narrative. The authors caution that a sample of two texts cannot represent the genres, so this is a limited generalization.

"The amount of learning from the narrative was the same as that from the exposition. A sample of two texts could hardly be taken as representative of their respective genres; but it is worth emphasizing that the learning of word meanings from context was not confined to the exposition."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Eighth-grade students acquire measurable partial knowledge of unfamiliar word meanings incidentally while reading natural text, with a small but statistically reliable context-learning effect — related
• Incidental vocabulary exposure produces reliable learning, but learners pick up only a small share of the unknown words they meet — related
• The genre-by-generation-task interaction: sentence unscrambling beats letter completion in expository texts, and letter completion beats sentence unscrambling descriptively in narratives — related