Etymology of Modern English Vocabulary. Content Introduction

Task of the work: Presenting new words in meaningful texts is therefore clearly preferable: many
points of support are offered, the chance of interference is reduced and - unlike isolated words or sentences - texts do present a linguistic as well as a psychological reality. The theoretical background of the assumption that new words should be presented in texts and not isolated, may be explained through the theory of trace systems in memory by Van Parreren. To put it briefly, everything we experience or perceive, is stored in memory in the form of traces. These traces are organized in different systems which are more or less strongly segregated. The cohesion within one system depends on the amount and the nature of the connections between the traces within that system. These connections are very important, because they may be used as "access roads" to a trace one is searching for. Now texts offer many possibilities to form varied and meaningful connections between the traces of the new words. In the first place words in texts (unlike words in vocabulary lists) are already so connected. In the second place it is possible to treat words in texts in a number of different ways. This results in a better embedding of the traces in the memory system and therefore in a better recalls (N.B. in a number of cases when the meaning of a word is "forgotten", it has not disappeared from memory, but it simply cannot be retrieved.)[2]
Although theoretical support may thus be found for presenting words in texts, details of what is happening when a pupil reads a text with the aim of learning new words, are not known. The first experiment (with adults) was meant to gain insight into the characteristics of the memory processes involved and into some of the relevant textual and psychological conditions mat should be met when presenting words in texts.
In the second experiment - a long-term case study with relatively young children – the textual and psychological conditions for learning were explored over a longer time span and with quite different texts, In the third experiment - with pupils of the lowest ability range -these conditions were analysed in greater depth.