OK, so I've only just started studying the TESOL Diploma and maybe I should already know this, but I have just watched a lecture, where the speaker said that there is extensive research that shows that teaching associated vocab together is absolutely counter-productive to learning.
Here's the vid...
The lecture starts a bit slowly, but gets much better towards the middle and onwards.
When you go to any EFL lesson plans website, almost all of the beginners worksheets put vocab in related groups eg. fruit, family members, clothes etc
The speaker, Paul Nation, said that this info/research is from before 2000. SO maybe this is old news for more experienced teachers than me.
But this must surely be big news for a lot of teachers out there, who I think would teach vocab groups as the default method.
It seems incredible that this method of teaching can be 100% counter-productive to vocab memory recall (yep, that's what it says in the lecture) and I've emailed Paul Nation to get a link form him to be able to have a look at these research findings (which have been replicated a number of times with identical results apparently).
While I am eager to find out about this, I would think that it seems so ingrained in students' minds that you learn related vocab together that they might think that a teacher would not know what the hell they were doing if they only taught random words that had no interference with each other.
What would your students think?
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