Emily Johnson awarded research grant

Emily Johnson (BA Modern Languages-Spanish ‘23; MAE Spanish- Language Instruction ‘24) was just awarded $3500 from the Office of Student Research to fund her Summer 2022 TruScholars project, “Revamping Poor Teaching L2 Vocabulary Teaching Practices.” In collaboration with her mentor, Dr. Stacy Davis, Emily will conduct research as a part of Spanish courses offered by the Joseph Baldwin Academy (JBA) June 11- July 2 and July 9-30. Her students will work on vocabulary related to the several themes and Emily will test methods both conducive and not conducive to the development of learners’ vocabulary as set forth by Dr. Joe Barcroft in Input-Based Incremental Vocabulary Instruction for the L2 Classroom (2013) and Lexical Input Processing and Vocabulary Learning (2015). She will investigate ways to combat poor pedagogical practices that have now been disproven by research such as: having students write target words in sentences, copying individual target words, answering questions about the meaning of target words, and making pleasantness ratings about the meaning of target words. Her final paper will analyze data collected during her JBA classes and will explain the conditions under which L2 vocabulary acquisition is most successful, addressing common misconceptions of vocabulary instruction in the language classroom. Her work will proffer ways to teach vocabulary more effectively by understanding how input processing is important in regards to vocabulary acquisition, as well as expound on the ways in which different forms of presenting input specifically for vocabulary can positively or negatively impact how well a student can recall and reproduce lexical items in Spanish.