Expanding English Vocabulary Through an Effective Word List

Abstract

It is said that extensive reading and inferring word meanings from context (top-down approaches) are effective in building up vocabulary, but this holds for relatively advanced language learners (Knight 1994). For low-proficiency students, resorting to building up vocabulary only by top-down approaches is not realistic. Thus, the focus of this paper is on building up vocabulary through a bilingual word list (bottom-up approaches) which has been still popular among students. The purpose of this study is to find an effective way of learning vocabulary using a word list based on the past studies on word retention. The comparative experiment was conducted to the three groups of Japanese college students and the results were analyzed with descriptive statistics.