Action Research
Dr. Gianfranco Conti’s Extensive Processing Input Method & Vocabulary Acquisition By Leandro Venier The International School of Kuala Lumpur
Some years ago, after a long day at school in which my frustration as a teacher grew due to receiving endless yet much repeated questions about vocab from one of my IB Spanish B classes, I asked Chat GPT the following question: What is the best way that is scientifically-proven to be most effective to teach and learn vocabulary for a foreign language such as IB Spanish B at a high school context? The answer provided by Chat GPT included several suggestions that were “research-based strategies for teaching and learning Spanish vocabulary”1 . Out of the list of a total of 9 strategies, 4 of them caught my attention: these were spaced repetition, retrieval practice, contextual learning and interleaved and cumulative practice. In other words, vocabulary that is best learned through frequent “recycling” (hence retrieval and repetition) within a particular thematic option and practiced often in different scenarios to be “recycled” again further down the line. While there is probably nothing new to the seasoned second language teacher in that list of suggestions for vocabulary teaching and learning, it is interesting to see how those four strategies that caught my attention are crucial pillars of a particular method that our world languages department at ISKL has been implementing in the past couple of years: Dr. Gianfranco Conti’s Extensive Processing Input2 (EPI for short).
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EARCOS Triannual Journal