That raises issues of the methodological problems that a researcher faces when attempting
to measure word knowledge.
Elley (1989) tested the hypothesis that 7- and 8-year-old children would Ieam the
meanings of many new words that they heard in stories read aloud - without explanation
of such words. An additional aim of the study was to attempt to identify word-related and
subject-related variables, that correlated with vocabulary gain. The book chosen to be read
to the classes, Gumdrop at sea by Val Biro (1983), was considered appropriate because
it had been published recently, it had an appealing story and many attractive pictures, and
it used at least 20 words thought to be unknown to the target population. Pupils’
understanding of the difficult words was pretested on a multiple-choice test. The story was
read three times to each class over a period of 1 week. In the first reading, the teacher led
an initial discussion of the title, cover pictures and main characters. No definition or
explanation was given of any target word. The second reading three days later was
conducted by the pupils’ own classroom teacher, following the same pattern. The third
reading, on the seventh day, was given by the first teacher, who again showed the pictures
but also allowed some time for predictions and remarks by the children.
The same multiple choice test was given, 2 days after the third reading, as a post-test.
The scores for most target words were higher on the post-test than on the pretest, with a
mean increase of 15.4%. The words that were most readily learned in the story were those
for which the surrounding context was helpful, those that occurred more than once in the
story, and those that were illustrated in at least one picture. Elley (1989) concluded that
reading stories aloud was a significant source of vocabulary acquisition. Nevertheless,
there are a number of limitations in this study. Firstly, all the results are questionable
since they did not use a control group. Generalizabilty also is limited because of (a) the
use of only one book, and (b) of the fact that the permanence of the new learning was not
assessed.
Elley (1989) carried out a second experiment in order to overcome some of the previous
limitations. Her first aim was to confirm the phenomenon of incidental vocabulary
learning found in Experiment 1 with two different story books. The second purpose was
to estimate the effects of teacher’s explanation of unfamiliar words, over and above the
74