Learning biblical hebrew vocabulary : insights from second language vocabulary acquisition

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Though Biblical Hebrew (=BH) is no longer a spoken language, students continue to learn it for thepurpose of reading, or at least interacting at a deeper level, with the text of the Hebrew Bible. Thissuggests that BH shares with any modern language learning course the goal of learning to read. Oneimportant part of learning to read is the acquisition of an adequate number of vocabulary items. Thepurpose of this study is to determine which insights from Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition(=SLVA) research and related fields hold the most promise for a new - and possibly more effective- approach to learning BH vocabulary, to evaluate currently existing BH instructional materials inlight of these insights, to develop a new approach based on these insights, and to test aspects of thenew approach empirically.Researchers in SLVA have uncovered a number of helpful insights concerning how vocabulary andvocabulary learning should be defined as well as concerning how vocabulary is best learned. On theother hand, BH instructional materials reflect little to no influence from these insights. Thesematerials have continued to define vocabulary narrowly as individual words and continued toconceive of vocabulary learning primarily as pairing form and meaning in contrast to the much moresophisticated definitions found in the SLVA literature. For example, SLVA researchers consider itemsbeyond the word level, such as idioms, to be vocabulary (Moon 1997; Lewis 1993, 1997). BHinstructional materials have also failed to include a significant number of beneficial VocabularyLearning Strategies (=VLSs), while including some VLSs that are either intrinsically problematic orproblematic in the ways they are employed. For example, the strategy of learning semantically relateditems together is common in BH instructional materials, though it has been shown to be problematicin a considerable number of experimental studies (e.g. Nation 2000; Finkbeiner & Nicol 2003;Papathanasiou 2009).Since SLVA research has yet to influence BH instructional materials, a new approach to BHvocabulary learning is warranted. This new approach is based on sound theory concerning whatvocabulary is and what it means to learn it, while offering learners as many helpful strategies forlearning lexical items as possible. To justify this new approach, a set of experimental studies was runincluding one longitudinal case study and three larger-scale experiments. This testing was partial innature since it was only possible to test one variable at a time. The testing revealed a number ofimportant areas for future research into BH vocabulary learning.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University