Cải thiện từ vựng cho sinh viên sử dụng kỹ thuật chêm từ
226(03): 43 - 50
TNU Journal of Science and Technology
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY
USING THE DIGLOT-WEAVE TECHNIQUE
Nguyen Thi Thu Huong*, Tran Thi Mai Huong
TNU - University of Education
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
This study investigated the effectiveness of the Diglot-Weave Technique
in helping non-English majors at Thai Nguyen University of Education
improve their vocabulary. The research aimed at investigating the current
situation of the students’ vocabulary, and the extent to which the Diglot-
Weave Technique improved the students’ vocabulary. There were 24
participants who were non-English majors from 5 departments (Primary
Education, Biology, Mathematics, Physics, and Philology) at Thai
Nguyen University of Education. Two data collection instruments were
used, namely questionnaires, and tests. Before the study, most of the
students did not have adequate vocabulary and they had some difficulties
in learning vocabulary. The findings revealed the effectiveness of the
Diglot-Weave Technique in enhancing the students’ vocabulary. The
experimental group’s scores in the post-test were higher than those of the
control group and there was a difference between the pre-test and the
post-test scores of the experimental group. The majority of the students
thought the Diglot-Weave Technique was useful for them to guess the
meanings easier and remember words longer.
Received:
Revised:
03/3/2021
24/3/2021
25/3/2021
Published:
KEYWORDS
Vocabulary
Diglot-Weave technique
English learning
English teaching
Non-English majors
CẢI THIỆN TỪ VỰNG CHO SINH VIÊN SỬ DỤNG KỸ THUẬT CHÊM TỪ
Nguyễn Thị Thu Hương*, Trần Thị Mai Hương
Trường Đại học Sư phạm – ĐH Thái Nguyên
THÔNG TIN BÀI BÁO
Ngày nhận bài: 03/3/2021
Ngày hoàn thiện: 24/3/2021
Ngày đăng: 25/3/2021
TÓM TẮT
Nghiên cứu này điều tra tính hiệu quả của kĩ thuật Chêm từ trong việc
giúp sinh viên không chuyên tiếng Anh tại trường Đại học Sư phạm –
Đại học Thái Nguyên củng cố vốn từ vựng. Nghiên cứu này nhằm mục
đích điều tra thực trạng vốn từ vựng của sinh viên và mức độ hiệu quả
củng cố vốn từ vựng của kĩ thuật Chêm từ. Người tham gia nghiên cứu
là 24 sinh viên không chuyên tiếng Anh đến từ 5 khoa (Giáo dục Tiểu
học, Sinh học, Toán, Vật lý và Văn) của trường Đại học Sư phạm –
Đại học Thái Nguyên. Hai công cụ nghiên cứu được sử dụng gồm
phiếu điều tra và bài kiểm tra. Trước nghiên cứu, hầu hết sinh viên
không có đủ vốn từ vựng và gặp khó khăn với việc học từ. Kết quả
nghiên cứu khẳng định tính hiệu quả của kĩ thuật Chêm từ trong việc
củng cố vốn từ vựng cho sinh viên. Điểm kiểm tra sau nghiên cứu của
nhóm thực nghiệm cao hơn so với nhóm đối chứng và có sự khác nhau
giữa điểm kiểm tra trước và sau nghiên cứu của nhóm thực nghiệm.
Hầu hết sinh viên đều cho rằng kĩ thuật Chêm từ giúp họ đoán nghĩa từ
dễ hơn và nhớ từ lâu hơn.
TỪ KHÓA
Từ vựng
Kĩ thuật chêm từ
Học tiếng Anh
Dạy tiếng Anh
Sinh viên không chuyên
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226(03): 43 - 50
TNU Journal of Science and Technology
1. Introduction
Vocabulary plays an essential role in helping learners learn a language. It is considered an
important factor that connects four skills of English, namely writing, speaking, listening, and
reading altogether. Learners need to be able to use a certain number of words to make their
conversations go smoothly. They need to know words being spoken to understand the whole
meaning of conversations. They need vocabulary to comprehend different kinds of reading texts
they may be exposed to [1]. In addition, to express their ideas in writing, a proper amount of
vocabulary needs to be used. Therefore, vocabulary is an indispensable factor in learning a
foreign language [2].
A number of techniques have been applied to help English learners enhance their
vocabulary. However, the researcher was particularly interested in the one called the Diglot-
Weave Technique. According to Azadel and Ensieh [3], Diglot-Weave is considered a
breakthrough in learning a language. In Greek, “di” means “two”, “glot” means “language”, and
“weave” means “blend two languages together”. Jingxia [4] indicated that the Diglot-Weave
Technique is code-switching between the target language and the mother tongue, and this
technique will be applied to build a bridge from the mother tongue to the target language.
Elizabeth, Paul, and Stephen [5] defined the Diglot-Weave Technique as blending target words
into passages or written dialogues in learners’ first language. This technique is also called by
other names such as sandwich stories, the bilingual reader method, or substitution method.
This is an example of a reading text with the Diglot-Weave Technique, where speakers of
Vietnamese aim to learn English. “Một con sư tử rất cruel sống trong rừng. Hằng ngày, nó kill và
ăn thịt rất nhiều loài vật. Muông thú afraid rằng sư tử sẽ kill và ăn thịt tất cả loài vật trong khu
rừng. Chúng nói với sư tử rằng: Chúng ta hãy thoả thuận. Nếu ngài promise rằng mỗi ngày ngài
chỉ ăn một con vật, thì hằng ngày một trong số chúng tôi sẽ tới đây nộp mạng. Ngài sẽ không
phải hunt và giết chúng tôi nữa” [6]. In this case, teachers select a text and replace some
Vietnamese words in the text with their English equivalents. The selected words are those whose
meanings can be guessed through the context. Learners read the text in Vietnamese language
with some English words in it. With this technique, learners learn new words in the target
language while reading something in their mother tongue.
Ji [7] conducted research using the Diglot-Weave technique to teach vocabulary to
schoolchildren who are under 13 years old in China. She asked students to present some stories
using both English and Chinese. She found that the method is really suitable for learners who are
not good at memorizing vocabulary. Azadeh and Ensieh [3] carried out research using the Diglot-
Weave technique to find out the effectiveness of the technique on Iranian students. They found
the technique really helpful for the students to learn word meanings. Loom [8] points out that
learners can use a “Diglot reader” book that includes their mother tongue on one side and their
target language on the other. It seems good, but learners have to switch back and forth, and it is
quite boring. Blending some target words into a first language text brings about a better result.
Besides, combining the mother tongue and English as a foreign language in the same piece of
material is believed to lessen the pressure of the learning process for students, particularly non-
English majors. Therefore, the researcher conducted this study to investigate the impact of the
Diglot-Weave technique on students’ vocabulary in the University of Education in Thai Nguyen.
This research aims to find out the current situation of non-English majors’ vocabulary at Thai
Nguyen University of Education and how the Diglot-Weave technique helps students improve
their vocabulary.
Two research questions are:
1. What is the current situation of non-English major students’ vocabulary?
2. To what extent can the Diglot-Weave Technique improve the students’ vocabulary?
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology
2. Research method
According to Gay [9], the experimental method can be considered the most reliable one in
studying all areas, especially education. The researcher chose the experimental research design to
carry out the study. Both experimental and control groups were introduced to the Diglot-Weave
technique, but only the experimental group was treated. Both groups were tested before and after
the experiment to measure the difference between the two groups. The researcher compared the
test results of the experimental group and the control group to draw a conclusion of whether the
Diglot-Weave technique was useful in improving students’ vocabulary or not.
The participants were 24 non-English majors from five different departments of TNUE
(Primary Education, Biology, Mathematics, Physics, and Philology) who were learning the
module General English 1 – English in communication. All of them are from mountainous
provinces. The participants were randomly divided into the experimental and control groups.
Two tools of data collection were used in this research, namely questionnaire and test.
Bell [10] indicates that a questionnaire is the study instrument that composes of a set of
questions with the aim to collect necessary information for the research to answer the research
questions. A questionnaire can include two types of questions (open-ended questions and close-
ended questions). While close-ended questions give options for participants to choose from,
open-ended ones require participants to answer from their own experience, opinions and
thoughts. Researchers can easily gather information in a short period of time; therefore, they can
save a huge amount of time.
There was a pre-questionnaire and a post-questionnaire in the study. The researcher used the
pre-questionnaire to collect the student’s general information (age, major, hometown and gender)
and some specific information including their English proficiency level, their vocabulary size and
their understanding of the Diglot-Weave technique). The post-questionnaire aimed to find out
about the students’ understanding and attitude towards the technique.
According to Wilson [11], tests are usually reliable and the data is easy to collect, so observer
subjectivity is eliminated. The researcher in this study used pre-test and post-test to see the
difference between before and after the participants used the Diglot-Weave technique and to
compare the control group and the experimental group. This data collection instrument plays a
crucial role in evaluating the effectiveness of the Diglot-Weave technique. The students took the
vocabulary test in the format of Aptis test in both the pre-test and the post-test. The results were
compared to see the difference between two groups. Besides, the researcher used a website called
Myvocab to evaluate English vocabulary of the students from both groups. The website tests the
spellings of words by asking test takers to click on the correct spellings. It also tests the meanings
of words by asking test takers to click on the words that have similar meanings to the given ones.
After the test, the website gives a final result according to IELTS classification. From the results
of the test on this website, the researcher had an objective evaluation on the students’ vocabulary
before conducting the study.
3. Findings and discussion
3.1. Current situation of the students’ vocabulary
Figure 1 shows the students’ self-evaluation of their own vocabulary. It can be seen that the
percentage of students with poor vocabulary ranked first with 58.3% (14 students) while the
figure for very poor vocabulary followed with 33.3% (8 students). By contrast, the proportion of
students with neutral vocabulary size just made up 8.3% (2 students). Especially, nobody chose
fair, good, and very good in vocabulary size. This might explain why students admitted that they
were not confident about their vocabulary and they had difficulties in learning other skills.
The result of the test on the website Myvocab indicates that all of the students from both
control and experimental group were at non-user level. The website explains this result as having
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226(03): 43 - 50
TNU Journal of Science and Technology
no ability to use the language except a few isolated words. This result confirms the students’ self-
evaluation on their vocabulary.
Figure 1. Students’ self-evaluation of their vocabulary
Figure 2. Students’ situations in learning English vocabulary
From figure 2, we can realize that all students had problems in learning English vocabulary.
With 41.7 % of students (10 students) choosing “No impression on the vocabulary learned”,
which means most of the students did not realize they had already learnt a word when they
encountered it again. A little more than a third of the students could not remember many new
words because they are difficult to remember according to them. The figure for “You recognize
vocabulary but do not remember its meaning” was 20.8% (5 students).
The students took a vocabulary test in the format of Aptis to give the researcher data on the
students’ vocabulary size. The full score of this test is 25. Question types of the Aptis vocabulary
test include word definition, word pairs, word usage and word combinations. The results are
shown in table 1.
Table 1. Students’ vocabulary scores (pretest)
The experimental group
Student Score
The control group
Score
Student
S13
S14
S15
S16
S17
S18
S19
S20
S21
S22
S23
S24
S1
S2
6
7
4
5
6
5
5
7
7
7
6
4
7
6
6
4
7
4
6
7
6
5
4
8
S3
S4
S5
S6
S7
S8
S9
S10
S11
S12
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology
Nobody got the full score on the test. The highest score was 8, and the lowest score was 4.
The researcher used paired sample t-test on SPSS to see whether there was a difference
between two groups before the reasearch. Table 2 and 3 below show the results.
Table 2. The mean score of each group
Paired Samples Statistics
Mean
5.7500
5.8333
N
Std. Deviation
1.13818
Std. Error Mean
.32856
the experimental group
the control group
12
12
Pair 1
1.33712
.38599
It can be seen that the mean score of the experimental group was 5.7500 while the figure for
the control group was 5.8333. These figures indicate that the experimental group and the control
group had the roughly same vocabulary size before participating in the research.
Table 3. The differences between the 2 groups
Paired Samples Test
Paired Differences
95% Confidence Interval
of the Difference
Sig. (2-
tailed)
t
df
Std.
Deviation
Std. Error
Mean
Mean
Lower
Upper
experimental
Pair1 group- control -.08333 1.78164
group
.51432
-1.21533
1.04867
-.162
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.874
Looking at the Sig. (2-tailed) with 0.874 which is larger than 0.05. Therefore, there was no
difference between the two groups before the research.
3.2. The effectiveness of the Diglot-Weave Technique in learning vocabulary
The students took the vocabulary test in the format of Aptis as a post-test to give the
researcher data to compare with pre-test.
Table 4. Students’ vocabulary scores (post-test)
The experimental group
Student Scores
The control group
Scores
Student
S13
S14
S15
S16
S17
S18
S19
S20
S21
S22
S23
S24
S1
S2
12
13
8
7
6
S3
6
S4
7
5
S5
9
8
S6
9
9
S7
10
8
11
9
S8
S9
9
6
S10
S11
S12
7
8
8
6
9
8
As shown in table 4, the highest score was 13, and the lowest score was 5.
Table 5 and 6 below show the analysis of SPSS.
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology
Table 5. The mean score of each group
Paired Samples Statistics
Mean
9.0833
7.4167
N
Std. Deviation
Std. Error Mean
the experimental group
the control group
12
12
1.83196
1.72986
.52884
.49937
Pair 1
We can see that the mean score of the experimental group was 9.0833 which is larger than the
mean of the control group with 7.4167. This is the signal of a difference between the two groups.
To be more exact, the researcher used SPSS to analyze to be sure whether there was a difference
between the two groups after the research.
Table 6. The difference between the two groups
Paired Samples Test
Paired Differences
95% Confidence
Sig. (2-
tailed)
Std.
Error
Mean
Interval of the
Difference
t
df
Std.
Mean
Deviation
Lower
Upper
experimental
Pair 1 group- control 1.66667 2.46183 .71067
group
.10249
3.23084
2.345
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.039
On table 6, looking at Sig. (2-tailed) 0.039 which is smaller than the standard 0.05, it can
definitely be indicated that there was a difference between the two groups. The Diglot-Weave
Technique actually helped the students to improve their vocabulary.
Figure 3 gives information about how students evaluated the effectiveness of the Diglot-
Weave technique through the post-questionnaire.
Figure 3. Students’ evaluation of the Diglot-Weave Technique
It can be seen that, regarding “Very effective”, the proportion of students choosing it
accounted for half of the students (6 students). This opinion was also the most chosen as opposed
to the others. Following “Very effective” was “Effective” with 41.7% (5 students). There were
only 8.3% of the students (1 student) going with the opinion “Fair”. No students felt that the
technique was of little or no effectiveness.
Figure 4 illustrates the advantages of the Diglot-Weave technique. It can be seen that 66.7%
of the students (8 students) which accounted for the largest percentage believed that they agreed
with all three advantages when using the Diglot-Weave technique, including “Remembering
words immediately”, “Helping me guess the meanings of the English words”, and “Remembering
words longer than when I use the traditional teaching method”. The proportion of students
choosing “Remembering words longer than when I use the traditional teaching method” ranked
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology
second with 25%. Only 8.3% of students (1 student) went with “Helping me guess the meanings
of the English words”. Although no student chose the option “Remembering words
immediately”, that 66.7% of the students having chosen the options “All the answers above
indicates that they found the technique helpful in remembering words immediately.
Figure 4. Advantages of the Diglot-Weave Technique
4. Conclusion and recommendations
The essential findings discussed in the previous chapter help the researcher draw some
conclusions for the study.
The answer for the first research question was taken from the results of pre-questionnaire
and pre-test. Most of the students did not have adequate vocabulary and they had some
difficulties in learning vocabulary. In the Aptis vocabulary test, there was no difference
between the vocabulary scores of both the experimental group and the control group and both
of the groups had low scores.
The answer to the second research question shows the extent to which the Diglot-Weave
technique improves students' vocabulary. The conclusion was drawn from post-questionnaire and
post-test. The experimental group’s scores were higher than those of the control group. There was
a difference between the pre-test and the post-test scores of the experimental group. Therefore,
the researcher believed that the Diglot-Weave technique had a positive effect on the student’s
vocabulary learning. Most of the students thought the Diglot-Weave Technique was useful for
them to remember words longer and guess the meanings easier.
The findings of the research prove that the Diglot-Weave Technique is effective in helping
non-English students learn more new vocabulary quicker and easier and remember vocabulary
for a longer time. This technique is worth using for non-English majors who are at beginner level
and whose vocabulary size is limited. Compared to reading texts which are written totally in
English, this technique places less pressure on learners. They learn with ease, which helps to
motivate them in keeping on learning.
From the findings, it can be seen that the Diglot-Weave Technique has positive effect on the
learning of vocabulary. For this technique to show better results, the researcher would like to
make some recommendations.
Firstly, although teachers always pay attention to the number of English words in a text before
delivering to learners, this number should be adjusted after the first text was given to learners.
This adjustment confirms the suitability of the reading texts and the success of the experiment.
Secondly, English words should be selected in the order of difficulty. The first two or three texts
may include easy-to-guess words. The difficulty of the English words increases as learners read
later texts. Finally, the length of the texts should also be expanded gradually so that learners do
not feel stressed with learning.
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REFERENCES
[1] I.S.P. Nation, Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
[2] J. Read, Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[3] N. Azadel, and M. Ensieh, “The effect of teaching vocabulary through the Diglot-Weave Technique on
vocabulary learning of Iranian high school students,” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol.
98, no. 1, pp. 1340-1345, 2014.
[4] L. Jingxia, “How much the first language is there in Teachers’ talk in EFL classroom?” The Open
Applied Linguistics Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 59-67, 2008.
[5] C. Elizabeth, M. Paul, and Y. Stephen, “Second language vocabulary acquisition using a diglot reader
or a computer-based drill and practice program,” Computer Assisted Language Learning, vol. 20, no. 1,
pp. 67-77, 2007.
[6] English ABC, “180 English diglot stories,” (in Vietnamese). [Online]. Available:
https://tienganhabc.net/suu-tam/180-truyen-chem-tieng-anh.htm. [Accessed December 22, 2020].
[7] Y. Ji, “Communicative Language-Teaching through Sandwich stories for EFL children in China,”
TESL Canada Journal/Revue Test Du Cananda, vol. 17, no.1, pp. 103-113, 1999.
[8] V. Loom, “What is a Diglot-Weave and how it can help me learn a new language,” [Online]. Available:
language-7a0d49e3d8cc. [Accessed December 20, 2020].
[9] L. R. Gay, Educational research. New York: Merrill, 1992.
[10] J. Bell, Doing Your Research Project. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2005.
[11] E. Wilson, School-based Research: A Guide for Education Students. London: SAGE Publications Ltd,
2013.
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