Online Approaches to Learning Vocabulary: Teacher-Centred or Learner-Centred?

Examples of learning vocabulary through the computer are appearing with increasing regularity in the recent CALL literature. Much of this learning, however, tends to be teacher-centred in that learners often rely on teachers to select the vocabulary items that they are to study. In the current study, pre-intermediate learners of English studying at a university in Japan were divided into two groups: a teacher-centred (TC) group where the learners were provided with online vocabulary learning activities composed of items selected by the teacher and a learner-centred (LC) group where the learners were required to compile their own vocabulary lists which were then entered by the learners themselves into a specially designed online system that would then create the vocabulary learning activities from these items. Data were collected in the form of pre- and post-testing of vocabulary items that appeared in the teaching materials and through questionnaires regarding their perceptions of the system.