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Recent thinking in vocabulary teaching is tending towards a dynamic, process-centred approach. Vocabulary learning is being seen more and more as a skill in which responsibility lies with the learner to develop his or her own lexicon. VocabBuddy has been designed with this in mind.
Teachers often advise learners to take notes on vocabulary items that they encounter for the first time in order to facilitate retention. However, it is important to remember that the simple act of storing a word--in whatever medium--does not guarantee its retrieval. Factors involved in short and long-term memorization will determine how well and for how long learners retain words. The strengths of the VocabBuddy program in this respect are that it allows learners to easily organise vocabulary items into meaningful groups, it increases the number of exposures learners receive to vocabulary items through the use of built-in vocabulary games, and it puts the onus on learners to choose which items to store.
Teachers of EFL recognise that it is difficult to select vocabulary items to cover with their classes since learners bring with them widely different vocabulary needs - a word unknown to one student may well be very familiar to his or her neighbour. Furthermore, research has shown that much vocabulary is learned by the students individually through reading, and not deliberately, under the teacher's control in class.
VocabBuddy aids EFL learners in this endeavour by enabling them to :
-create their own dictionaries of words and phrases each with notes, meanings, examples and pictures
-mark difficult or important entries in a Hotlist.
-listen to the pronunciation of any and all text with VocabBuddy's built in access to Microsoft text to speech technology
-play word games based on their dictionaries or Hot List, meanings and examples.
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