Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to develop two types of courseware for teaching English vocabulary and to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches: a traditional approach and an integrated approach. The traditional approach consists of two widely-used techniques: presentation and cloze test. The integrated approach, on the other hand, is a systematic combination of six steps which is based on several psychological theories of learning. Although the target words were presented in contexts in both approaches, the sentences were divided into chunks in the integrated approach. Eighty-nine words were carefully selected for the teaching experiment considering the level of the subjects. Seventeen Japanese college students worked with both approaches by using a CAI for 3 hours on the average, during a period of one month. The effectiveness of the two approaches were measured by a set of tests administered immediately after and several weeks after the instruction. The result showed the superiority of the integrated approach over the traditional approach in terms of acquisition and retention rates. The result of the questionnaire survey conducted after the instruction also showed the learners' preference for the integrated approach.
