Etymology and Vocabulary Development for the L2 College Student Tom S. Bellomo University of Central Florida <tsb@mpinet.net> Abstract

The result of an in-class experiment demonstrated that etymology as a word attack strategy for L2 students does not offer an unfair advantage to students whose L1 is Latin-based (the Romance languages). A significant portion of the English language makes use of Latin roots and affixes; therefore, students whose original language is derived from Latin will initially have an advantage in word recognition due to cognates. A pre-test did in fact demonstrate this disparity between the two populations, though near equivalent scores on a post-test demonstrated that both Latin-based and non Latin-based languages equally benefited from direct instruction which utilized etymology as a word attack strategy.

Keywords: Etymology, Vocabulary