Integrating vocabulary goals in university level, Spanish L2 content-based courses: flashcards for learning frequent words

Integrating language goals in upper-level content courses in language majors at U.S. universities has been encouraged in the literature. Nevertheless, few studies have examined students’ perceptions and gains when language learning goals are integrated. This action research study explores students’ perceptions and their actual gains when using flashcards in two content courses to learn the 4,000 to 5,000 most frequent Spanish words. These results are compared with the same and other students learning the 2,000 to 4,000 most frequent words while enrolled in a previous language-focused course in the major. Both groups reacted similarly to the flashcard activities, even though the students in the language course found them better integrated with their class goals. Learning of frequent words was higher in the language course than in the content courses, as measured by the ITT-Receptive Vocabulary Test. Pedagogical recommendations are given about how to better integrate vocabulary learning goals in content-courses for language majors.