The spacing effect refers to the learning benefit that comes from separating repeated study of target items by time or by other items. A prominent proposed explanation for this effect states that repeated exposures that occur closely together may not engage full attentional processing due to residual activation of the previous exposure and also, in an intentional learning context, due to a sense of familiarity that may result in strategic allocation of less study time to an item in massed repetitions. The present study used eye-tracking methodology to investigate the effects of temporal distribution of repeated exposures to novel second language words on attentional processing and learning of these words under intentional learning instructions. Adult native speakers of English read Finnish words embedded in English sentence contexts under massed and spaced conditions. The results showed that (a) massed repeated exposures received less attentional processing than spaced repeated exposures; (b) target words were better remembered in the spaced condition; and (c) attention was a significant mediator of the obtained spacing effect, in line with the predictions of the deficient processing account of the spacing effect. Implications for vocabulary learning are discussed.

Within the field of computer assisted language learning (CALL), scant literature exists regarding the effectiveness and practicality for secondary students to utilize data-driven learning (DDL) for vocabulary acquisition. In this study, there were 100 participants, who had a mean age of thirteen years, and were attending an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This particular milieu unsurprisingly comprised ‘third culture kids’ (TCKs) and ‘cross-cultural kids’ (CCKs). They were assigned to a control and experimental group; both had several intensive weeks of online-dictionary learning training, while the experimental group also experienced intensive DDL training. This was done prior to the start of the eight-week longitudinal study. Major findings included a significant longitudinal main effect for both groups, significantly overall higher results for the experimental group than the control, and a significant difference among subjects’ grade level was discovered. Furthermore, the experimental group exhibited a significantly marked increase in vocabulary results in the later weeks of the experiment. In general, these results show that DDL can be successful in the secondary school English as a foreign language (EFL) context and that it promotes significantly better vocabulary acquisition when used in conjunction with online-dictionary vocabulary learning methods, especially for a sustained longitudinal period of time.