Guess First or Learn First? What My Research on Vocabulary Exercises Found

Written By Brian Strong

What’s the issue?

Most vocabulary exercises are built one of two ways: either students learn a word and its meaning before they practice it, or they’re handed a blank to fill in cold, guess, and find out the answer afterward. Both approaches show up constantly in textbooks and apps, and both have a certain logic to them: practicing something you just learned should help it stick, and getting corrected right after a wrong guess should too. My colleagues and I set out to test which one actually holds up, using phrasal verbs (think give up or break down) as our test case, since they’re some of the toughest vocabulary items for learners to pick up. What we found says something about vocabulary teaching more broadly, not just phrasal verbs.

What does the research say?

Guessing before instruction turned out to be the weaker approach. In one study, 140 English learners in Japan were split two ways: half learned a set of phrasal verbs before practicing them, half guessed cold and got the answer afterward. The group that learned the words first came out ahead, both on a test right away and one a week later. The bigger surprise was what happened to the wrong guesses. Even after students saw the correct answer, a quarter of their original mistakes turned up again, unchanged, on the test a week later. Telling a student “that’s wrong, here’s the right answer” doesn’t erase the wrong answer nearly as well as we tend to assume.

There’s a wrinkle, though. A wrong guess isn’t necessarily wasted as long as the student can still remember making it. Students who could recall their own original guess when they were shown the correct answer went on to remember the correct answer better than students who’d forgotten their guess entirely. The error can turn into a memory hook instead of dead weight, but only if it isn’t erased or brushed aside.

Even small formatting choices mattered more than we expected going in. Take the phrasal verb give up, as in give up smoking. We tested two versions of a fill-in-the-blank exercise for it. The first version reads: “give ___ smoking.” Students fill in up. The second version reads: “___ up smoking.” Students fill in give. Students remembered the phrasal verb better after the first version, where up was the missing word. Which word you choose to blank isn’t a throwaway decision. It shapes what actually gets learned.

The TESL Classroom Connection

Guess-first exercises rest on an assumption: get it wrong, get corrected, and the correct version sticks. That holds up fine when students already know enough to make an educated guess. It falls apart for brand-new or confusing vocabulary, which happens to be most of what vocabulary exercises are for in the first place. With nothing to guess from, students land on something close to random, and that wrong answer can go on competing with the right one long after a teacher has “corrected” it. None of this means tossing your textbook out. Most materials just need a few small adjustments, not a rewrite.

Try this!

1. Teach the word first, even briefly. Two or three minutes previewing new vocabulary before a guessing exercise is often enough to turn a blind guess into real practice.
2. Skip the eraser. When you review an exercise together, have students write the correct answer next to their original guess instead of crossing it out. Remembering the error seems to help the correct answer stay put.
3. Pick the blank on purpose. In a fill-in-the-blank task, leave out whichever part is hardest to predict; for phrasal verbs that’s usually the small word like up, out, or down, rather than just blanking whatever word comes first.

The full study is open access if you want the details: Evaluating the Application of a Gap-Fill Exercise on the Learning of Phrasal Verbs: Do Errors Help or Hinder Learning? (Strong & Leeming, 2024, TESOL Quarterly).