Learning and Teaching Vocabulary

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    LEARNINGANDTEACHING

    VOCABULARYProf. Tamar Mikeladze

    Telavi State University

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    WORDFREQUENCY

    What do you think are the ten most frequent words

    in English? Would you teach them all to beginners?

    Why do you think frequency is important?

    Keyword:

    word frequency: simply measured by counting how

    often a word or word form occurs in a large sample

    of spoken or written language, such as the BritishNational Corpus (BNC) (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk)

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    The first surprise on looking at this list is that

    most of the words feature in the discussion of

    grammar in Chapter 2 since they are structure

    words, such as articles the, pronouns it,

    auxiliaries would and forms of the verb be.

    Usually the teaching of structure words is seen

    as part of grammar, not vocabulary. Frequency

    is taken to apply more to content words.

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    Influential as frequency has been in teaching, it has

    not played a major role inSLA research. It belongs

    more to the descriptive Lang3 sense of language

    as a collection of sentences. It is true that you are

    more likely to remember a word you meet everyday than one you only meet once. But there are

    many other factors that make students learn words.

    A swear word **** said accidentally when the

    teacher drops the tape recorder is likely to beremembered by the students for ever, even if it is

    never repeated. Common words like because and

    necessary are still spelt wrongly after students

    have been meeting them for many years.

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    Frequency is usually established nowadays from a

    large corpus of a language, such as the BNC for

    English.

    Words vary extremely in how often they are used.

    Frequency is only one factor in the choice of words

    to teach.

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    FOCUSINGQUESTIONS

    What do you know about a word like man if you

    speak English?

    When you teach students the meaning of a word,

    what do you mean by meaning and how do you

    teach it?

    Keyword:

    argument structure: the aspect of a word thatdictates the structures in which it may be used, for

    example, the verb give requires an animate

    subject, a direct object and an indirect object: Peter

    gave a stone to the wolf

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    Most people assume that knowing a word is a

    matter of knowing that plane in English means

    or that the English word plane mea

    A word in the Language sense of language asknowledge in the mind is more than its meaningns

    the same as laereo in Italian.

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    EXAMPLEOFTHEWORDMAN

    FORMSOFTHEWORD

    Pronunciation /mJn/ or /mn/ (chairman)

    Spellingdouble n in man verb form

    Grammatical properties Grammatical categorynoun, verb, possessive

    form, plural, subject or object

    Possible and impossible structures- She manned

    the barricades, not They manned. the argumentstructure of words is pivotal in language acquisition.

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    LEXICALPROPERTIES

    Collocations. We know many more or less set

    expressions in which the word man conventionally

    goes with other words, such as my good man,

    man in the street, man to man, Man of God, to

    separate the men from the boys, my man Jeeves,and many others.

    Appropriateness. my man may be used as a form

    of address Hi my man. The prime minister might

    be surprised at being greeted with Hi my man, apop star might not. We have to know when and to

    whom it is appropriate to use a word.

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    MEANING

    General meanings. We know general properties

    about the meaning of man, such as male, adult,

    human being, concrete, animate. These aspects

    of meaning, called semantic features or

    components of meaning, are shared with manyother words in the language.

    Specific meanings. We know a range of specific

    senses for man. The OED has 17 main entries for

    man as a noun, ranging from A human being(irrespective of sex or age) to One of the pieces

    used in chess.

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    Hence the message for language teaching is thatvocabulary is everywhere. It connects to the systems ofphonology and orthography through the actual forms ofthe words, to the systems of morphology and grammarthrough the ways that the word enters into grammatical

    structures and through grammatical changes to thewords form, and to the systems of meaning through itsrange of general and specific meanings and uses.

    Knowing a word means its spoken and written forms, itsgrammatical and lexical properties and its meaning.

    Vocabulary impinges on all areas of languageacquisition and is not just learning sets of words andmeanings.

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    ONEWORD-STOREORTWOINTHEL2

    USERSMIND?

    When you learn a new word in a second language,

    do you try to keep it separate from your first

    language words?

    When you teach a new word do you try to link it to

    words in the first language, say, by translation, or

    do you keep it separate?

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    THEFUNDAMENTALQUESTIONINSLA VOCABULARYRESEARCHIS

    HOWTHEWORDSOFTHETWOLANGUAGESARESTOREDINTHE

    MIND. THEVARIOUSALTERNATIVESARESETOUTBELOW.

    1.Separate s tores. The vocabulary of the secondlanguage is kept entirely separate from that of the first:an English person who learns the word libre in Frenchkeeps it separate from the English word free.

    2. L2 store dependent o n L1 store. The two word-storesare tightly linked so that L2 words are always related toL1 words; to think of the French word libre meansthinking first of the English word free.

    3. Overlapp ing s tores. There is an overlapping system sothat some words are shared, some not; libre in Frenchmight be associated with English free, liberty orliberal.

    4. Sing le sto re. There is a single overall word-store forboth languages; French libre and English free arestored together.

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    The L1 and the L2 sets of vocabulary in the L2

    users mind may be related in various ways,

    ranging from completely separate to completely

    integrated.

    Research suggests that in many cases the two

    vocabulary stores are closely linked.

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    TYPESOFMEANING

    What do you mean by meaning?

    What nouns can you remember learning first in your

    first language? In your second?

    Keywords

    components of meaning: general aspects of

    meaning which are shared by many words; boy

    has the components male, human, young, andso on

    prototype theory: words have whole meanings

    divided into basic level (car), subordinate level

    (Ford) and superordinate level (vehicle)

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    COMPONENTSOFMEANINGANDLEXICAL

    RELATIONS

    Often the meaningof a word can bebroken up intosmallercomponents. Thus

    the meaning of girlis made up offemale, humanand non-adult.The meaning of

    apple is made upof fruit, edible,round, and so on.

    Words do not exist by themselves, however, butare always in relationship to other words. Themeaning of hot relates to cold; the meaning ofrun to walk, of high to low, of pain topleasure, and so on. When we speak, wechoose one word out of all those we haveavailable, rejecting all the words we could havesaid: I love you potentially contrasts with I hate

    you. Words function within systems of meaning.A metaphor for meaning that is often used istraffic lights. When a traffic light has two colours,red and green, red means stop, contrasting withgreen go. Hence red does not just mean stop,it also means not green, that is, dont go, asystem with two options. Add another colour,called amber in England, and the whole systemchanges, with amber acting as a warning that

    something is going to change, having twopossibilities: amber alone, officially stop(unofficially, prepare to stop), and amber andred together, officially stop (unofficially prepareto go). If a simple three-colour system can leadto such complexity of meanings (and indeedtraffic accidents), think what happens with thethousands of words in any human language.

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    PROTOT

    YPES

    Prototype theory claims that children first learn words that are

    basic because they reflect aspects of the world that stand out

    automatically from the rest of what they seeprototypes.

    Sparrow is a basic-level term compared to a superordinate

    level term like bird, or a subordinate-level term like housesparrow. The basic level of vocabulary is easier to use and to

    learn. On this foundation, children build higher and lower levels of

    vocabulary. Some examples of the three levels of vocabulary are

    seen in Table 3.2.

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    WAYSOFMEANING

    Words have many different kinds of meaning, whethersharing general components, linked in lexical relationsor related to prototypes and levels.

    While some aspects of meaning are universal, there aredifferences between languages in how they express

    concepts of colour, and so on, which may affect thethinking of L2 users.

    Vocabulary strategies

    To understand an unfamiliar L2 word, people make use

    of a variety of strategies, such as guessing, usingdictionaries, deducing meaning from the words formand relating it to cognates.

    To acquire new L2 words, people use strategies such asrepetition, organizing them in the mind, and linking themto existing knowledge.

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