Vocabulary Acquisition

Learning and teaching vocabulary

Coady, J and Huckin, T Second Language

Vocabulary Acquisition, 1997, CUP. Historic trends Knowing words Orthographic knowledge Oral production Tracking acquisition Vocabulary enhancement strategies Mnemonic methods Extensive reading and SLA Lexical approach

Knowing a word

What does knowing a word mean?

What does ‘knowing a word mean?

We need to know: Form (pronunciation and spelling) Structure (the root word and its inflections) Syntactical information Meaning: referential; affective;pragmatic Lexical relations with other words: synonymy, antonymy etc Common collocations (Laufer B 1997 What’s in a word….)Learners/users will often only partially know a wordAnd this can be represented on a cline:Not at all _________________________________fully(katamuku) (shiru) (natsukashi)

Factors affecting learnability

Make a list of factors which affect learnability

Factors affecting learnability

Pronounceability Orthography Length Morphology: inflectional complexity; derivational complexity Synformy (similarity to other forms) Word class (nouns easiest; adverbs most difficult) Semantic features of the word: idiomaticity; polysemy

(Laufer B 1997 What’s in a word…)

How should we teach vocabulary?

Think of five strategies that a teacher has at his or her disposal

How should we teach vocabulary?

Integrate new words with old Provide a number of encounters with the word (7

occurrences in a coursebook leads to learning?) Promote deep-level processing Facilitate imaging and concreteness Use a variety of techniques Encourage independent learning (Sokmen A 1997 Current trends in teaching language vocabulary.)

Criteria for selecting vocabulary to be acquired

Think of as many factors as you can that might be considered in selecting or highlighting new vocabulary.

Vocabulary Syllabus

Criteria for selection Frequency: the more frequently a word is used, the sooner it should

appear Coverage: words with broader coverage should be taught first (eg go

before walk or travel) Range: words found in a variety of texts Learnability: words which are similar, easily demonstrated meanings,

which are regular. Opportunism: words that are relevant to learners’ immediate

situation. Centres of interest: lexical sets that will interest learners in a

particular group. (adapted from, O’Dell F 1997 Incorporating Vocabulary into the

Syllabus)

Practical presentation

This web site includes some practical ideas for developing vocabulary acquisition:

http://sched.sbu.edu/courses/fb1/Presentations/Vocabulary_files/frame.htm