Chapter 3 Vocabulary
Paul Nation & Paul Meara
Contents:
3.1 What is vocabulary?
3.2 What vocabulary should be learned?
3.3 How should vocabulary be learned?
3.1 What is vocabulary?
3.1.1 Tokens & types
“Better to see than to hear.”
(six tokens)
(five types)
Some problems:
When counting tokens, it is necessary to
decide if we count items such as I’m or we’ll
as two tokens or one. If we are counting
tokens in spoken language, do we count um
and er as tokens, and do we count repetition
such as I…I…I said as tokens?
When counting types, what do we do with
identical types that have different meaning?
The answers will rely on our reasons for
counting.
3.1.2. Counting word families
a. Lemmas (the most conservative way)
A lemma is a set of related words that consists of
the stem form and inflected form that are all the
same part of speech.
e.g. watch, watches, watched, watching.
prefixes
un-, non-, ir-
suffixes
-ness, -ful, -ly
b. Items made with
3.1.3. “multi-word units” (MWUs)
A key feature: the words in the unit cannot be freely
substituted with other words; rather they have strong
partnership connections, a property called ‘collocation’.
What is considered to be a MWUs will depend on the purpose
of the counting.
Goal 1: to count items that would require learning for
comprehension
MWUs--------non-compositional
Goal 2: to come up with a list of items that could contribute to
fluency and a native-like turn of phrase
MWUs ---------frequent and grammatically coherent.
Vocabulary is the study of:
The meanings of words
Many words have several different meanings.
Vocabulary studies the meanings of the words and
the part of speech.
How the words are used
Study the words in context, apply what you learn by
writing sentences with your words.
Root words, prefixes, suffixes
Studying these will aid in the study of vocabulary.
3.2 What vocabulary should be learned?
Two major considerations to choose what
vocabulary should be focused on:
The needs of the learners
The usefulness of the vocabulary items
High-frequency words
Low-frequency words
The Academic Word List (Coxhead,2000)
The classic list of the most useful
words of English is Michael West’s
A General Service List of English
Words (GSL)
2000 high-frequency words
Based on written language
3.3 How should vocabulary be learned?
There are four strands of learning vocabulary:
3.3.1 Learning vocabulary from meaning-focused input
(listening and reading)
For most first language vocabulary learning
For non-native speakers, three major conditions need
to be met:
a. low unknown vocabulary load
b. quantity of input
c. some deliberate attention to the unknown
vocabulary
Reading: graded readers
for learners in the beginning and intermediate
stages.
begins with books about 5000 words long
written within a 300-500-word family vocabulary.
go up in four to six stages to books about
25,000-35,000 words long written within a 2000-2500word family vocabulary.
Nation and Wang (1999) estimate that second language
learners need to be reading at least one graded readers
every two weeks in order for noticeable learning to occur.
Listening:
a. low unknown vocabulary load
b. quantity of input
repeated listening (listen to the same story or
materials several times over several days)
c. some deliberate attention to the unknown
vocabulary
defining unknown items
noting them on the board
allowing learners the opportunity to negotiate
their meaning by asking for clarification.
non-negotiated learning from context.
3.3.2 Learning vocabulary from meaning-focused output
(speaking and writing)
Guidelines for speaking (Joe, Nation, and Newton, 1996)
a. predicting what parts of the written input are most
likely to be used in the task
b. using retelling
c. role-play
d. problem-solving discussion which draws heavily on
the written input
e. encouraging creative use of vocabulary through
having to reshape the written input to a particular purpose.
There are no studies of the learning of particular vocabulary
through writing, but written input to the writing task could
play a role similar to that which it can play in speaking tasks.
3.3.3 Deliberate vocabulary learning
Some guidelines should be followed through the use of
word cards:
a. Retrieve rather than recognize
b. Use appropriately sized groups of cards
c. Space the repetition
d. Repeat the words aloud or to yourself
e. Process the words thoughtfully
f. Avoid interference
g. Avoid a serial learning effect
h. Use context where this help
Deliberate vocabulary teaching
Such teaching can have three major goals:
a. result in well-established vocabulary learning
“rich instruction”
b. raising learners’ consciousness of particular words
c. help learners gain knowledge of strategies and of
systematic features of the language.
Deliberate vocabulary teaching can take a variety of form
including:
a. Pre-teaching of vocabulary before a language use
activity
b. Exercises that follow a listening or reading text, such as
matching words and definitions, and creating word
families using word parts or semantic mapping.
c. Self-contained vocabulary activities like the secondhand cloze.
d. Word detectives where learners report on words they
have found.
e. Collocation activities
f. Quickly dealing with words as they occur in a lesson.
3.3.4 Developing fluency with vocabulary across the four
skills
Two general approaches:
a. “the well-beaten path approach”
(repetition)
activities: repeated reading; the 4/3/2 technique
the best recording; rehearsed talks
b. “the richness approach”
(making many connections and associations with a
known item)
activities: speed-reading practice; easy extensive
reading; continuous writing; retelling.