Daniela A. Meyer –
Which vocabulary words or phrases do you remember best? How did you learn them? How often do you use them when speaking English? How does your brain retrieve them? As Jeanne McCarten stated in Cambridge University Press’s pedagogical booklet entitled Teaching Vocabulary; Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom, ‘the acquisition of vocabulary is the most critical component of successful language learning. Until recently, however, it has been difficult to determine the most important words and phrases needed to establish a suitable vocabulary for conducting conversations most effectively. The Corpus’ massive collection of texts has given us access to a wealth of information regarding spoken and written English that was previously unavailable.”
So, what can we learn from the Corpus? Let´s consider some questions: how many words are there in English? The Global Language Monitor, which tracks language trends, especially in the media, has counted up to almost a million. Webster´s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, includes 470,000 entries.
But counting words is complicated! For example, let´s think of the word family RUN: run, runs, running, ran, runner, runners. Do we count these as one word or six? How do we count different uses of the same word, ie. run a marathon and run a company? How about idiomatic uses, such as run out of gas, feel run down, or a run of bad luck? And, of course, new words are being added to the language all of the time, such as internet, surf the web, podcast, blog, etc.
Despite these difficulties, researchers have estimated that native speakers know between 12,000 and 20,000 words, depending on their level of education. But still, 12,000 to 20,000 words seems too many for our learners, right? Fortunately, it is possible to get along in English with fewer than 20,000 words! Because of high-frequency words, it is said that learners can understand a large proportion of texts with a relatively small vocabulary. Did you know, for example, that learners who know the most frequent 2,000 words should be able to understand almost 80 percent of the words in an average text? A knowledge of 5,000 words increases learners’ understanding to 88.7 percent. For spoken language, the news is even better. About 1,800 words make up over 80% of the spoken corpus, according to Michael McCarthy.
So, what´s the answer to ‘what do we need to teach’?! The most frequent 1,800/2,000 words! But what ARE the most common 1,800 or 2,000 words? That´s where a corpus may help… A Corpus is a collection of texts, stored in a computer. The texts can be written or spoken language. Written texts like newspapers and magazines can be entered into the computer from a scanner, or CD. Spoken texts, like conversations, are recorded and then the recordings are transcribed. It is then possible to analyze the language in the corpus with corpus software tools to see how people really speak or write.
The Cambridge International Corpus essentially tells us about what can we learn from the Corpus about vocabulary that will help learners become more successful communicators. For that, learners need to learn about:
- Frequency: which words and expressions are most frequent and which are rare;
- Differences in speaking and writing: which vocabulary is more often spoken and which is more often written;
- Contexts of use: the situations in which people use certain vocabulary;
- Collocation: which words are often used together;
- Grammatical patterns: how words and grammar combine to form patterns;
- Strategic use of vocabulary: which words and expressions are used to organize and manage discourse.
And what do we need to teach about vocabulary? As Jeanne McCarten says, in the above-mentioned booklet, “learning vocabulary is a challenge for learners, partly because of the size of the task, and partly because of the variety of vocabulary types to be learned, including single words, phrases, collocations, and strategic vocabulary, as well as grammatical patterning, idioms, and fixed expressions. Richards (1976) and Nation (2001) list the different things learners need to know about a word before they can say that they have learned it. These include:
- The meaning(s) of the word
- Its spoken and written forms
- What ‘word parts’ it has (e.g., any prefix, suffix, and ‘root’ form)
- Its grammatical behavior (e.g., its word class, typical grammatical patterns it occurs in)
- Its collocations
- Its register
- What associations it has (e.g., words that are similar or opposite in meaning)
- What connotation it has
- Its frequency”
As teachers, we obviously cannot teach everything there is to know about a word the first time it is presented to students! If we were to try to do so, lessons would become very tedious. We also need to consider which vocabulary we want students to be able to use when they speak or write (their active or productive vocabulary) and which we want them to recognize and understand only (their passive or receptive vocabulary). Additionally, even in elementary levels, it is important to include in vocabulary lessons not just single words, but also larger “chunks” such as collocations, phrases, or expressions, in order to help students to assemble the language they need to communicate more fluently.
So, how can we help learners learn vocabulary, in spite of the sheer number of words and phrases to learn, and the depth of the knowledge students need to know about each vocabulary item? There is a vast amount of research into how learners learn best and how teachers might best teach. Here are some key principles. When teaching vocabulary in class, teachers can
- Focus on vocabulary: give vocabulary a high profile in the syllabus and the classroom so that students can see its importance and perceive that learning a language is not just about learning grammar.
- Offer variety: the more appealing the materials are, the better. Use different ways to present vocabulary, including pictures, sounds, stories, conversations, web pages, questionnaires, etc.
- Repeat and recycle: learning vocabulary is largely about remembering, and students generally need to see, say, and write newly learned words many times before they can be said to have learned them.
- Provide opportunities to organize vocabulary: textbooks often present new vocabulary in thematic sets as an aid to memory, but there are other ways to organize them. Find broad headings that are relevant to your students, and encourage them to use these as well.
An important part of learning vocabulary happens outside the classroom. We need to help students become independent in and out of class. As Gu (2003) summarizes, “Good learners seem to be those who initiate their own learning, selectively attend to words of their own choice, studiously try to remember those words, and seek opportunities to use them.” We can therefore help students by setting structured tasks that can be done out of class. Some ideas are: encourage students to keep vocabulary notebooks, to exploit the Internet, and to activate and practice vocabulary in their everyday like.
As Jeanne Mc Carten wrote (2007), “we need to help students understand that learning is a gradual process that takes place in small, manageable increments over time, and to encourage them to seed additional information on their own, personalizing the learning experience and tailoring it to their own specific needs.”
Reference
- McCarten, J. (2007). Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom. Cambridge University Press
- McCarthy, M. (2004). Touchstone: From Corpus to Course Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- O’Keefe, A., McCarthy, M. , and Carter, R. (2007). From Corpus to Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Gu, P. Y. (2003). Vocabulary Learning in a Second Language: Person, Task, Context and Strategies. TESL-EJ 7:2
- Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This post is offered by: Cambridge University Press
