Give Vocabulary Learning a Chance

Seán Scurfield

Seán Scurfield has been teaching English in Spain for almost twenty years, mostly in The University of Cantabria. He is interested in all aspects of vocabulary teaching and learning, particularly vocabulary size testing, word frequency analysis and its applications and guessing meaning from context.

Give Vocabulary Learning a Chance

Introduction

After a long period of neglect, research into vocabulary acquisition has blossomed since the 1980's to such a point that it is now considered a bona fide sub-branch of SLA research. The fruits of this work mean that we now know a great deal more about the how, where, when, why and how much of lexical acquisition by L2 learners.

However, attempts to put the research into practice by means of a comprehensive lexical approach have met with little success. The reasons for this failure are beyond the scope of this article. The aim is rather to salvage some of the main findings of second language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) research, particularly those with a direct relevance for language teaching, and to suggest some principles and activities for applying these findings in the classroom situation.

Numbers and Targets

One of the main initial concerns was to establish useful and realistic targets in terms of the numbers of words to be learned. One encouraging finding showed that the 2,000 most frequent word families of English make up around 80% of the individual words or word tokens of an average English text. Table 1 below, which is based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus by Carroll, Davies and Richman (1971), shows this and some other rather interesting and intriguing statistics, revealing, for example, that just 10 words account for 23.7% of word tokens in an average text.

Table 1. Vocabulary size and coverage

These statistics indicate that, certainly in the first stages of learning English, there is a fairly clear and seemingly attainable objective to be reached - that of acquiring, on a receptive level at least, the two thousand most frequent word families.

However, while such a level of lexical knowledge might be considered an apt, realistic and indeed recommendable goal for students in the initial stages of learning a language,

it has been statistically proven to be insufficient for the majority of situations in which the learner might then find herself. Should her objective be to further her lexical competence independently through reading, or to go on to a university or other academic course in the English language, the shortcomings of this knowledge would soon become apparent.

The problem evolves around reaching what some linguists have coined 'the threshold level'. In the above scenario of learners reaching a level of the 2000 or so most frequent word families, they would know on average four out of every five words in a text. In other words, one word in every five would be unknown to them. The learner-reader then has two alternatives for finding out the meaning of these words. The first is to look them up in a dictionary, but such is the volume of unknown words that this task would be so laborious as to dissuade even the keenest learner from continuing. The second alternative is to attempt to guess the meaning of the new words from the context, but the important point here is that the number of words needed to make successful guessing from context at least possible is far higher than four out of every five. Most authors (Nation and Waring, 1997; Laufer, 1989) claim that a learner needs to know around 19 out of every 20 words in a text to guess the meaning of the unknown words. Liu and Nation (1985) pointed out that 'we need a vocabulary of about 3,000 words which provide coverage of at least 95 per cent of a text before we can efficiently learn from context with unsimplified text.' (Mentioned by Nation and Waring 1997, 11).

Lexical Acquisition and Number of Meetings

Several experiments have been carried out to determine the number of meetings a learner requires to learn a word. Results have shown some variation (Saragi et al. put it as high as 16), but most (e.g. Nation, 1990, Tinkham, 1993) set the average at around five to six meetings. Furthermore, it has been shown experimentally (Bloom and Shuell, 1981; Dempster, 1987) that spaced repetition is more effective than massed repetition; thus, if we are to spend 20 minutes focusing on a word, it is more effective to spread the minutes out over a period of several classes than to spend the whole 20 minutes in one class.

This knowledge has been available now for some years, but seems to have fallen on deaf ears as far as materials designers are concerned. Coursebooks should surely reflect such a basic and well-founded principle but this is generally not the case. Studies of some of the more popular contemporary coursebooks by Oxford and Scarcella (1994) and Schmitt (2000) have found that most new words taught in coursebooks are not repeated in another exercise or even found in the book again.

As stated above, most teachers logically assume that coursebook writers have some kind of principle behind their choices and thus take for granted that the presentation of vocabulary will be coherent and rational. Sadly and indeed, unforgivably, this is often not the case.

Collocation and Lexical Phrases

Research (both L1 and L2) into the mental lexicon has shown that we do not only store and retrieve words individually. Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) and Lewis (1993, 1997) have observed that a significant amount of the English language is made up of lexical phrases, which range from phrasal verbs (two or three words) to longer institutionalised expressions (Lewis, 1993, 1997). The importance of collocation, the way in which some words have a tendency to occur together, is also widely recognised. These two features are highly regular components of naturally occurring language but have not been given the attention they merit in ELT.

3. Some principles and activities for applying these findings in the classroom situation

A Two-stage System

After studying this evidence, several writers (most notably Nation and Waring,1997 and D. Willis, 1990) have proposed a two-stage system of learning the English language which consists in building up elementary and intermediate students' receptive vocabulary knowledge using the 3,000 most frequent word families and then, once this milestone is passed, providing them with training and skills to interpret the meanings of newly met words. The argument goes that outside these 3,000 word families, words appear with so low a frequency that it is of little value to teach them explicitly. Classroom time will be more usefully spent on practising the correct use of dictionaries, guessing meanings of words from context, increasing learner autonomy and negotiating the difficult task of converting the store of receptive vocabulary into productive vocabulary.

THE FIRST STAGE

Using Word Lists

A good Word Frequency List (Michael West's General Service List, though first published in 1953, has certainly stood the test of time and is still resisting the onslaught of the new corpus-built lists) can help the teacher to decide which vocabulary his students should encounter at the various stages of learning. Vocabulary Size Tests, such as those developed by Nation, can help the teacher to determine how high up on the list to start.

An alternative, though much maligned, use of Word Lists, is to give your students sections of it for them to study. Rote learning of decontextualised lexical items such as this is clearly unfashionable and does not lead to a full knowledge of a word's meanings and nuances but it can help in the first stage of learning a word - that of associating its form and its meaning. It may not work for everybody, but much has been written in recent years about individual learning styles and I have found that some students enjoy the 'statistical' challenge of working their way up through a Word List.

Word Storage

At the very least, our students should undertake some kind of systematic storage of new words. Nation and Waring (1997), among others, have suggested that word cards have several advantages over the traditional notebook, pointing to the following qualities:

They can provide a sense of achievement as the learner can physically see the increase in numbers of words learnt.

Polysemy can be dealt with by adding new meanings on the same card.

The information can be extended with each meeting of the word, noting down the sentences in which it occurs thus providing insights into the lexical patterning.

They can also contain information on collocation and lexical phrases in which the word occurs.

They are portable and can thus be used anywhere, at any time.

Number of meetings

We have seen above that there are several advantages to meeting the same lexical unit several times over a prolonged period and that, as a general rule, coursebooks do not provide sufficient opportunities for this to happen. The onus is therefore on teachers to provide these opportunities. We must keep a note of new words and make sure that our students encounter them again in the following days and weeks. For example, if we read a text in class on crime introducing several new crime terms to our students, we can follow it up later in the class by a simple activity focusing on the form of the words, such as a phonetics exercise or an anagrams game. We can recycle them again in the next class with a crossword or another word game. The following week we can do some vocabulary exercises on the same topic. A week or two later, we can read another text on the same subject, perhaps leading to a task requiring making a decision or problem-solving. In the above case of crime vocabulary, we might want to present our students with the outlines of some court cases and to have them decide which punishment they would pass if they were the judge.

Another way of ensuring that our students encounter new words a sufficient number of times is by having them read graded readers. Graded readers are an extremely useful but much-neglected resource for lexical acquisition. We can encourage their use by keeping an extensive stock of them in our institutions and allowing our students to make their own choices as to which stories to read. We can also set the ball rolling by setting aside some class time for silent reading.

Collocation and Lexical units

The explanation of lexis in context and vocabulary exercises should focus not only on single words but also on collocation and lexical phrases.

THE SECOND STAGE

The learner is now in a position to continue the task of lexical acquisition with a greater degree of autonomy and the main role of the teacher is to guide the learner in this process. There is still room, however, for explicit vocabulary teaching, particularly with a view to consolidating knowledge of words from the receptive to the productive stage. The typical information transfer activities of communicative language teaching are appropriate for this purpose.

Extensive Reading

The best way of ensuring that learners continue to receive sufficient exposure to new words is through extensive reading. Extensive listening is obviously also extremely valuable and should be encouraged but it is far less accessible.

We can encourage our students to read extensively in the following ways:

Making them aware of the importance of reading for continued lexical acquisition.

Making an extensive and varied store of books, magazines and newspapers available to them.

Having silent reading sessions in class.

Introducing them to some of the major figures of English literature.

Encouraging students to follow the news on English language newspaper sites on the Internet.

Pointing to some of the valuable resources available on the net.

Guessing from Context

The ability to guess the meaning of words from context is essential if our learners are to benefit fully from the reading of unsimplified texts. This skill is mainly acquired through practice but it can be facilitated through classroom activities such as the following:

Read a text together and ask students to guess the meanings of unknown words or lexical phrases.

Encourage them to think about the following features of the word:

Part of speech

Word parts - does it have any prefix or suffix ?

Relationships with other words in the sentence and in the paragraph.

Dictionary Use

The other invaluable skill at this stage, and one which has been traditionally undervalued in ELT, is dictionary use. Training can be given in the following areas:

Knowing when to use it: this means not looking up every word, but rather only those words which are essential for understanding the text or words which appear several times in a text.

Finding the required information quickly.

Understanding all of the abbreviations.

Understanding phonetic transcriptions.

The Internet

We need to make our learners aware of some of the many resources available on the net. We can do this by holding joint netsurfing sessions. A good place to start is www.towerofenglish.com and a fascinating resource for reading a novel (Jack London's "The Call of The Wild") with concordancing (click once on any word and it is read out, click twice and you get more sentences including the word) is available at Tom Cobb's excellent 'Compleat Lexical Tutor' site.

6. Conclusion

I do not wish to advocate an exclusively lexical focus in language teaching. Activities and tasks aimed at promoting communication are clearly beneficial, and some explicit teaching of grammar is essential particularly in the early stages of language learning. I do consider, however, that we should pay more heed to the proven findings of research into vocabulary acquisition and try to incorporate them into our classroom practices in a more systematic way. Only then can we really Give Vocabulary Learning a Chance.

REFERENCES

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Carter, R & McCarthy, M (Eds.) 1988. Vocabulary and Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Cobb; T. 2003. The Compleat Lexical Tutor. Available online: http://132.208.224.131/

Dempster, F.N. 1987. Effects of variable encoding and spaced presentation on vocabulary learning. Journal of Educational Psychology,79:162-170.

Laufer, B. 1989. What percentage of text lexis is essential for comprehension? In C. Lauren & M. Nordman (Eds.) Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters: 316-323.

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