Devising a lexical curriculum

How many words should be in the curriculum? If by the end of elementary they should know 1200 words, then include 1200 words? But: these are also the most boring words. Do not provide coverage of any interesting topic, story, description. Same problem at intermediate and proficiency levels. Solution?

According to frequency? Surprising discrepancies between corpora Problem of multi-word items Problems of homonyms, homophones, homographs Problem of adult sources Problem of native-speaker linguistic and cultural background

But there are other considerations:

1. Easiness of teaching/learning Semantic groups – very convenient to teach, but difficult to learn. And will inevitably include infrequent items Words that are easier to learn (e.g. big rather than large) – Concrete meanings – Short – Easily pronounced and spelt – Cognates – Words that have a clear translation into L1 (Chen & Truscott, 2012)

Classroom needs Classroom instructions (open, listen, write…) Classroom items (pencil, book, page) Textbook instructions (circle, answer…) Metalanguage (word, sentence, verb) Greetings, leavetakings, requests (please, thank you)

Student -appropriate ‘fun’ items (crocodile…) child-teenage language (cool, facebook) local context (Israel, Middle East, Hebrew, Arabic)

Investment ‘generalizable’ items flexible chunks

Range Number of different contexts in which an item may occur e.g. lesson has a narrow range basic has a wide range

Some issues discussed by Martinez Martinez, R. (2013). A framework for the inclusion of multi-word expressions in ELT. ELT Journal, *

Importance of learning chunks Learners tend to over-estimate their understanding of a text: ignore ‘chunks’ Readers experience greater ‘processing load’ if there are malformed chunks (e.g. cheap cost instead of low cost) Explicit teaching of chunks increases proficiency Problem of ‘transparency’

So two sometimes conflicting considerations Frequency Transparency

infrequent   frequent take credit take issue take time take place transparent   opaque take credit take time take issue take place

Frequent take time take place (2) (1) Transparent Opaque take credit take issue (4) (3) Infrequent

Frequent guide decisions black and white (2) (1) Transparent Opaque explicit instruction hard and fast (4) (3) Infrequent

To take into account: 1. Is the expression potentially ‘deceptively transparent’? e.g. ‘every so often’ 2. Could the learner’s L1 influence accurate interpretation? e.g. ‘take place’ has no equivalent in Hebrew, whereas ‘black and white’ does.