Lexical chunks Liu, D. (2003). The most frequently used spoken American English idioms: a corpus analysis and its implications. TESOL Quarterly 37(4), Martinez and Schmitt (forthcoming) Biber, D & Cortes, V.. (2004). 'If you look at...' lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25(3),

Useful points Martinez & Schmitt, Liu – meaningful, non- compositionality Martinez and Schmitt found about 1/10 of useful lexical items are multi-word a lot of phrasal verbs

Conclusion Such lists are a rough guide: but you need to adapt or supplement using your own common sense. About one in ten new items should be multi-word But also: non-transparent collocations (afraid of, do homework)

What can be done to ensure that students do indeed learn the most important lexical items, including lexical chunks… …by curriculum writers? …by materials writers? …by teachers?

Other criteria Apart from frequency: what other criteria might be important for choosing which items to teach? items that are culturally appropriate (fast (v), synagogue, mosque, church) items that are used in a variety of contexts and have a variety of meanings (‘range’) (use, head) items that have to do with students’ lives or interests, or will be useful to them (football, facebook) items that have to do with current events (rally, protest, prisoner) proper names (of people from other cultures, of nationalities, countries, languages, festivals etc.) items that are easy to learn because are cognates or easily spelt/pronounced items that have to do with classroom process (pencil, eraser, delete) ‘fun’ items for elementary school (crocodile, elephant) technology (enter, paste, mouse)

How many lexical items do students need to know? Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (under review) A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in vocabulary teaching. (TESOL Quarterly)

‘High-frequency’ words – the first 2000 – considered basic, essential. cost/benefit as a guiding principle Above 10,000 – ‘rare’ Nation estimates that need up to 8,000 – 9,000 level in order to read unsimplified texts with no problem.

Nation says that beyond first 2000 words – not worth teaching: rather, teach vocab-learning strategies to learners to they’ll be able to manage on their own. ???

Vocabulary Size and Text Coverage (Written and Spoken) Word Approximate written Approximate spoken Families coverage (%) coverage (%) 1st 1,000 78–81 81–84 2nd 1,000 8–9 5–6 3rd 1,000 3–5 2–3 4th–5th 1, –3 6th–9th 1, –1 10th–14th 1,000 <1 0.5 Proper nouns 2–4 1–1.5 14,000+ 1–3 1

But maybe 3000 more realistic? A range of research studies to show that 3,000 word families may be enough to cover conversational English Most graded readers get up to about 3000 ‘headwords’ – implying this is an important stage, and that after it they can start reading unsimplified. Defining vocabulary in dictionaries: LDOCE 2000, OALD 3000, Macmillan 2500 – come from first 3000.

Increase in reading scores as a result of learning more vocabulary Increased training in reading didn’t help much (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010)

The lack of a principled approach to teaching mid-frequency vocabulary High-frequency is systematically taught; low-frequency left to learners, What about mid-frequency? Nation says it can be left to the learners. Schmitt and Schmitt disagree. Little possibility of re-encounters of more advanced vocabulary; little exposure outside the classroom

In fact, research shows that learners quite often have shockingly small vocabularies (e.g. Akbarian, 2010; Ward, 2009), with Laufer (2000) showing that even after 1,000 hours or more of instruction, learners often do not master even the 3,000 word families of high-frequency vocabulary. It seems that mid-frequency vocabulary needs to be explicitly addressed in order to be learned effectively.

But it isn’t taught Folse 2010 found that teachers rarely teach new vocab, and even more rarely do they review it. Same goes for textbooks. Conclusion: need to teach mid-frequency vocabulary systematically; and review it.

How many lexical items do students need to know? By the end of … …Elementary school: 1,000 – 3,000 …Middle-school: 3,000 – 5,000 …High school: 5, ,000 (first figure: satisfactory; second figure: optimum target)