Vocabulary Acquisition Learning and teaching vocabulary

Coady, J and Huckin, T Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, 1997, CUP.  Historic trends  Knowing words  Orthographic knowledge  Oral production  Tracking acquisition  Vocabulary enhancement strategies  Mnemonic methods  Extensive reading and SLA  Lexical approach

Knowing a word  What does knowing a word mean?

What does ‘knowing a word mean? We need to know:  Form (pronunciation and spelling)  Structure (the root word and its inflections)  Syntactical information  Meaning: referential; affective;pragmatic  Lexical relations with other words: synonymy, antonymy etc  Common collocations (Laufer B 1997 What’s in a word….) Learners/users will often only partially know a word And this can be represented on a cline: Not at all _________________________________fully (katamuku) (shiru) (natsukashi)

Factors affecting learnability  Make a list of factors which affect learnability

Factors affecting learnability  Pronounceability  Orthography  Length  Morphology: inflectional complexity; derivational complexity  Synformy (similarity to other forms)  Word class (nouns easiest; adverbs most difficult)  Semantic features of the word: idiomaticity; polysemy (Laufer B 1997 What’s in a word…)

How should we teach vocabulary?  Think of five strategies that a teacher has at his or her disposal

How should we teach vocabulary? Integrate new words with old Provide a number of encounters with the word (7 occurrences in a coursebook leads to learning?) Promote deep-level processing Facilitate imaging and concreteness Use a variety of techniques Encourage independent learning ( Sokmen A 1997 Current trends in teaching language vocabulary.)

Criteria for selecting vocabulary to be acquired  Think of as many factors as you can that might be considered in selecting or highlighting new vocabulary.

Vocabulary Syllabus Criteria for selection  Frequency: the more frequently a word is used, the sooner it should appear  Coverage: words with broader coverage should be taught first (eg go before walk or travel)  Range: words found in a variety of texts  Learnability: words which are similar, easily demonstrated meanings, which are regular.  Opportunism: words that are relevant to learners’ immediate situation.  Centres of interest: lexical sets that will interest learners in a particular group.  (adapted from, O’Dell F 1997 Incorporating Vocabulary into the Syllabus)

Practical presentation This web site includes some practical ideas for developing vocabulary acquisition: ations/Vocabulary_files/frame.htm