Raba and TazhanLearning and Teaching Vocabulary

“While without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”

David Wilkins, British linguist

The vast majority of students and teachers report that vocabulary acquisition is an essential part for language learning…

Word FrequencyIt measured by counting how often a word or word form occurs in a large sample of speaking or written language.

The most frequent words in the target language should be taught first which is the most teaching has been based on this idea.

Most frequent words are introduced in the beginner level.

According to BNC the most frequent words are

Most frequent words are structure words. According to BNC for three types of content words

are

It is more likely to remember a word that you meet everyday than you only meet once.

But, sometimes students learn a word which they meet only once like swear words or when a teacher drops something and say a rude word students learn it even if it is never repeated in a class.

Knowledge of Words

Learning vocabulary means acquiring long lists of words with their meanings, whether through some direct link or via translation in to the first language.

Knowledge of words

Forms of the word

pronunciation

spelling

Grammatical properties

Grammatical category

Possible and impossible structures

Idiosyncratic grammatical information

Word building

Lexical properties

collocations

appropriateness

meaning

General meaning

Specific meaning

One word-store or two in the L2 user’s mind? The L1 and the L2 sets of vocabulary in

the L2 user's mind maybe related in various ways, ranging from completely separate to completely integrated.

Types of meaning

Components of meaning: general aspect of meaning which are shared by many words: boy has the components “ male”, “human”, “young”, etc.

Lexical relations: words do not exist by themselves, but are always in relationship to other words… the meaning of hot relates to cold, etc.!!!!!!!!!!!

In lexical semantics, cruse (1986) explained that words can be synonyms or hyponyms for example dogs, cats, horse are kind of animals, or antonyms, etc.

Prototypes: words have whole meanings divided into basic level “car”, subordinate level “ford” and superordinate level “vehicle”.

Are meanings universal?While some aspects of meaning are universal, there are differences between languages in how they express concepts of color, etc., which may affect the thinking of L2 users.

Strategies for understanding and learning vocabulary To understand an unfamiliar L2 word,

people make use of variety of strategies, such as guessing, using dictionary, deducing meaning from the word’s form and relating to cognates.

To acquire new L2 words, people use strategies such as repetition, organizing them in the mind, and linking them to existing knowledge

Guess from the situation or context: this is the natural process of getting meaning for unknown words that we use all the time in our first language.

Use a Dictionary:The most popular way of getting the meaning of a new word like “calligraphy” is to look it up in a dictionary.-monolingual versus to translation dictionary: written in one language, used by native speakers and competent speakers.-reception versus production dictionary: production dictionaries permit one to hunt for the precise word to express something one wants to say.

- corpus-based dictionaries: depend on collecting a large sample of words from many sources, but recent dictionaries have been based on large-scale collections of real spoken and written language processed by computer.

Make deductions from the word form: try to deduce it from its actual form, I have encountered other words with the morpheme “lith” before, such as(megalith) which I understand to be a big stone, and (neolithic) which I understand stone age, hence I guess that (lith) is something to do with stone.

Strategies for acquiring words Repetition and rote learning: repeat the word again and again until you know it well, typically this is done by memorizing lists of words or by testing yourself repeatedly.

Organizing words in the mind:

Linking to existing knowledgeThe commonest way to remembering new vocabulary is to exploit the different memory system in our minds for linking new information to old.

Vocabulary and Teaching

Demonstrating The complexity Fitting in student’s strategies meaning of words

Audio visual traditional TBL not transfer L1,L2 show pic, miming, definition

Picture Translation no technique

Vocabulary and teaching Teach the complexity of words Fit in with the students' strategies Teach basic-level words first Teach lexical relationships Think about the first presentation of the word Teach some words through components of meaning Remember that it is how the word is practiced, not how

often, that is important Remember that students transfer L1 meanings as well

as the words themselves Put word in their structural context