Internationally recognised as one of the leading texts in its field, this volume offers a comprehensive introduction to vocabulary for language teachers who would like to know more about the way vocabulary works. Two leading specialists make research and theory accessible, providing the background knowledge necessary for practitioners to make informed choices about vocabulary teaching and testing. This second edition retains the popular format of the first edition, and has been rewritten to take account of the many developments in the past 20 years. There is a greater focus on the vocabulary learning process, with new chapters on incidental learning, and intentional learning, and a new wide-ranging discussion of formulaic language. The book now also includes extensive treatment of word lists and vocabulary tests, with explanations of their various strengths and limitations. Updated further reading sections, and new Exercises for Expansion make this volume more invaluable than ever.

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Vocabulary in Language Teaching

A meta-analysis of the comparative distance education (DE) literature between 1985 and 2002 was conducted. In total, 232 studies containing 688 independent achievement, attitude, and retention outcomes were analyzed. Overall results indicated effect sizes of essentially zero on all three measures and wide variability. This suggests that many applications of DE outperform their classroom counterparts and that many perform more poorly. Dividing achievement outcomes into synchronous and asynchronous forms of DE produced a somewhat different impression. In general, mean achievement effect sizes for synchronous applications favored classroom instruction, while effect sizes for asynchronous applications favored DE. However, significant heterogeneity remained in each subset.

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How Does Distance Education Compare With Classroom Instruction? A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature

The study reported here examines the English language knowledge and performance of bilingual school children of Middle School age in Britain, in particular their acquisition and use of vocabulary. One of the chief premises of the research is that pupils from bilingual minority ethnic backgrounds suffer a major disadvantage while learning from the National Curriculum because they lack the necessary richness of word knowledge, accompanied by the conceptual frameworks expected in learning subjects such as science and geography. Furthermore, it is believed that by raising awareness among teachers and by the adoption of appropriate methods of vocabulary teaching founded on research, the vocabulary learning of bilingual pupils can be greatly increased. The aim of the study is to identify, describe and evaluate methods of vocabulary instruction currently used and to provide recommendations for suitable methods to be introduced. By means of an action research methodology implemented in a middle school, and with the joint participation of some members of staff and some pupils, classroom data was collected over a two and a half year period from teachers of science, geography and English and their pupils, supplemented with semi-structured interviews with teachers and support staff and conversations with children. These data provided material for a detailed analysis of exactly how individual words develop from first introduction into the pupils’ active vocabulary.

Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Learning Vocabulary in Another Language: Appendixes

This article overviews current research on second language vocabulary learning. It concludes that a large vocabulary is necessary to function in English: 8000—9000 word families for reading, and perhaps as many as 5000—7000 families for oral discourse. In addition, a number of word knowledge aspects need to be learned about each lexical item. Taken together, this amounts to a substantial lexical learning challenge, one which many/most learners fail to meet. To facilitate adequate vocabulary learning, four vocabulary learning partners (students, teachers, materials writers, and researchers) need to contribute to the learning process. Vocabulary learning programs need to include both an explicit, intentional learning component and a component based around maximizing exposure and incidental learning. The four learning strands (meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development) suggested by Nation (2001) provide a structure by which to integrate intentional and ...

Review article: instructed second language vocabulary learning

Second language acquisition: an introductory course (3rd edition), by Susan Gass and Larry Selinker, Oxford and New York, Routledge, 2008, xviii + 593 pp., £62.50/US$100.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8...

Second language acquisition: an introductory course

This replication study demonstrates that second language learners recognized the meanings of new words and built associations between them as a result of comprehension-focused extensive reading. A carefully controlled book-length reading treatment resulted in more incidental word learning and a higher pick-up rate than previous studies with shorter tasks. The longer text also made it possible to explain incidental learning growth in terms of frequency of occurrence of words in the text. But the general frequency of a word was not found to make the word more learnable. Findings also suggested that subjects with larger L2 vocabulary sizes had greater incidental word learning gains. Implications for incidental acquisition as a strategy for vocabulary growth are discussed. Au-delà de L'orange mécanique: L'acquisition des mots de vocabulaire en langue seconde par le biais de la lecture. Cette étude de réplication démontre que les apprenants d'une language seconde peuvent apprendre la définition de nouveaux mots de vocabulaire et peuvent même associer ces mots les uns aux autres en cherchant à comprendre le sens d'une série de lectures. Suite à la lecture contrôlée d'une série de textes dont la longueur totale équivalait à celle d'un livre, les apprenants qui ont participé à cette étude avaient appris plus de mots de façon inconsciente que d'autres apprenants qui ont participé à des études antérieures en lisant des séries de textes plus courte. L'utilisation d'une longue série de textes nous a également permis d'étudier la correlation entre l'apprentissage inconsciente de et la fréquence de ces mots dans le texte. Mais nous n'avons pas trouvé de lien significatif entre la fréquence d'un mot et la capacité de l'apprenant de le retenir. Les résultats de cette expérience suggèrent que le taux d'acquisition inconsciente dépend plus de la grandeur du vocabulaire de départ de l'apprenant dans sa langue seconde que de la fréquence des mots à apprendre. Nous discutons également des applications possibles de l'apprentissage inconscient dans l'enseignement d'une langue seconde.

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Beyond A Clockwork Orange: Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary through Reading.

While L2 vocabulary acquisition research is no longer ‘a neglected area’ (Meara, 1980), a lack of progress remains on some basic questions. One concerns the number of times a word must be encountered in order to be learned. Even using similar learning criteria, estimates range from six (Saragi, Nation, & Meister, 1978) to 20 (Herman, Anderson, Pearson, & Nagy, 1987). Another question concerns the types of contexts that are conducive to learning. Some studies have reported that rich, informative contexts are the most conducive to acquisition (Schouten-van Parreren, 1989), others that rich contexts divert attention from the lexical level and produce little acquisition (Mondria & Wit-De Boer, 1991). These phenomena were investigated in a vocabulary acquisition study with Quebec school-aged ESL learners at five levels of proficiency. First, learners read a text and were tested on its new vocabulary. Then, learned and unlearned words were compared for frequency of occurrence and level of contextual support. Fr...

Acquiring Vocabulary through Reading: Effects of Frequency and Contextual Richness

https://www.lextutor.ca/cv/pdf/concordance_feedback.pdf

Can Learners Use Concordance Feedback for Writing Errors

https://lextutor.ca/cv/measurable_learning.pdf

Tom Cobb

Papers

Second language acquisition: an introductory course

Beyond A Clockwork Orange: Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary through Reading.

Acquiring Vocabulary through Reading: Effects of Frequency and Contextual Richness

Can Learners Use Concordance Feedback for Writing Errors

Is There Any Measurable Learning from Hands-On Concordancing?.