Featured topic: Vocabulary

Topic of the monthRead and listen to a range of information about a particular area of applied linguistics. This month: Vocabulary.
Book of the month | Articles | Related journal articles | Vocabulary resources | Related titles

Book of the month

About the authors

Michael H Daller is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is an associate editor of The Linguistics Journal and the MJournal of English as an International Language, and a reviewer for several other journals in the fields of Applied Linguistics and language testing.

James Milton is the Senior Academic in the School of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. He formerly established and ran the Centre for Applied Language Studies and the Applied Linguistics Department at Swansea. He has held posts in Nigeria and Libya and carried out consultancy and materials development projects internationally.

Jeanine Treffers-Daller is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her two main research areas are bilingualism and language contact (particularly code-switching, borrowing and contact-induced language change), and vocabulary richness.

Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge

Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge
Michael H Daller, James Milton and Jeanine Treffers-Daller

Over the last 20 years vocabulary research has grown from a Cinderella subject to a position of some importance. Vocabulary is now considered integral to just about every aspect of language knowledge and is a lively and vital area of research and innovation. With this development have come standard and widely-used tests, such as vocabulary size and lexical richness measures, and commonly accepted metaphors, such as the mental lexicon as a web of words. Less widely known outside academic circles, however, is the extensive work on learners' lexis and the utility, reliability and validity of the tests we use to measure and investigate it.

This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned researchers in this field to explain much of the background to study in this area. It introduces to a wider audience the concerns, the newest approaches and developments in the field of vocabulary research and testing.

Read a sample chapter

James Milton

Lexical profiles, learning styles and the construct validity of lexical size tests (PDF)
James Milton

(Chapter 2 of Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge, 2007)

'This chapter will consider in more detail … the individual variables each learner will bring to the testing process. Lexical knowledge, like all language knowledge, is not a directly accessible quality like a person's height or weight. In tests, therefore, we rely on the learners themselves to demonstrate their knowledge so we can assess it or measure it.'

Articles

Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons from the Classroom (PDF)
Jeanne McCarten, 2007

This article looks at how a corpus can inform vocabulary teaching and deals with frequency, differences in speaking and writing, contexts of use, collocation, grammatical patterns, strategic vocabulary, and how these can best be taught. An appendix provides a list of the top 200 spoken English words.

Related journal articles

Cambridge Journals Online

The following articles are provided from Cambridge Journals Online.

The journal articles provided this month form part of a timeline of vocabulary research. The Research Timelines are a regular feature in the Language Teaching journal. These research surveys take a distinct approach, graphically summarising through the timeline presentation the main shifts and movements and key research in the history of a particular aspect, together with the representative bibliographical references. They make it possible to spot the emerging tendencies, as well as actually monitor the development of research and learn quickly about the main 'players'.

Batia Laufer's article below, 'Second language vocabulary acquisition from language input and from form-focused activities', presents a timeline of vocabulary research. The two articles below this and the chapter taken from Learning Vocabulary in Another Language all form part of this Research Timeline.

'Second language vocabulary acquisition from language input and from form-focused activities'
Batia Laufer

Language Teaching, Volume 42, Issue 03, July 2009, pp 341–354

Interest in L2 vocabulary learning and teaching started long before the nineteen-eighties (for references to earlier studies, see Rob Waring's database http://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/vocab/vocrefs/vocref.html) but it declined with the advent of generative linguistics to the point of discrimination and neglect (Meara 1980). In 1986, I argued that vocabulary was about to acquire a legitimate and prominent place within applied linguistics (Laufer 1986), but I did not envisage the vast quantities of lexical research that would have been produced in the following two decades. One of the central concerns of vocabulary researchers is the source of L2 vocabulary learning. Is it L2 input, enhanced input, interaction, communicative tasks, non-communicative ‘artificial’ exercises, list learning, or repetition? A similar question is addressed by SLA researchers in general. This similarity of interests, which demonstrates the integration of vocabulary into mainstream SLA, prompted me to define the topic of this timeline as I did. And since the field of SLA developed in the 1980s, this timeline starts in the nineteen-eighties. I focus here on the external sources of learning, i.e. language input and instructional techniques, and not on learner-related variables, like motivation, L1, age, or strategies of learning. Nor do I focus on any other areas of lexical research, important as they may be, such as the construct of vocabulary knowledge, lexical development, testing, bilingual mental lexicon, or corpora analyses.

'The Use of Verbal and Imagery Mnemonics in Second-Language Vocabulary Learning'
Andrew D Cohen

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Volume 9, Issue 01, Feb 1987, pp 43–61

This paper provides a critical look at the use of mnemonic associations in vocabulary learning. The paper begins with a definition of mnemonic devices—that is, techniques for converting material to be learned into a form that makes it easier to learn and remember—and focuses on verbal and imagery mnemonics, whereby a word, a phrase, or a sentence and visual imagery serve as mediator between what is known and what is to be learned. Particular attention is given to the keyword approach, in which there is both an acoustic link between a native-language word and the second-language word, and an image of the keyword interacting with the native-language word or phrase. Contentions are discussed concerning both the learning of words through verbal and imagery mnemonics and their subsequent retrieval. Attention is also given to research issues in need of investigation.

'Receptive and Productive Vocabulary Learning: The Effects of Reading and Writing on Word Knowledge'
Stuart Webb

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Volume 27, Issue 01, Mar 2005, pp 33–52

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association, grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways. The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive tasks.

Learning Vocabulary in Another Language

Word study strategies (PDF)
I S P Nation

(Chapter 8 of Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, 2001)

Vocabulary resources

Related titles

Language teaching and learning

General linguistics