LEARNING AND TEACHING

VOCABULARY
Prof. Tamar Mikeladze
Telavi State University

WORD FREQUENCY
What do you think are the ten most frequent words
in English? Would you teach them all to beginners?
Why do you think frequency is important?

Keyword:
word frequency: simply measured by counting how
often a word or word form occurs in a large sample
of spoken or written language, such as the British
National Corpus (BNC) (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk)

The first surprise on looking at this list is that

most of the words feature in the discussion of
grammar in Chapter 2 since they are structure
words, such as articles the, pronouns it,
auxiliaries would and forms of the verb be.
Usually the teaching of structure words is seen
as part of grammar, not vocabulary. Frequency
is taken to apply more to content words.

Influential as frequency has been in teaching, it has

not played a major role inSLA research. It belongs
more to the descriptive Lang3 sense of language
as a collection of sentences. It is true that you are
more likely to remember a word you meet every
day than one you only meet once. But there are
many other factors that make students learn words.
A swear word **** said accidentally when the
teacher drops the tape recorder is likely to be
remembered by the students for ever, even if it is
never repeated. Common words like because and
necessary are still spelt wrongly after students
have been meeting them for many years.

Frequency is usually established nowadays from a

large corpus of a language, such as the BNC for
English.
Words vary extremely in how often they are used.
Frequency is only one factor in the choice of words
to teach.

FOCUSING QUESTIONS
What do you know about a word like man if you
speak English?
When you teach students the meaning of a word,
what do you mean by meaning and how do you
teach it?

Keyword:
argument structure: the aspect of a word that
dictates the structures in which it may be used, for
example, the verb give requires an animate
subject, a direct object and an indirect object: Peter
gave a stone to the wolf

Most people assume that knowing a word is a

matter of knowing that plane in English means

or that the English word plane mea
A word in the Language sense of language as
knowledge in the mind is more than its meaningns
the same as laereo in Italian.

EXAMPLE OF THE WORD MAN

FORMS OF THE WORD
Pronunciation /mJn/ or /mn/ (chairman)
Spelling double n in man verb form

Grammatical properties
Grammatical category noun, verb, possessive
form, plural, subject or object
Possible and impossible structures- She manned
the barricades, not They manned. the argument
structure of words is pivotal in language acquisition.

GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES
Idiosyncratic grammatical information.The plural
spoken form of man is /men/; the written form is
men, that is, we know that it is an exception to the
usual rules for forming noun plurals in English
Word building. There is a whole family of related
words to man, such as mannish, manlike,
unmanly. These are made by adding various
prefixes such as un- and suffixes such as -ish to
the stem man.

LEXICAL PROPERTIES
Collocations. We know many more or less set
expressions in which the word man conventionally
goes with other words, such as my good man,
man in the street, man to man, Man of God, to
separate the men from the boys, my man Jeeves,
and many others.
Appropriateness. my man may be used as a form
of address Hi my man. The prime minister might
be surprised at being greeted with Hi my man, a
pop star might not. We have to know when and to
whom it is appropriate to use a word.

MEANING
General meanings. We know general properties
about the meaning of man, such as male, adult,
human being, concrete, animate. These aspects
of meaning, called semantic features or
components of meaning, are shared with many
other words in the language.
Specific meanings. We know a range of specific
senses for man. The OED has 17 main entries for
man as a noun, ranging from A human being
(irrespective of sex or age) to One of the pieces
used in chess.

Hence the message for language teaching is that

vocabulary is everywhere. It connects to the systems of
phonology and orthography through the actual forms of
the words, to the systems of morphology and grammar
through the ways that the word enters into grammatical
structures and through grammatical changes to the
words form, and to the systems of meaning through its
range of general and specific meanings and uses.

Knowing a word means its spoken and written forms, its

grammatical and lexical properties and its meaning.
Vocabulary impinges on all areas of language
acquisition and is not just learning sets of words and
meanings.

ONE WORD-STORE OR TWO IN THE L2

USERS MIND?
When you learn a new word in a second language,
do you try to keep it separate from your first
language words?
When you teach a new word do you try to link it to
words in the first language, say, by translation, or
do you keep it separate?

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IN SLA VOCABULARY RESEARCH IS

HOW THE WORDS OF THE TWO LANGUAGES ARE STORED IN THE
MIND.

THE VARIOUS ALTERNATIVES ARE SET OUT BELOW.

1.Separate stores. The vocabulary of the second

language is kept entirely separate from that of the first:
an English person who learns the word libre in French
keeps it separate from the English word free.
2. L2 store dependent on L1 store. The two word-stores
are tightly linked so that L2 words are always related to
L1 words; to think of the French word libre means
thinking first of the English word free.
3. Overlapping stores. There is an overlapping system so
that some words are shared, some not; libre in French
might be associated with English free, liberty or
liberal.
4. Single store. There is a single overall word-store for
both languages; French libre and English free are
stored together.

The

L1 and the L2 sets of vocabulary in the L2

users mind may be related in various ways,
ranging from completely separate to completely
integrated.
Research suggests that in many cases the two
vocabulary stores are closely linked.

TYPES OF MEANING
What do you mean by meaning?
What nouns can you remember learning first in your
first language? In your second?

Keywords
components of meaning: general aspects of
meaning which are shared by many words; boy
has the components male, human, young, and
so on
prototype theory: words have whole meanings
divided into basic level (car), subordinate level
(Ford) and superordinate level (vehicle)

COMPONENTS OF MEANING AND LEXICAL

RELATIONS

Often the meaning

of a word can be
broken up into
smaller
components. Thus
the meaning of girl
is made up of
female, human
and non-adult.
The meaning of
apple is made up
of fruit, edible,
round, and so on.

Words do not exist by themselves, however, but

are always in relationship to other words. The
meaning of hot relates to cold; the meaning of
run to walk, of high to low, of pain to
pleasure, and so on. When we speak, we
choose one word out of all those we have
available, rejecting all the words we could have
said: I love you potentially contrasts with I hate
you. Words function within systems of meaning.
A metaphor for meaning that is often used is
traffic lights. When a traffic light has two colours,
red and green, red means stop, contrasting with
green go. Hence red does not just mean stop,
it also means not green, that is, dont go, a
system with two options. Add another colour,
called amber in England, and the whole system
changes, with amber acting as a warning that
something is going to change, having two
possibilities: amber alone, officially stop
(unofficially, prepare to stop), and amber and
red together, officially stop (unofficially prepare
to go). If a simple three-colour system can lead
to such complexity of meanings (and indeed
traffic accidents), think what happens with the
thousands of words in any human language.

Prototype theory claims that children first learn words that are
basic because they reflect aspects of the world that stand out
automatically from the rest of what they see prototypes.
Sparrow is a basic-level term compared to a superordinate
level term like bird, or a subordinate-level term like house
sparrow. The basic level of vocabulary is easier to use and to
learn. On this foundation, children build higher and lower levels of
vocabulary. Some examples of the three levels of vocabulary are
seen in Table 3.2.

PROTOTYPES

WAYS OF MEANING

Words have many different kinds of meaning, whether

sharing general components, linked in lexical relations
or related to prototypes and levels.
While some aspects of meaning are universal, there are
differences between languages in how they express
concepts of colour, and so on, which may affect the
thinking of L2 users.

Vocabulary strategies
To understand an unfamiliar L2 word, people make use
of a variety of strategies, such as guessing, using
dictionaries, deducing meaning from the words form
and relating it to cognates.
To acquire new L2 words, people use strategies such as
repetition, organizing them in the mind, and linking them
to existing knowledge.

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 practised, not how
often, that is
important.
Remember that students transfer L1 meanings as well
as the words themselves.
Put words in their structural context.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE SEMINAR

1. Take a lesson or a page from the textbook you are most
familiar with: what new words are taught, and how?
2. What strategies would you now encourage in your students
for learning vocabulary?
3. To what extent can we learn the words of another language
without learning a new way of thinking to go with them?
4. How useful are dictionaries for students?
5. Decide how you would teach a beginners class these highfrequency words:
Nouns: time, people, way, year, government, day, man, world,
work, life.
Verbs: say, know, get, go, see, make, think, take, come, use.
Adjectives: new, good, old, different, local, small, great, social,
important, national.