Vocabulary selection

Taken from http://orlywiner.wikispaces.com/Vocabulary+Games

Vocabulary Selection What to teach extra in a thematic unit

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Friday, May 6, 2016 Post 269

“Vocabulary is one of the most obvious components of language and one of the first things applied linguists turned their attention to” (Richards, 2001). Its importance is then stated in the corpus that is selected for the various thematic units we teachers find in textbooks. However, as many teachers I work with have asked me, “what else can be taught to enrich a unit because I oftentimes find that the vocabulary in the textbook’s unit is insufficient?”

Vocabulary “depends on the objective of the course and the amount of time available for teaching” (Richards, 2001). The lexical items that are included in a unit correspond to corpus studies and word frequency analyses made by publishing houses.

The aim is to find what the most productive language is to be taught, and this language productivity has to do with the usefulness lexemes have in various contexts or thematic units. A word such as exciting can be used in so many different situations such as traveling, movie-viewing, hiking, reading, and so on. Exciting is indeed a very productive word. In terms of the time available to teach, the instructor must consider the number of new “productive” words that can be used within the thematic unit that is

being studied. Problem is, many of these “productive” words may not necessarily be frequent words used by native speakers. “Not all words that native speakers know are necessarily useful for second language learners who have only a limited time available for learning” (Richards, 2001).

West (1953), also cited by Richards (2001), states that “a language is so complex that selection from it is always one of the first and most difficult problems of anyone who wishes to teach it systematically.” If this was stated by West in 1953, vocabulary selection continues to be problematic for the applied linguists who are considering what words belong to the corpus of the thematic units they are designing and developing. But lexical items cannot be taught isolatedly; they need to be contextualized to be learned and used by learners within the syntactical boundaries that grammar constructions allow. That is, words, syntactically speaking, are not always productive in all contexts.

One of the criteria that has been employed in the choosing of vocabulary for thematic units is the frequency in which a word appears in a given context. “Some of the earliest approaches to vocabulary selection involved counting large collections of texts to determine the frequency with which words occurred, since it would seem obvious that words of highest frequency should be taught first” (Richards, 2001). But the language instructor is not meant to be revising corpus lists to determine what lexemes to teach in the thematic unit s/he is covering. Word selection should not be determined by the so-called word frequency. The speech act that can be encased in textbook thematic units must be the way to determine what extra vocabulary could be taken care in class as an extra exercise that can help train students to be more functional in the target language. Let us keep in mind that “frequency is not necessarily the same thing as usefulness” (Richards, 2001).

Richards (2001) provides some other criteria that can be considered when deciding what extra words can also be taught within a thematic unit an instructor is

covering. Dr. Richards names the following: teachability, similarity, availability,

coverage, and defining power.

Teachability

Lexical items can be easily illustrated or demonstrated to learners.

Similarity

Lexemes in both languages are similar in spelling and meaning.

Availability

Words that come to mind the moment a topic is being taught.

Coverage

Words that include or cover the meaning of other lexical units.

Defining Power

Lexical units that can be used to defined others easily.

Adapted by Prof. Jonathan AcuĂąa from Richards (2001)

Though these criteria are not the only ones, they seem to fit quite well a model I want to propose for the choosing of extra vocabulary to be taught in the language course. As stated above, the idea is to keep in mind that lexical units are determined by a context and a situation, also known as speech act. A speech act is meant to include lexemes and the syntactical constructions where those words can be functional.

Speech Act Linked to a thematic unit

Teachability

Defining Power

Lexemes that are easily illustrated

Words that are not frequent but

or demonstrated to learners.

that help to provide definitions

Similarity

Availability

Coverage

Use of cognates to expand the

Words that come to mind every

Words that include others such as

learners’ word-base

time a topic is discussed

hypononyms

If these conditions are met, instructors can indeed start teaching extra words for their students, as supplementary lexical units that can help learners become more functional in the target language.