“The real intrinsic difficulty of learning a foreign language lies in that of having to master its vocabulary” (Sweet, 1899). More and more, language researchers and practitioners have come to realize the truth of Sweet's statement. Unlike grammar, which is a system of a limited number of rules, vocabulary is an open set of many thousands of items. Hence, one reason for the enormity of the vocabulary learning task lies in its quantity. Furthermore, word knowledge entails the mastery of numerous features of the word in question and of the patterns it can form with other words. Hence, the second intrinsic difficulty of vocabulary learning is qualitative. Finally, since vocabulary consists of a huge number of words of various degrees of usefulness, many of them will not appear frequently in the second language input, particularly in the context of instructed learning (i.e., in a regular classroom). Learners receive grammatical reinforcement by encountering grammatical structures in every phrase or sentence they are exposed to. They do not receive the same kind of reinforcement of a lot of the low frequency vocabulary, for which large quantities of input would be required. Hence, the third difficulty of learning foreign language vocabulary is environmental or situational. This paper provides an overview of vocabulary learning addressing the three dimensions stated above.
Except for some brief times of activity, vocabulary teaching has been largely neglected and has been subordinated to other units of analysis in curriculum design, such as grammar, topics, or tasks. The noted exception to this was Michael West's (1931) New Method Readers which used vocabulary as the main unit of progression in the course.
There has, however, been a long history of creating word lists of the most useful vocabulary needed by second language learners of English. Since usefulness was considered to overlap with word frequency, word lists included the most frequent words in a language. The most influential of the word lists was the 2000 headword General Service List of English Words (West, 1953), which included frequency information and also provided relative frequencies of the major senses and meanings of the words that it contained. It was especially influential in the development of schemes for graded readers. There is still no equivalent adequate replacement for it.
Vigorous growth in research on L2 vocabulary learning has largely occurred since the 1990s when an increasing body of researchers made vocabulary research part of their continuing research agenda.
When selecting words for L2 vocabulary teaching, it is important to realize that non-native speakers operate with a limited vocabulary by comparison with native speakers. One must therefore make sure that this vocabulary will be as useful as possible and as accurate as possible when functioning in the language. Important words are of two kinds: those that are frequent in the language being learnt and therefore useful for all purposes, and words that may be infrequent, but are nevertheless useful for learners’ particular needs, for example, academic reading, or tour guiding.
Frequent words and useful words. In recent years there has been an interest in creating specialized vocabulary lists. This reflects the realization that some words may be useful to some learners even if they are not generally frequent in the language, depending on the specific needs that learners may have. A good example is Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, which contains 570 words which are frequent in academic discourse, and has therefore provided a very useful source for designing instructional materials for academic purposes (see for example Schmitt and Schmitt, 2005).
In spite of the technological advances that led to the construction of corpora and subsequent collection of data on word frequency, range and dispersion, the creation of reliable and valid word lists is still problematical. Two methodological problems with creating word lists are distinguishing between various meanings of homonyms and including multiword units. Word frequency counting programs cannot distinguish panel (meaning a group of experts) from panel (as in ceiling panel, or a part of a car). With research into homonymy it may be possible to design programs that can search for known homonyms and tag them so that they can be counted as separate items. Typically, word lists do not contain multiword units. There is no consensus in either terminology or in criteria for deciding which multiword units should be counted with the same status as single words. Continuing research into multi-word units (Schmitt, 2004) provides convincing evidence that high frequency multiword units are stored as single choices and that use of multiword units is an indicator of proficiency development. It seems likely that most multiword units are largely lexically and grammatically regular, and lists of frequent multiword units (Biber et al., 2004; Grant and Nation, 2006; Shin and Nation, 2008) are useful resources for teachers and curriculum designers.
Easy words and difficult words. Another criterion for deciding which vocabulary should be focused on, in addition to frequency and usefulness, is the word's learnability. Differences in word learning difficulty were realized by Lado (1972) and Higa (1965). Lado attributed learning difficulty to the formal and semantic congruence or lack thereof between L1 and L2. Thus, for example, cognates, words similar in form and meaning between two languages, are easy, while false cognates, words similar in form, but different in meaning, are difficult. Higa, on the other hand, emphasized the relationship between the new words and already known words in the L2, particularly the relationship between the way the new words were related to each other in terms of semantic sets for presentation for learning. For example, words presented at the beginning and the end of a word list are easier than those in the middle, and new words which are semantically related are more difficult to remember than semantically unrelated words (Tinkham, 1997).
Languages related genetically contain many cognates, and unrelated languages, too, borrow words from each other, particularly from English, albeit with some phonological adaptations (Daulton, 2008). These words are easy to learn and introducing them in large numbers can enrich learners’ functioning in a foreign language and consequently positively affect their confidence and motivation.
Defining lexical competence and measuring it in a valid and reliable manner is crucial for conducting research in vocabulary acquisition and for setting the goals of lexical instruction in the L2. Both researchers and educators have to decide what about single words and vocabulary in general can and should be researched or taught, and what measurement techniques to employ for testing whether and how well a word is known. We will discuss the concept of lexical competence in connection with single words and total vocabulary, and later on describe several well-known vocabulary tests and the research they have generated.
Lexical knowledge has been defined in a number of ways. Some researchers (e.g., Nation, 2001) claim that knowing a word involves a range of inter-related sub-knowledges—knowledge of the spoken and written form, morphological knowledge, knowledge of word meaning, collocational and grammatical knowledge, connotative and associational knowledge, and the knowledge of social or other constraints to be observed in the use of a word. For each feature of knowledge, we can distinguish between receptive (passive) and productive (active) knowledge. All these components together constitute the depth of knowledge of a word. Some researchers (e.g., Wesche and Paribakht, 1996) claim that lexical knowledge constitutes a continuum, starting with a superficial familiarity with the word and ending with the ability to use the word correctly in free production.
Read (2004) distinguishes between several types of depth of lexical knowledge—precision of meaning, comprehensive word knowledge, and network knowledge. Precision of meaning relates to one aspect of knowledge, for example, how well the meaning of a word is known. Comprehensive knowledge involves knowing aspects of the form, meaning, and use of a word. Network knowledge involves incorporation of a word into a lexical network and also has connections with fluency of access.
Another way of describing lexical knowledge, in addition to depth of knowledge of individual words, is in terms of a person's total vocabulary, i.e., the number of words s/he is familiar with. This is called vocabulary breadth or size, and here, knowledge typically refers to the ability to associate word forms with their meanings, since it is impossible to measure many aspects of depth of knowledge when a large number of words are tested.
In spite of the very long history of interest in vocabulary measurement, there are remarkably few standard, well-researched vocabulary tests. The early interest in lexical measurement was in measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers. The earliest published research in this area dates from the 1890s (see for example Kirkpatrick, 1891). Unfortunately, the methodological issues involved in vocabulary testing, particularly those related to getting a representative sample of words to test, were not properly dealt with in most of the early studies. The results of such studies greatly overestimated vocabulary size, with studies like Seashore and Eckerson's (1940) claiming that university students had vocabulary sizes of 100,000 to 200,000 words. More recent research has dealt with these problems and thus we can have more faith in their results (Goulden et al., 1990; Zechmeister et al., 1995). In general research shows that native speakers acquire vocabulary at a rate of around 1000 word families per year, up to the age of around 20.
There has also been interest in measuring the vocabulary size of non-native speakers. One of the earliest systematically designed tests for measuring this was Meara and Jones (1990) which used a yes/no format. This involved learners looking at an isolated word and deciding if they could provide a meaning for that word (they did not actually have to provide the meaning). A proportion of the words in the test were nonsense words that looked as if they could be real words. These were used to adjust scores for learners overstating their knowledge. If a learner responded to a proportion of the nonsense words by saying he could give a meaning for those words, the score on the real words was reduced by this proportion.
More recently, a multiple-choice vocabulary size test has been developed (Beglar, 2009; Nation and Beglar, 2007) which appears to work well. The items for the test were selected on the basis of the British National Corpus. This test measures vocabulary size up to 14,000 word families. The target words appear in neutral, non-defining contexts and the distracters include words of higher frequency than, or similar to the tested item. Here is a sample item:
fragile: These things are very <fragile>.
| a | precious |
| b | hard to find |
| c | popular |
| d | easily broken |
There are two well-established diagnostic tests of vocabulary which can be used to decide which level of vocabulary learners need to work on: the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt et al., 2001), which is a revised version of the original Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1983) and the Productive Levels Test (Laufer and Nation, 1999).
The latest versions of the Levels Test, Computer Adaptive Test of Size and Strength (CATSS) (Laufer and Goldstein, 2004; Laufer et al., 2004) provide a finer picture of global vocabulary knowledge by testing four degrees of knowledge of the meaning-form connection: active recall, i.e., being able to supply the form for a given meaning, passive recall—supplying the meaning for a given form, active recognition—recognizing the word form among several options, and passive recognition—recognizing the word's meaning among several options. These degrees of knowledge were shown to constitute a hierarchy (with active knowledge as the most difficult to achieve) and to be implicationally scaled.
Finding out learners’ global vocabulary in terms of size or level is important when we want to describe their state of knowledge, observe their lexical progress, or check whether their lexical level is adequate for a task we plan to assign, for an experiment we want to conduct, or for a course we are designing.
The ability to supply the word form when prompted does not necessarily imply that the learner will use the word in production. Confidence, lexical preferences, and avoidance strategies can play a role in the decision to use words. Hence, it is useful to separate active knowledge from use, which can be defined as lexical richness and diversity. Similarly, fluency, that is the speed with which the word form with its meaning can be retrieved, is not part of knowledge, but control over it (see also Henriksen, 1999; Laufer and Nation, 2001).
In measuring lexical richness in writing, we measure how broad a vocabulary learners use when they write. “Broad” is usually defined in relation to the word frequency levels of a language. Vocabulary richness from this perspective involves using words from the lower word frequency levels. Laufer and Nation (1995) developed a computer-based measure, the Lexical Frequency Profile using the Range program freely available at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx. The profile has been developed for French by Cobb and is available at http://www.lextutor.ca. Following the development of the Lexical Frequency Profile, several investigations have been conducted showing that the measure could be used to measure change over time, that it could distinguish between learners at different proficiency levels, and that the use of infrequent vocabulary developed even more slowly than active knowledge, but better language proficiency would eventually lead to richer lexis in free production (Laufer, 1994; 1998; Laufer and Paribakht, 1998; Morris and Cobb, 2004; Ovtcharov et al., 2006).
Research on measuring lexical richness in writing has received a considerable boost with investigations through modeling (Meara, 2006), and the development of other measures such as D (D stands for diversity), which is a measure of the quantity of different words in a text that is independent of text length (Duran et al., 2004). With the development of computer-based testing it becomes easily possible to gather data on fluency of access to vocabulary by getting the computer to measure reaction times to vocabulary items.
In this section we will address one of the major issues regarding the learning of vocabulary: the main source of learning new words. Is it language input, or attending to words in communicative activities, or decontextualized word practice? Some related issues are the role of intentional versus incidental learning, the number of exposures to a word that learners need in order to acquire at least partial knowledge of a word, and the nature of activities that lead to effective learning.
Sources of vocabulary learning—language input. Even though vocabulary is considered to be one of the most important elements in language learning, it tends to be subordinated to the learning of grammar, and is largely left to take care of itself in language courses. These teaching practices are probably rooted in the belief that new words are acquired as a by-product of exposure to language input and language activities that do not necessarily focus on vocabulary. The vocabulary-through-input position assumes that on encountering an unfamiliar word, the learner notices it as unfamiliar, infers its meaning from context by using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic clues, and may consequently retain a partial or precise meaning of the word. If the word is not remembered after the learner's first exposure to it, or if only partial information about the word has been acquired, additional encounters with the same word will increase the probability of retaining it and expanding its knowledge. Even if very few words are retained after one communicative activity or reading of a text, the cumulative gains over time may be quite remarkable if the learner reads regularly. Krashen and his colleagues have been particularly active in promoting the importance of reading for vocabulary acquisition, in naturalistic and instructed contexts (e.g., Cho and Krashen, 1994; Mason and Krashen, 2004).
Interesting questions are how many times a word has to be met in the input to be learnt with its meaning, and how much learners have to read to achieve this number of exposures. Researchers seem to agree that with ten exposures, there is some chance of recognizing the meaning of a new word later on (Brown et al., 2008; Waring and Takaki, 2003). According to Nation and Wang (1999), in order to meet 108 words ten times, learners would need to read nine simplified readers. They suggest that for extensive reading to be effective, learners should read one–two books per week. Such ongoing exposure to vocabulary may not only result in learning, but, more importantly, prevent the forgetting of newly learnt words. However, Cobb (2007) computed, on the basis of corpus analysis, that most words beyond the most frequent 2,000 words will not be encountered at all in a year or two even if we assume the largest plausible amounts of free reading. Hence, if highly motivated L2 readers, let alone average students, do not meet new words frequently enough, an additional source of vocabulary learning is necessary—word-focused instruction.
Sources of vocabulary learning—word focused instruction. Word focused instruction, as with form-focused instruction in grammar, combines attention to form, i.e., to specific words, in authentic, communicative activities, as well as practice of decontextualized vocabulary. The first is known as Focus on Form (FonF) and the second as Focus on Forms (FonFs) (Ellis, 2001; Long, 1991). (For relating vocabulary instruction to form-focused instruction, see Laufer, 2005, 2009, 2010).
Even though the question of incidental versus intentional learning is still being debated, some researchers attach less importance to the type of learning, and more to the quality of processing of word information. Acknowledging the importance of the notions of depth of processing (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) and elaboration (Craik and Tulving, 1975), but feeling the need to translate and operationalize such general cognitive notions in terms of L2 vocabulary learning tasks, Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) developed a motivational-cognitive construct, the Involvement Load Hypothesis, for L2 vocabulary learning.
The Involvement Load Hypothesis provides a quantifiable way of examining teaching and learning procedures to try to predict the likelihood of learning occurring from the activities. The criteria used in the analysis are need, search, and evaluation, and if each of these three criteria are present in some form, then learning is highly likely to occur. There have now been several pieces of research investigating the hypothesis and largely confirming its predictive value (Barcroft, 2004; Keating, 2008; Kim, 2008).
A continuing issue in vocabulary learning which is related to form-focused instruction is the role of the first language in explaining and defining words. There is a belief among teachers that using the first language to explain the meaning of words is undesirable. There is however no evidence to support this claim. Earlier studies of error analysis, lexical elicitation studies, and more recent analyses of learner corpora have shown that many lexical errors and avoidance phenomena are a result of the influence of the first language (see the section on lexical selection). Evidence is available that the use of the first language is a very effective way of communicating word meaning (Laufer and Shmueli, 1997), and explanation of interlingual differences between new L2 words and expressions and corresponding L1 vocabulary may be more effective than other form-focused activities (Laufer and Girsai, 2008).
The construction of numerous corpora of various sizes and the development of computers has had significant effects on our ability to quickly gather data on word frequency, range, and dispersion. Many of the word counting and word searching programs are available as freeware (e.g., Range, AntConc, AntWordProfiler), as Web-based programs (e.g., Range, VocabProfile, Concordance), or as commercial programs (e.g., WordSmith Tools, MonoPro).
Word learnability data is available from early error analyses of written samples (Duškova, 1969; Laforest, 1980; Myint Su, 1971), elicitation studies (e.g., Biskup, 1992), and relatively recent analyses of large learner language corpora (Granger, 1998; Nesselhauf, 2005). Two major types of difficulty emerge from all the studies. The first one is interlingual, that is, it results from relating the new L2 words to L1 words which the learners take to be equivalent in meaning. The second one is intralingual, that is, stems from relating the new words to already familiar words within the foreign language (for reviews and summaries, see Laufer, 1990, 1997; Swan, 1997). Let us look at two examples: one interlingual and the other intralingual. Different languages lexicalize concepts differently and the result is lack of semantic overlap between words in L2 and their L1 equivalents. For example, song and poem are represented by one word shir in Hebrew, since Hebrew does not distinguish between rhyming words with or without music. Similarly evaluate, appreciate, and estimate are translated by one Hebrew word leha'arich. Each time learners speak or write in English, they have to make the choice between several variants that designate a concept represented by one lexical item in their L1. An example of an intralingual difficulty is synformy—similarity of form between different words. Pairs or groups of words can be similar in sound, script, and morphology and consequently confused by learners both in production and comprehension. (for definitions and classifications of synformy see Laufer, 1988, 1991). The following are examples of synforms:
conceal/cancel/counsel embrace/embarrass cute/acute lunch/launch industrious/industrial
exhausted/exhaustive economic/economical sensible/sensitive/sensual
Lexical problems have been found not only in single words, but also in multi-word units. Learners whose writing has no grammatical errors and no errors in the choice of single words may still sound odd or foreign because of lack of mastery of multi-word units, particularly collocations. The difficulties with collocations are both intra- and interlingual. Many errors can be traced to learners’ L1 (Biskup, 1992; Kaszubski, 2000; Nesselhauf, 2005). Furthermore, by comparison with native speaker corpora, learners exhibit underuse of common collocations and overuse of certain collocations, particularly with the core verbs—be, have, make, etc. (Alternberg and Granger, 2001; Kaszubski, 2000). The overall picture that emerges on the basis of collocation studies is that the use of collocations is problematic for L2 learners, regardless of years of instruction they received in L2, their native language, or type of task they are asked to perform.
The availability of the receptive and productive forms of the Vocabulary Levels Test has resulted in studies on the development of passive and active vocabulary size using both measures (Laufer, 1998; Laufer and Paribakht, 1998). These studies show that active vocabulary is smaller than passive vocabulary, and the two do not develop at a similar pace. A very important line of research involving measures of global vocabulary has to do with the relationship between lexical knowledge and the ability to function in the L2. Some examples of passive vocabulary size of learners of English as an L2 include Japanese college learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) who were found to know 2,000–2,300 word families after receiving 800–1,200 hours of instruction (Barrow et al., 1999; Shillaw, 1995), Israeli high school learners with 3,500 word families after 1,500 hours of instruction (Laufer, 1998), and Spanish university students in English philology with about 3,700 word families after 1,100 hours of instruction (Miralpeix, 2007). The vocabulary size of learners may be adequate for conducting a simple conversation, which can be done with 2,000 word families, but it is insufficient for listening and reading comprehension. To understand a radio interview with minimal support, i.e., without the necessity to use a dictionary too often, the listener would need to know 6,000–7,000 word families, to comprehend non-fiction and novels, the reader needs 8,000–9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). People with a vocabulary size above 8,000 words can usually comprehend 98 percent of the text's lexis. A lower level of comprehension can be achieved with a vocabulary size of around 5,000 word families and 95 percent of the text's lexis. These percentages and the vocabulary sizes that ensure them have been referred to as the lexical threshold of comprehension (Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996; Hu and Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1989).
Unlike the studies above, which examined global vocabulary, other researchers chose to focus on the depth of knowledge by using different tests formats that all test the same words (Pulido, 2004; Waring and Takaki, 2003), or that allow the allocation of partial or full credit to each word depending on the depth of knowledge (Nurweni and Read, 1999; Wesche and Paribakht, 1996). Webb (2007) measured knowledge of orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic associations, grammatical functions, and meaning and form, both productively and receptively. His tests illustrate an attempt to measure comprehensive word knowledge and the study shows that different aspects of word knowledge are affected differently by learners’ exposure to words.
Wesche and Paribakht (1996) used a group administered version of an interview test (Nagy et al., 1985) where learners rate their knowledge of a word on a scale of statements.
(1) I don't remember having seen this word before.
(2) I have seen this word before, but I don't know what it means.
(3) I have seen this word before, and I think it means______(synonym or translation).
(4) I know this word. It means______(synonym or translation).
(5) I can use the word in a sentence: ______________.
Scores can range from 0–4. This vocabulary knowledge scale has come in for a lot of criticism because it mixes aspects of knowledge (e.g., familiarity with word form, word meaning, word use), requires proof at some levels and not at others, and is not necessarily a truly progressive scale in that it is possible to use a word in a sentence without being very sure about its meaning.
Even though, according to most researchers, word knowledge involves more than just understanding the link between form and meaning, most studies on vocabulary learning investigate whether, at a certain point of time, or at the end of some intervention, learners can demonstrate understanding of the target words, or produce the target form for given meanings. The studies that do investigate several aspects of word knowledge (e.g., Pigada and Schmitt, 2006; Waring and Takaki, 2003; Webb, 2007) examine the acquisition of meaning as well.
The emphasis on meaning is inevitable given that words are, first and foremost, units of meaning. Moreover, for comprehension purposes, matching the meaning to form, spoken or written, will usually suffice since most of the word's other features are provided in the input. Hence, word meaning is arguably the central feature of word knowledge and vocabulary research should at least focus on the extent to which people can correctly associate the word form with the concept the form denotes.
Even though multi-word units are considered to be a part of lexical knowledge, we do not yet have standardized tests that measure global knowledge of these units.
Most studies of the acquisition of words from reading used relatively short texts (up to 7,000 words) and measured short-term retention of meaning (recall or recognition). The gains were very small: 1–7 words per text, though Brown et al. (2008) found better recognition results (about 11 out of 28 words), but very low (less than 1) recall results. Most words that were recognized appeared more than 10 times in stories of about 5,000 words each. Acquisition from one graded reader (measured in terms of recall or recognition of meaning) was also low: 3–5 words per reader (Horst, 2005; Waring and Takaki, 2003).
There is a lot of empirical evidence showing that the acquisition of words attended to in communicative tasks (i.e., in FonF) is more effective than acquisition from input only. Thus, reading tasks where attention is drawn to words by dictionary use yielded better results than reading tasks with or without glosses (Hulstijn et al., 1996; Knight, 1994; Luppescu and Day, 1993). In oral interaction, whenever learners focused on unfamiliar vocabulary by asking for clarifications, they had a better chance of retaining these words than when they did not attend to words in this way (De la Fuente, 2002; Ellis and He, 1999; Newton, 1993; et al., 1994). There is also evidence that focusing on words in non-communicative, non-authentic language tasks (i.e., FonFs) yields better results than acquisition from input. These can be learning from word cards or exercises in matching words, various multiple-choice activities, filling in blanks, writing unrelated sentences, creating word banks, online concordances, and other computer-assisted practice, etc. (Cobb, 2007; Hill and Laufer, 2003; Horst et al., 2005; Kitajima, 2001; Laufer, 2003; Paribakht and Wesche, 1997). Particularly effective, for short- and long-term retention, are productive tasks, which require learners to retrieve the word forms and use them generatively, that is, in novel contexts (Ellis and He, 1999; Joe, 1995, 1998; Kitajima, 2001)
The studies above have an incidental design as defined earlier. Studies of intentional learning (e.g., using bilingual lists, word cards, or in minimal context in a computer environment) show very encouraging results: up to 99 percent on immediate tests of passive knowledge, up to 79 percent on immediate tests of active knowledge, and a loss of about 25 percent on delayed tests. Moreover, research by Elgort (2011) indicates that the deliberate study of vocabulary from word cards results in both explicit and implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge been typified by being available through subconscious access, being fluently available, and being part of a lexical network. The deliberate teaching and learning of vocabulary can result in knowledge which is of immediate use for communication.
In the previous sections we discussed the advantages and shortcomings of input based learning and demonstrated the benefits of word-focused instruction. Our contention was that attention, operationalized as involvement, is a key factor in learning. Though there are promising movements in encouraging extensive reading (see for example the Extensive Reading Foundation website), extensive reading programs are more noticeable by their absence rather than presence in most courses. For extensive reading to be maximally effective, it should be combined with autonomous word-focused learning. Learners could be encouraged to read one or two books per week which are appropriate to their language proficiency, select a certain number of new words from the books and attend to them by using a dictionary, online concordances and other computer-assisted exercise, by creating word banks and word cards, and by using the new words in writing about the plots. If large quantities of input are unavailable and teacher designed word-focused practice is the major source of vocabulary growth, the guiding teaching principles could be variation in activities and periodic recycling of words. The activities could be communicative and non-communicative, contextualized and decontextualized, related to textbook and to novel contexts, focused on comprehension and production. They could make use of either L2 or L1 and could foster incidental or intentional learning. Periodic recycling can occur in the input, in word-focused activities and in tests.
Since there is sense in taking a balanced approach to language learning in general and vocabulary learning in particular, it is important to make use of input-based learning and form-focused instruction, incidental and intentional learning, contextualized and decontextualized teaching, the use of L2 and L1, and recycling vocabulary in language input and in teacher-designed tasks. Consequently, Nation (2007) argues that to create the best opportunities for well-balanced vocabulary learning, there should be a balance across four strands—meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development, with each of these four strands gaining roughly equal time in a course. If this guideline was followed then in some courses there would be a large reduction of deliberate teaching and learning, and a corresponding increase in message-focused input, output and fluency development, for example, through extensive reading, while in some communicatively based courses, there would be an increase in language-focused learning (form-focused instruction) using, for example, word card study and vocabulary exercises. Although the idea behind balancing the four strands is not readily researchable, there is plenty of evidence to support the existence of each one of the strands. The idea of the four strands is intended largely as a guideline for course designers and teachers to ensure that the courses provide a good balance of opportunities for learning. Another guideline for course designers and material writers, at least at the beginning stages of language learning, or in specialized courses, could be a lexical syllabus, i.e., the specific number and type of words for a particular course. For example, material writers of an academic English course could benefit from an Academic Word List as the words on the list could serve as a target for word-focused practice.
A well-designed vocabulary learning program has sensible vocabulary selection procedures, gives attention to a range of aspects of vocabulary knowledge, monitors and tests this knowledge, and provides opportunities to learn through input, output, deliberate learning, and fluency development.
While there is now a large amount of vocabulary-focused research, there are still areas that deserve further research.
(1) Investigation of vocabulary learning tasks. The Involvement Load Hypothesis has proved to be a useful stimulus for research on vocabulary teaching activities. However, other systems of analysis are possible and the testing of competing systems of analysis is likely to be a fruitful area of research. The experimental and observational study of both deliberate and incidental vocabulary learning activities is a much neglected area of vocabulary studies. Incidental vocabulary learning through extensive reading has received some attention, but beyond this and a few direct tests of the Involvement Load Hypothesis, much remains to be done. Research focuses could include studies of ways to build retrieval, generative use (Joe, 1998), negotiation and imaging into learning tasks; and ways to recycle vocabulary through the use of linked skills tasks and procedures such as reporting back on a task, the pyramid procedure (Jordan, 1990), and expert groups and family groups (Nation and Newton, 2009).
(2) Deliberate learning. A particular vocabulary learning task that deserves further experimental study is learning vocabulary using word cards. Although there has been a lot of research establishing the basic principles of spaced retrieval, use of mnemonic techniques, and receptive and productive learning (Griffin and Harley, 1996), there is still a need for research on making the beginning stages of such learning more immediately successful. For example, will learning words that are thematically related (Tinkham, 1997) greatly increase success rates? Will learning small groups of ten words at a time lead to greater early success rates than larger numbers of words? Will the use of cues on one side of the card which make retrieval easier result in faster learning and good long-term results?
(3) Computer-assisted vocabulary learning. There are now many word card programs in electronic format and they can be used very portably on cell phones and iPods. The potential of these programs is greater than that of word cards in that they can monitor and manage the spacing of repetitions, provide a variety of cues when needed, and provide the pronunciation of the words and phrases. The investigation of vocabulary-learning activities now needs to work out criteria for evaluating computer-assisted activities that take account of their unique features and yet allow comparison with non-electronic alternatives. Similarly, there needs to be experimental research comparing and evaluating the various programs.
(4) Partial knowledge. One of the frontiers in vocabulary research involves the measurement of small amounts of learning of words. Most of the present vocabulary measures rely largely on conscious knowledge of word form and meaning. There is plenty of evidence that implicit knowledge of vocabulary, which is subconscious, results from both deliberate and incidental learning and, in some case, is a precursor to explicit knowledge. Having practical ways of measuring such knowledge may reveal that many activities result in far more vocabulary learning than was previously thought.
(5) Multiword units. Where does vocabulary end and grammar begin? The vocabulary/grammar distinction is an arbitrary one and research on multiword units serves to underline this. If much of language use is instance-based and such instances (multiword units) can be learned as vocabulary then the deliberate learning of multiword units has a large role to play in a language course, and this role should largely replace much of what is included in grammar teaching. The two-way relationship between fluency and the use and storage of multiword units is a promising area of research.
(6) Corpus-based research. Corpus-based research on multiword units has largely taken practical paths rather than valid ones. There are however the beginnings of growth in the number of more rigorous studies using sensible criteria that combine computer-based analysis with the painstaking manual analysis that is necessary for good research in this area. This is likely to lead to findings that can be built upon.
(7) Vocabulary size and growth. We still know very little about the vocabulary growth of native speakers of English. This knowledge is very useful for setting goals in second language courses both in terms of rate of learning and amount of vocabulary to be learnt. Now that the methodology of vocabulary size testing is better understood, it is likely that this area of research will now yield results that we can have some faith in.
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