Vocabulary in Language Learning

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INTRODUCTION About half a century ago, Sweet (1964) supported that the real intrinsic difficulty of learning a language lies in that of having to master its vocabulary. This claim was made at a time when vocabulary was notably neglected in language learning for a plethora of reasons. Decontextualised vocabulary instruction had been emphasised too much in the classroom during the years of the Grammar Translation Method, so there was a need for a shift of emphasis on the structural component of the language. This was also partially due to the specialisation in linguistic research on syntax and morphology, which fostered a climate in which vocabulary was thought to be less important (Carter, 1987). Thus, teachers tended to concentrate less on lexis for fear of students making mistakes in sentence construction, if a large amount of vocabulary was acquired before the basic grammar (Allen, 1983). Carter moves on to say that this neglect was in accordance with the “underlying perception that significant structural description and generalisation is possible within syntax, where relations are finite, but less likely in lexis, where relations are theoretically infinite” (1987:145). Furthermore, there may have been more practical reasons for this aversion to teaching vocabulary, since measurement of lexical knowledge can be difficult and only approximate, and vocabulary items do not lend themselves to clear-cut specifications in a syllabus, in terms of either their number, type, or range – unlike syntactic structures (ibid.). Having said the above, we come to the present practice of teaching English, where teachers and learners realise and admit the value of vocabulary, since lack of the necessary words results in failure in communication.... ... middle of paper ... ...aknesses of word lists will be presently examined based on Michael West’s GSL since it is still considered “easy to use [and] deservedly popular” (Fox and Manhood, 1982:128). It contains 2000 headwords and was developed in the 1940s, based on a five-million-word written corpus. The GSL was compiled in order to be used as a resource for developing simplified reading texts categorised into stages or steps. The entries can be divided into the most frequent 1000 words, which according to Carter (1987) and Nation (2001) cover over 75% of the running words in an academic text, and the second 1000 most frequent ones which cover 5-6% of the running words. Elsewhere (Nation and Newton, 1988) it is claimed that the percentage amounts to 85% of the words in any page on any book no matter what the subject matter and that the coverage provided is even greater is spoken language.

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