1
Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language A. How many words and what words to learn? 1. Number of words ESL learners need to function effectively in English (From Nation & Newton, 1997): 2. What words to learn/teach: some word lists a. The General Service List (West, 1953): 2,000 most frequent words based on a 5,000,000 word written corpus, carefully developed by West in the 1940s, still one of the best word lists today. b. The University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984): 836 words from several lists combined, covering 19 academic disciplines. c The Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000): 570 head words believed to provide more coverage of academic texts than the UWL. B. Dimensions and assessment of lexical competence in L2 Size/breadth Organization Automaticity Depth C. Comparative studies of vocabulary learning/teaching methods 1. The keyword method (e.g., Wang, Thomas, & Quellette, 1992) 2. The word list or rote learning method 3. Incidental vocabulary acquisition 4. Comparison of semantization strategies (e.g., Hulstijn, Hollander, & Greidanus, 1996) a. guessing/inferring from context b. using in-text or marginal annotation (synonyms, translations, definitions, or pictures) c. using visual aids such as pictures and objects d. using monolingual or bilingual dictionary e. word lists with translations f. analyzing lexical forms such as prefixes and suffixes (Intralingual, extralingual, & interlingual strategies) D. Explaining L2 vocabulary acquisition: a transfer-based model of L2 VA (Jiang, 2000) 1. Lexical representation: some assumptions 2. Three stages of L2 vocabulary acquisition a. lexical association b. L1 lemma mediation c. full integration 3. Some hypotheses made in the model a. the semantic transfer hypothesis b. the morphological insensitivity hypothesis c. the lexical fossilization hypothesis 4. Testing the model (Jiang, 2002) Level Number of Words Text Coverage High-frequency words 2,000 87% Academic vocabulary 800 8% Technical vocabulary 2,000 3% Total to be learned 4,800 98% Native Speakers 17,000-20,000 word families or 60,000 words

Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Languageeslnxj/8250/vocabula.pdf · Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language ... The University Word List ... c The Academic Word List (Coxhead,

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Languageeslnxj/8250/vocabula.pdf · Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language ... The University Word List ... c The Academic Word List (Coxhead,

Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language A. How many words and what words to learn? 1. Number of words ESL learners need to function effectively in English (From Nation & Newton, 1997): 2. What words to learn/teach: some word lists a. The General Service List (West, 1953): 2,000 most frequent words based on a 5,000,000

word written corpus, carefully developed by West in the 1940s, still one of the best word lists today.

b. The University Word List (Xue & Nation, 1984): 836 words from several lists combined, covering 19 academic disciplines. c The Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000): 570 head words believed to provide more coverage of academic texts than the UWL.

B. Dimensions and assessment of lexical competence in L2 Size/breadth

Organization Automaticity

Depth

C. Comparative studies of vocabulary learning/teaching methods 1. The keyword method (e.g., Wang, Thomas, & Quellette, 1992) 2. The word list or rote learning method 3. Incidental vocabulary acquisition 4. Comparison of semantization strategies (e.g., Hulstijn, Hollander, & Greidanus, 1996) a. guessing/inferring from context b. using in-text or marginal annotation (synonyms, translations, definitions, or pictures) c. using visual aids such as pictures and objects d. using monolingual or bilingual dictionary e. word lists with translations f. analyzing lexical forms such as prefixes and suffixes (Intralingual, extralingual, & interlingual strategies) D. Explaining L2 vocabulary acquisition: a transfer-based model of L2 VA (Jiang, 2000) 1. Lexical representation: some assumptions 2. Three stages of L2 vocabulary acquisition a. lexical association b. L1 lemma mediation c. full integration 3. Some hypotheses made in the model a. the semantic transfer hypothesis b. the morphological insensitivity hypothesis c. the lexical fossilization hypothesis 4. Testing the model (Jiang, 2002)

Level Number of Words Text Coverage High-frequency words 2,000 87% Academic vocabulary 800 8% Technical vocabulary 2,000 3% Total to be learned 4,800 98% Native Speakers 17,000-20,000 word families or 60,000 words