What’s in a word?The role of vocabulary in

language learningVocabuild

29 June 2010Jeanine Treffers-Daller (UWE Bristol)

Is vocabulary important? What do you think?

What does it mean to know a word? The link between vocabulary knowledge

and school success Vocabulary and reading ability Edgar Allan Poe’s – the pit and the

pendulum Being bilingual: the good and the bad The Simon Task Bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge Supporting bilingual learners A teaching+research agenda?

Overview

Researchers may not necessarily be delving into the area that the teacher needs to inform his or her practice.

The research agenda is being set almost entirely by the research community (Macaro 2005: 3)

What kinds of research are most useful for teachers?

1 = useful 4 = not at all useful

Second-Language teachers: what are the important issues?

Macaro (2005)

N=80

vocabulary 1.73

social interaction 2.10

sentence structure 3.57

pronunciation 4.74

phonics 5.10

grammar 5.22

literacy 5.60

Vocabuild surveyWhat areas of speech, language and learning do you feel are most important when supporting a bilingual child? Rank in order of priority with 1 being the most important and 7 being the least important.

N =143 (21 June 2010)

Recommendations: Defining and explaining word meanings Arranging frequent encounters with new

words (at least 6 exposures to a new word) Encouraging pupils’ deep and active

processing of words and meanings in multiple contexts

Primary national strategy (2007)

“Bilingualism is an asset, and the first language has a continuing and significant role in identity, learning and the acquisition of additional languages.”

Source: Supporting children learning English as an additional language. Guidance for practitioners in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Primary National strategy (2007)

The importance of bilingualism

What is a front wing post?

What does it mean to know a word?

What does it mean to know a word? What is a ….front wing post?

Why do IKEA products have names…?

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

                                 

 GRANÅSdining table

$159.00    

                                 

 KAUSTBYchair

$54.00    

                                 

 GRANÅSchair

$35.00    

                                 

 IVARchair

$35.00    

                                 

 FORSBYdining table

$329.00    

                                 

 ARONchair

$69.00    

                                 

 BJURSTAdining table

$349.00    

                                 

 ODDVARbar stool

What does it mean to know the word “give”? A word’s pronunciation Different forms (give, gives, gave, given) Meaning (giver, receiver, something is given) Syntactic frame (give X to Y, give up, give in, give

away, etc.) Formality (register) – “give” is different from

“donate” Frequency: how common is the word? Collocations/idioms: I don’t give a toss if…; give-and-

take Associations: what other words does this word make

us think of?

What is involved in knowing a word?(Nation 2001)

Vocabulary is the core component of all language skills (Long and Richards 2007: xii)

Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed (Wilkins 1972: 111; in Milton 2008: 333).

Why words?

The properties of lexical items shape the sentence (Cook 1998).

Vocabulary is everywhere: it connects to the systems of phonology and orthography, morphology, syntax, grammar and to meaning systems.

Why words?

What is a word? “The word is not an easy concept to define,

either in theoretical terms or for various applied purposes” (Read 2000: 17).

… anything between two spaces…?

Door Doorstep Door-to-door Doorkeeper Front door

behind closed doors See someone to the door Slam the door in your face Through the back door

Formulaic sequences

In a nutshell / it is important to note that /a large part of communication / makes use of fixed expressions. / As far as I can see / for many of these at least / the whole is more than the sum of its parts./ However, /it is appropriate to say at this point / that much work remains to be done.

Wray (2002: 24)

Formulaic language

word families

Are the following all different words?◦ Work, works, working worked (inflected forms)◦ Worker, unworkable, rework (derived forms)◦ Workaholic, work force, workmate (compounds)

Word family: word with inflected forms and derived forms (not compounds)

Total English: 54,000 word families (Nation and Waring)

I can give a definition I know some aspects of its meaning (partial

knowledge) I have seen the word before without

knowing what it means I don’t know this word at all

What does it mean to know a word?

Educational studies in L1 acquisition: expansion of lexicon is key to educational success (Dickinson, Flushman and Freiberg 2009).

Individual differences Difference of 4000 root words between

between highest and lowest performing 6-year-olds (Biemiller 2006).

Vocabulary knowledge and school success

By failing to support vocabulary effectively, we overlook the most pressing needs of many children who are most at risk of later reading failure (Dickinson et al 2009: 23).

The basic dimension of school literacy may not be technicalities of recoding letters into sounds and blending them into words and sentences, but mastery of the academic language and its associated specialised vocabulary and grammar (Leseman and van Tuyl 2006: 214).

Vocabulary knowledge and school success

Importance of early language abilities

End of pre-school vocabulary strong predictor of reading ability in grade 4 (Tabors, Porsche and Ross 2003; Sénéchal et al 2006).

Pre-school vocabulary strongly correlates with fourth grade vocabulary (r =.77) (Dickinson et al 2009: 28)

Vocabulary knowledge and school success

Language threshold for reading is largely lexical (Laufer 1992; Hu and Nation 2000).

How many words do you need to know in order to read a text?

98% of words need to be known for independent reading

95% minimally acceptable comprehension (Laufer 2010).

Vocabulary knowledge and reading

Optimal threshold◦ 8,000 word families yielding the coverage of 98%

of words in a text (including proper nouns)

Minimal threshold◦ 4,000–5,000 word families resulting in the

coverage of 95% of words in a text (including proper nouns)

Source: Laufer and Geke C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010)

Lexical threshold (adult L2 learners)

Edgar Allan Poe – the pit and the pendulum My outstretched hands at length

encountered some solid obstruction. It was a wall, seemingly of stone masonry -- very smooth, slimy, and cold. I followed it up; stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique narratives had inspired me.

What are the difficult words?

Vocabprofile analysis

my outstretched hands at length encountered some solid obstruction it was a wall seemingly of stone masonry very smooth slimy and cold i followed it up stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique narratives had inspired me

Blue: 1-1000 (most frequent words)Green: 1001-2000Yellow: academic word listRed: off-list words

http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/

Edgar Allan PoeFreq. Level Families

Coverage %

Cum%

K1 Words : 157 75.19 75.19%

K2 Words : 39 7.20 82.39%

K3 Words : 26 5.05 87.44%

K4 Words : 18 3.37 90.81%

K5 Words : 11 1.84 92.65%

K6 Words : 6 0.92 93.57%

K7 Words : 6 1.07 94.64%

K8 Words : 7 1.07 95.71%

K9 Words : 2 0.31 96.02%

K10 Words : 5 0.92 96.94%

Vocabulary and reading High frequency words: 80% of running

text Academic words 9% to 10% of an

academic text (see Coxhead 1998) Technical words: words that are very

closely related to the topic and subject area of a text (5% of the words in a text).

Low frequency words: there are thousands of these: they form the largest group of words (5% of the words in an academic text).

95% coverage can be achieved by 5,000 word families with proper nouns:

◦ 78% (1K) ◦ 8% (2K) ◦ 3% (3K) ◦ 3% (4K–5K) ◦ 3% proper nouns.

98% coverage: add words from 6k-9k

Vocabulary knowledge and reading

Vocabulary learning in L2 First few thousand words: explicit

vocabulary learning Remaining words: through incidental

(implicit learning) (Huckin and Coady 1999)

Learning from meaning-focused input can best occur if learners are familiar with at least 95% (but preferably 98%) of the running words in the input they are focusing on (Nation 2001: 390)

Vocabulary learning in L2 How can teachers use this information? Nation (2001: 16): “The high frequency

words are clearly so important that considerable time should be spent on them by teachers and learners. The words are a small enough group to enable most of them to get attention over the span of a long-term English programme.”

The most effective way for English language learners to develop oral proficiency and literacy in English is by encouraging and creating a strong background in L1 (Cummins 1981; Hakuta 1986)

Time spent on native language instruction does not take away from English reading in later years (Reese et al 2000)

Strong vocabularies in L1 contribute to greater fluency in L2 (Proctor et al 2006).

Vocabulary learning in L2

Vocabulary learning in L2 “Learning a word is a cumulative process

involving a range of aspects of knowledge. Learners need many different kinds of meetings with words in order to learn them fully” (Nation 2001: 4).

Vocabulary learning in L1 Children learn 10 words a day (after slow

start) Vocabulary size at age 5: 4,000-5,000 word

families Children learn 1,000 word families a year University graduate: 20,000 word families

(Nation 2001)===========================

= Word families: stem + inflected forms

◦ Work, works, working worked (inflected forms)◦ Worker, unworkable, rework (derived forms)

The good: Bilingual children perform better than

monolingual children on non-verbal tasks that require executive control and conflict resolution (Bialystok et al 2005).

Simon task

Lift your LEFT arm when you see a RED circle Lift your RIGHT arm when you see a BLUE

circle

Bilingualism: the good and the bad…

The bad: Bilinguals generally have a smaller

vocabulary in each language than monolinguals (Oller and Eilers, 2002; Perani et al., 2003; Portocarrero, Burright and Donovick, 2007).

Bilinguals are slower in accessing vocabulary, picture naming tasks, verbal fluency tasks

They experience more tip-of-the-tongue experiences (Gollan and Acenas, 2004)

Bilingual children

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores of 971 children between the ages of 5 and 9 years

Bilinguals: mean score of 95 Monolinguals: mean score of 105 (Bialystok and Feng 2009)

Bilingual children

“English should not replace the home language; it will be learned in addition to the language skills already learned and being developed within the language community at home.”

Supporting children learning English as an additional languagr. Primary National Strategy (2007).

Recommendations of the national language

In the US most ELL children are put in English-only classrooms, led by teachers who are monolingual speakers of English

California, Arizona, Massachussetts: legislation to prevent bilingual education.

Every child matters Green Paper (2003): develop strategies for supporting bilingual learners

How can we help bilingual children develop their vocabularies?

In January 2008, only 5.7% of teachers in local authority maintained schools were from non-white ethnic groups, an increase of 0.3 percentage points over 2007 and an increase of 1 percentage point over the figure for 2006.

Source: Ben Smith Ethnic Minorities in Politics, Government and Public Life

(November 2008) http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/

briefings/snsg-01156.pdf

How to support bilingual children?

There is scant research describing how primary grade classrooms support growth of children’s vocabulary and language through conversations (Dickinson 2009).

In schools, talk is sometimes valued and sometimes avoided, but—and this is surprising—talk is rarely taught. It is rare to hear teachers discuss their efforts to teach students to talk well. Yet talk, like reading and writing, is a major motor—I could even say the major motor—of intellectual development. (Calkins, 2000, p. 226)

A teaching+research agenda?

Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Grady, C., Chau, W., Ishii, R., Gunji, A. & Pantev, C. (2005). Effect of bilingualism on cognitive control in the Simon task: Evidence from MEG. NeuroImage, 24, 40–49

Goulden, R., P. Nation and John Read (1990) How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics 11 (4), 341-363.

Laufer, B. & G.C. Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) Lexical threshold revisited. Reading in a foreign language 22(1), 15-30.http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/April2010/articles/laufer.pdf

Sources

Sénéchal, M., G. Ouellette and D. Rodney (2006) The misunderstood giant: On the Predictive Role of Early Vocabulary to Future Reading. In Susan B. Neuman, David K. Dickinson (eds.) Handbook of Early Literacy Research (173-184). The Guilford Press.

Winokur, J. And K. Worth (2006) Language Use In The Science Classroom: Looking At What Students And Teachers Need To Know And Be Able To Do. EDC’s Center for Science Education

Education Development Center, Inc

.

Sources

Tidball, Françoise and Jeanine Treffers-Daller (in press) Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous speech of native and non-native speakers of French: a quest for the Holy Grail? In: Daller, Helmut, James Milton and J. Treffers-Daller (eds.) Testing and modelling lexical knowledge. CUP

Sources