Тульский государственный педагогический университет им. Л.Н. Толстого
ELT Methodology course
Module handouts Tula
2012
Introduction
It is very clear to any foreign language learner that you can communicate (though not in the most successful way) if you know words and your grammar is very restricted.
If language structures make up the skeleton of the language, then it is vocabulary that provides the vital organs and the flesh. An ability to manipulate grammatical structure does not have any potential for expressing meaning unless words are used. We talk about the importance of ‘choosing your words carefully’ in certain situations, but we are less concerned about choosing structures carefully – unless of course we are in a language classroom. Then structural accuracy seems to be the dominant focus. In real life, however, it is even possible that where vocabulary is used correctly it can cancel out structural inaccuracy.
However, teachers traditionally spend much time teaching grammar and hope that students will learn vocabulary themselves. For many years vocabulary was seen as incidental to the main purpose of language teaching – namely the acquisition of grammatical knowledge about the language. Vocabulary was necessary to give students something to hang on to when learning structures, but was frequently not a main focus for learning itself.
Recently, however, methodologists and linguists have increasingly been turning their attention to vocabulary, stressing its importance in language teaching and reassessing some ways in which it is taught and learnt. The approach we accept is that vocabulary is too important to be left by itself. The teacher should not only select the words which the students learn but also help the students to learn new words.
Selecting vocabulary
Part of the problem in teaching vocabulary lies in the fact that whilst there is consensus about what grammatical structures should be taught at what levels the same is hardly true for vocabulary. It is true, of course, that syllabuses include word lists, but there is no guarantee that the list for one beginners’ syllabus will be similar to the list for a different set of beginners.
One of the problems of vocabulary teaching is how to select what words to teach. Dictionaries for upper intermediate students frequently have 55.000 words or more – and there may be many meanings for a word – and they represent a small fraction of all the possible words in a language. Somehow we have to make sense of this huge list and reduce it to manageable proportions for our learners.
How many words should the students know?
It is important that teachers have some idea about how many words students should know.
There are about 5.000.000 words in the English language
An educated native speaker will be able to understand about 40.000 – 60.000 words
Many native speakers use less than 2.000 words in their daily lives
In written English 40,4% of words only occur once in 5.000.000 words
Normally students can remember 5-7 words per lesson
The following figures were taken from a survey of 5.000.000 words
-
the number of words the learner knows
% of words in the text that the learner will know
10
23,7%
100
49%
2.000
81,3%
3.000
85.2%
5.000
89,4%
43.831
99%
86.741
100%
From these figures we can make the following conclusions: