VOCABULARY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING

VOCABULARY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING

1. Language

   • Is formed words
     • Words allow us to talk about objects as diverse as helicopters and penguins.
   • Vocabulary
     • The language learner learns words before acquiring syntax or conventional discourse patterns.
     • The learner´s vocabulary is key in language and it´s acquisition.
     • Vocabulary has been as a primary factor in verbal comprenhesion throught much of the history of modern psychological and educational research.
   • What does it mean to know a word?
     • Various aspects of a word are learned and it s generally the case that this learning initially develops into a receptive vocabulary and that over time much of that receptive vocabulary used in listening and reading becomes productive vocabulary for speech and writing.

2. Breath of word of word knowledge

   • Breadth of word knowledge is generally estimated based on word frequency lists.
     • ´How many words shouls a reader know in a second language in order to read an authentic text?
       • The words are ranked according to frecuency and the learner is given a test to determine at what band of vocabulary he or she demostrates control.
         • The Teacher´s Word Book of 30,000 Words (Thorndike and Lorge 1944) better known as the Thorndike-Lorge List, samples English words from juvenile literature, the Bible, newspapers.
         • A General Service List of English Words (West 1953) provides a set of 2,000 words selected to be of assistance to learners of English as a foreign language.
         • Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (Kucera and Francis 1967) presents words both in frecuency rank order and alphabetical order.
         • A University Word List (Xue and Nation 1984) focuses on the vocabulary of university study.
         • The American Heritage Intermediate Corpus (Caroll, Davies, and Richman 1971) was designed to examine the word frequencies for materials that might be encountared by students in grades 3 through 9.
         • The Academic Word List (AWL) also focused on the vocabulary of academic texts (Coxhead 2000). The texts were divided into the four general academic areas of arts, commerce, law, and science.

3. Depth of word knowledge

   • Depth of word knowledge refers to a learner´s knowledge of the different aspects of a given word. This knowledge has to to with extent of knowledge of the following categories:
     • 2. Morphological properties
     • 3. Syntatic properties and collocations
     • 6. Frecuency
     • 4. Meaning ( including connotations, polysemy, antonymy, and synonymy)
     • 5. Register
     • 1. Pronunciation and orthography
   • A key concept
     • Is known Ina deeper manner, then the more words that are associated with that word are also known.
       • Much of the research recognizing the incremental nature of second language vocabulary knowledge employs one of two elicitation techniques that represent partial stages of knowledge.
         • The second approach to examining depth of knowledge is the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale.
         • The first approach (Read 19993) uses a stimulus ajective and two boxes.

4. Relationships of breadh and depth

   • Most likely the breadth and depth dimensions of vocabulary knowledge interact and operate interdependently.
   • The larger the vocabulary size the more likelyis is that the reader will know words in more depth and will be aware of collocations and potential synonyms.
   • Qian (1999) investigated the relationships between breadth of vocabulary, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprenhesion.

5. Reading and first language vocabulary language

   • It was noted earlier that by the time a reader is ready to exit hight school he or she knows somewhere around 20,000.
   • For decades is has been assumed that these words are learned implicitly through the contexts of listening or reading without awareness, and generally incidentally without intention
   • Sternberg and Powell (1983)
     • Proposed a theoretic framework for how learning vocabulary from context takes places that focuses on contextual cues and mediating variables.
     • The approach distinguishes between those aspects of vocabulary that lie outside the learner, the contextual cues, and those aspects that exist at least partially within the learner, mediating variables
       • The contextual cues are:
         • Temporal cues, spatial cues, value cues, stative descriptive cues, functional descriptive cues, causal/enablement cues, class membership cues, equivalence cues
   • Reading and second language vocabulary learning
     • The factors that have emerged in the literature on first language as central to vocabulary also have a key place in understanding second language lexical learning.

6. Second language vocabulary and pedagogy

   • Dictionary use
     • The role of dictionaries, of either the bilingual or monolingual variery, is a topic that can bring out passion in even the most soft-spoken teacher.
     • Several researches view dictionaries as essential to efficient vocabulary learning. Hulstijn (1993).
   • Marginal glosses
     • Attention has also been given to the role that textual glosses have on increasing comprehension and vocabulary acquistion.

7. Meanin-in-context vocabulary learning strategies

   • Some of the strategies vary by language ability while others appear to represent idiosyncratic preferences.
     • It is useful to look at the words readers have identified as dfficult in order to determine how successfully they have inferred word meanings.

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