Vocabulary acquisition from teacher explanation and repeated listening to stories: Do they overcome the Matthew effect? Journal

Previous vocabulary research has focused on the size of lexicons and the number of words learned through various activities. To date, this type of research has generated little understanding of how individual words are acquired. To explore this issue, I tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for 3 adult learners with advanced profi-ciency in English. I measured 4 kinds of word knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and mean-ing. The participants had little problem with spelling, but rarely knew all of a target word’s meaning senses or deriva-tional word forms. Knowledge of the meaning senses of the target words improved about 2.5 times more than it was forgotten, and some of the word knowledge types appear to be interrelated. However, the study did not show evidence of a developmental hierarchy for word knowledge types. The mechanics of vocabulary acquisition is one of the more intriguing puzzles in second language acquisition (SLA). Language Learning 48:2, June 1998, pp. 281–317 I would like to thank the participants for their patience and help. Thanks also to Della Summers and Keith Mardell of Longman Publishing for access to the BNC, and Gwyneth Fox and Rosamund Moon of COBUILD for access to the Bank of English corpus. Ron Carter, Mike McCarthy, Paul Meara, and Diane Schmitt provided valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Some teachers and researchers may assume that when a learner knows one member of a word family (e.g., stimulate), the other members (e.g., stimulant, stimulative) are relatively easy to learn. Although knowing one member of a word family undoubtedly facilitates receptive mastery of the other members, the small amount of previous research has suggested that L2 learners often have problems producing the various derivative forms within a word family. This study examined the ability of 106 graduate and undergraduate nonnative-English-speaking students to produce appropriate derivatives in the four major word classes (i.e., noun, verb, adjective, and adverb) for 16 prompt words. The results indicated that it was relatively uncommon for subjects to know either all of the four word forms or none of them. Subjects usually had partial knowledge of the derivatives, with productive knowledge of two or three forms being typical. In a comparison of derivational mastery and knowledge of the prompt words on a four-stage developmental scale,

This study set out to empirically determine the reliability and validity of the Vocabulary Levels Tests, both the passive and productive versions. Furthermore, attempt was made to investigate the nature of the students ' vocabulary knowledge with regard to their passive and active knowledge of the L2 words as a whole and at different word frequency levels. Moreover, the relationships between these two types of vocabulary knowledge and the learners ' proficiency level and reading comprehension ability were studied. And finally, it was scrutinized if there were any significant differences between the High and Low proficient learners and also English majors and non-majors ' passive and active vocabularies. Three tests, the Vocabulary Levels Test, the Productive Version of the Vocabulary Levels Test, and a TOEFL test, were administered to a group of 76 Iranian undergraduate students majoring in engineering and English Language and Literature. The results proved the Vocabulary Levels Tests to be reliable and valid tests of vocabulary size. The learners ' passive and active vocabularies were also found to be highly correlated as a whole and at each separate word-frequency level. Passive vocabulary was always larger than active vocabulary at all levels; however, the gap between the two increased at lower word-frequency levels. In addition, there was a high correlation between the learners ' vocabulary knowledge on the one hand and proficiency and reading comprehension ability on the other hand. It was also found that there was a statistically significant difference between the vocabulary knowledge of High proficient and Low proficient groups and also between the English majors and non-majors. The High proficient group and the English majors had greater passive and active vocabulary knowledge than their corresponding Low proficient group and the non-majors.

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Corpus-based vocabulary research has had a profound impact on English language education, and there is abundant evidence that this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Perhaps the greatest challenge of such research is the determination of what constitutes a Word for counting and analysis purposes. Decisions in this regard have important ramifications not only for the lexical findings themselves, but also for the pedagogical theories and practices that derive from them. This article surveys several fields of study in order to discuss this dilemma, with a particular focus on three problematic areas relating to computer-processed corpora: (a) morphological relationships between words, (b) homonymy and polysemy, and (c) multiword items. The article concludes with recommendations for assessing the validity of the Word construct in applied corpus-based vocabulary research. The influence of corpora and corpus-based research on educational theories and practices is well-established in both first language (L1) and second

The importance of vocabulary in second language (L2) wnnng is widely accepted, but there has been relatively little research into the lexical errors learners produce when writing in their second language. Moreover, the error categorisation frameworks used in some previous studies have addressed only a relatively limited number of lexical error categories. In this paper the authors used a more comprehensive error taxonomy based on James (1998), with some additions from Leech's semantics (1981), to analyse Thai third-year university students ' English compositions for lexical errors. The analysis revealed that (a) 'near synonyms ' were the most numerous errors, followed by 'preposition partners ' and 'suffixes', (b) the students had more difficulty with semantics than the forms of words, and (c) the identified sources of errors were mainly from L2 intrinsic difficulty rather than the first language (Ll) transfer. The findings from the Thai students ' written lexical errors have impli-cations for L2 vocabulary teaching and learning, which should be of interest to wider English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Research into lexical errors The language produced by foreign language (FL) learners almost inevitably contains errors of various types. This is the process of learning a language. Empirical evidence suggests that lexical errors are the most frequently occurring

Abstract This study investigated the role of oral reading fluency in second language reading. Two hundred and fifty-five high school students in South Korea were assessed on three oral reading fluency (ORF) variables and six other reading predictors. The relationship between ORF and other reading predictors was examined through an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Next, the contribution of ORF to silent reading comprehension was investigated through multiple regression analyses (MRA) with ORF variables as predictors of reading comprehension. EFA identified two factors (fluency and comprehension) and showed that passage reading fluency crossloaded with both factors. MRA results indicated that the three ORF variables collectively explained 21.2% of variance in silent reading comprehension. Oral passage reading fluency alone explained 20.9% of variance in silent reading comprehension. After controlling for pseudoword reading and word reading fluency, oral passage reading fluency still accounted for an additional 12.4% of the remaining reading variance.

This paper first considers some of the practical and theoretical issues involved when teaching or learning vocabulary items in an ESP course, and discusses (briefly) the notion of what it means to know a word. Following that, it reports on the results of an experiment designed to test the usefulness of a slightly modified version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale developed by Paribakht and Wesche and how this has given us insights into our students' knowledge of certain vocabulary items and their learning processes. Finally, it suggests a number of factors to bear in mind when teaching vocabulary. Although the L1 of the subjects involved in this research was Spanish and the target language English, we believe the general findings reported in this paper are applicable to speakers of other L1s learning other languages.

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