Vocabulary in

Language Teaching

Norbert Schmitt

University of Nottingham

(Introduction)

            Vocabulary is the first key when we want learn about language, because if we know the vocabulary so we know what the text talking about. Rather, our knowledge of individual words grows over time, both in our ability to use them receptively and productively and in the different kinds of word knowledge we come to master. With the background knowledge from this chapter in hand, we should be ready to explore the fascinating world of how vocabulary is learned and used. But first we start by considering how people have viewed vocabulary over the ages, and how this has led to our current thinking in the field.

            Reports of the size of the English language in the popular press have a very wide range: from 400,000 to 600,000 words (Claiborne, 1983, p. 5), from a half million to over 2 million (Crystal, 1988, p. 32), about 1 million (Nurnberg & Rosenblum, 1977, p. 11), and 200,000 words in common use, although adding technical and scientific terms would stretch the total into the millions (Bryson, 1990).

            Mastery of the complete lexicon of English (and probably any other language) is beyond not only second language learners but also native speakers. Still, the amount of vocabulary the average native speaker acquires is prodigious. This is shown by studies that have estimated that English native-speaking university graduates will have a vocabulary size of about 20,000 word families (Goulden et al., 1990; D’Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991). Nation and Waring (1997, p. 7) review vocabulary size studies and conclude that in English, these figures indicate that building a native-sized vocabulary might be a feasible, although ambitious, undertaking for a second language learner. Indeed, learning language is probably the most cognitively (mentally) challenging task a person goes through. But whereas the grammar of a language is largely in place by the time a child is 10 years old (Crystal, 1987, p. 243), vocabulary continues to be learned throughout one’s lifetime. This is because the grammar of a language is made up of a limited set of rules, but a person is unlikely to ever run out of words to learn.

            The mechanics of vocabulary learning are still something of a mystery, but one thing we can be sure of is that words are not instantaneously acquired, at least not for adult second language learners. Everyone realizes that a word’s meaning must be learned before that word can be of any use. In addition, there is the practical matter of mastering either the spoken or the written form of the word before it can be used in communication. A person who has not thought about the matter may believe that vocabulary knowledge consists of just these two facets meaning and word form. But the potential knowledge that can be known about a word is rich and complex.

These are known as types of word knowledge, and most or all of them are necessary to be able to use a word in the wide variety of language situations one comes across.

• the meaning(s) of the word

• the written form of the word

• the spoken form of the word

• the grammatical behavior of the word

• the collocations of the word

• the register of the word

• the associations of the word

• the frequency of the word

            We must remain aware that this is an expedient, and in reality the different kinds of word knowledge are almost certainly interrelated. For example, frequency is related to formality (part of register) in that more frequent words tend to be less formal, and less frequent words tend to be more formal. With the background knowledge from this chapter in hand, we should be ready to explore the fascinating world of how vocabulary is learned and used. But first we start by considering how people have viewed vocabulary over the ages, and how this has led to our current thinking in the field.