Vocabulary and Language Teaching

Ronald Carter, Michael Mccarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317869146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The material in this book reviews work dating back to the vocabulary control movement in the 1930s and also refers to more recent work on the role of lexis in language learning. Two chapters describe the main foundations of lexical semantics and relevant research and pedagogical studies in vocabulary and lexicography; and a further chapter discusses recent advances in the field of lexis and discourse analysis. There is also a series of specially commissioned articles which investigate the structure and functions of the modern English lexicon in relation to its exploitation for classroom vocabulary teaching.

1 Word lists and learning words: some foundations

Throughout this book we claim that vocabulary study has been neglected by linguists, applied linguists and language teachers. We believe that we are justified in claiming this. Although interest has grown quite rapidly during the 1980s, there is certainly not much evidence of interest in vocabulary in the last twenty-five years taken as a whole, and relative to investigation at other linguistic levels. This opening chapter gives us an opportunity for qualifying this claim, or, at least, placing it in some kind of historical perspective. For taken over the last sixty years, the picture is rather different, because the 1930s witnessed the beginnings of what has come to be called the ‘vocabulary control movement’. There are a number of strands and offshoots to this movement both in Great Britain and in the United States, but we shall focus here on two particular developments: the work on Basic English of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards; and the work on definition vocabulary which led to the production by Michael West of A General Service List. A number of issues raised in this book, and a number of articles in Chapter 4, can be examined in relation to the aims and goals of these earlier pedagogically-inspired efforts at vocabulary control.

It may be useful, however, to begin this chapter by listing some questions which teachers and students have asked, usually quite persistently, about vocabulary and language study. The list is not exhaustive and answers will, in any case, not be forthcoming to all the questions, either in this chapter or after reading this book. But, we hope to try and lay some foundations from which answers might be found:

1. How many words provide a working vocabulary in a foreign language?
2. What are the best words to learn first?
3. In the early stages of learning a second or foreign language, are some words more useful to the learner than others?
4. Are some words more difficult to learn than others? Can words be graded for ease of learning?
5. What are the best means of retaining new words?
6. Is it most practical to learn words as single items in a list, in pairs (for example, as translation equivalents) or in context?
7. What about words which have different meanings? Should they be avoided? If not, should some meanings be isolated for learning first?
8. Are some words more likely to be encountered in spoken rather than written discourse? If so, do we know what they are?

1 Basic English: how basic is Basic?

The proposal for Basic English was first put forward in the early 1930s. Essentially, it was a project designed to provide a basic minimum vocabulary for the learning of English. The originators of the proposal were C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (Ogden 1930, 1968), though the latter author was responsible for numerous revisions, refinements and extensions to the scheme. Throughout the project had two main aims: ‘the provision of a minimum secondary world language and the designing of an improved introductory course for foreign learners, leading into general English’ (Richards 1943, p. 62). Its design has been outlined succinctly as follows by Richards (who, in fact, uses Basic English for the outline):

Basic English is English made simple by limiting the number of words to 850 and by cutting down the rules for using them to the smallest number necessary for the clear statement of ideas. And this is done without change in the normal order and behaviour of these words in even day English. It is limited in its words and its rules but it keeps to the regular forms of English. And though it is designed to give the learner as little trouble as possible, it is no more strange to the eyes of my readers than these lines which are, in fact, in Basic English

(Richards 1943, p. 20)

In other words, for Ogden and Richards it is a basic principle that, although their scheme will not embrace full English, it will at least not be un-English. In Figure 1 (pp. 4–5) is the list of words selected by Ogden and Richards as their basis. And the fact that they can be conveniently listed on a single side of paper is seen as one of the advantages of the proposal.

FIGURE 1 Basic English Word List

(Richards 1943, Basic English and its uses)

At the basis of Ogden and Richards’s Basic English is the notion of a communicative adequacy whereby, even if periphrastically, an adult’s fundamental linguistic needs can be communicated. Even though more complex ideas may have to be paraphrased, it is claimed that the words supplied will both serve to express complex ideas and be in themselves easy and fast to learn. The learning burden on these words is likewise kept to a minimum because, instead of introducing a wide range of verbs which, in English, necessitates the additional learning of numerous and often irregular inflections, Ogden and Richards confine their list to no more than eighteen main verbs, or ‘operations’ as they prefer to term them. The verbs are send, say, do, come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, see, plus the modal verbs may and will and the auxiliary words be and have. The only inflections to be learned (on verbs and nouns) are -er, -ing and -ed, and Basic English does not even permit the bound morpheme inflection s for verbs, so that he make(s) becomes ‘ungrammatical’. An example of the kind of periphrasis made possible or, depending on your point of view, unnaturally enforced by the system, is the omission of the verbs ask and want from the list of operators for the simple reason that they can be paraphrased. That is:

ask

put a question;

want

have a desire for.

The idea that many notions can be re-expressed using more basic language is central to the Basic English project. Other examples might be:

smoke

have a smoke;

walk

have a walk.

Closer scrutiny of the word list reveals further difficulties in the way of answers to some of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. Firstly, learning 850 word forms is not the same thing as learning 850 single senses. One calculation is that the 850 words of Basic English have 12,425 meanings (Nation 1983, p. 11). Which meanings should be learned first? Are there core meanings which are more easily retained or which are more important? Ogden and Richards seem to suggest that there are. For example, they have a category of 200 ‘pictured’ words which, presumably, have defined physical or concrete properties. But even these items can be polysemous. Which ‘picture’ of the following items is the right one, and should it be learned first: pipe, head, stamp, line? Secondly, it is interesting to note just how many of the 850 words have more than one sense. This applies to both lexical and grammatical words as well as to words such as round or right or past, which can have either primarily lexical or grammatical functions. This raises an interesting psycholinguistic question of whether the senses of single word forms (however polysemous) are easier to retain than the same number of monosemouswords with different word forms. Ogden and Richards offer no guidance here (and do not seem particularly aware of the question), although, to be fair to them, this is still a problem today which requires more extensive exploration. Thirdly, there is little guidance given as to how Basic English might be extended, and thus how this list and any additions to it might be graded for relative difficulty or usefulness, or, indeed, how much further, if at all, a learner would need to go to have a ‘working vocabulary’. Fourthly, the system is not designed to enhance social interaction through language. The object is one which bears not only on more specific features such as the fact that items such as goodbye or thank you or Mr and Mrs do not appear in Basic English, or that communication would be inevitably rather neutral or slightly formal stylistically (for example, have a desire for, take a walk), but also on the fact that the extent of periphrasis required can make communication a relatively clumsy affair. Additionally, there is the problem already noted that in the process of transfer to Standard English, a relatively large number of constructions which will have been created in the course of learning Basic English will have to be unlearned.

This is not to say that Basic English is not eminently ‘usable’ as an auxiliary language for general purposes of simplified international communication, and as a practical introduction to a more standardized form of English than can be found in many intranational contexts of English usage. It is also, as Ogden and Richards themselves have amply demonstrated, a useful system for producing clear and comprehensible written texts, particularly where high degrees of communicative expressivity are not required, such as in expository texts or material with high levels of information content. Although Basic English is not widely used or referred to today, the underlying impulse to provide systematically graded introductions to language, to specify lexical syllabuses and to construct core or nuclear Englishes for language learning purposes, is still an active one. (See, for example, Stein 1979; Quirk 1982; Stubbs 1986b; Carter 1982b, 1985, 1987a and b.)

2 Michael West and ‘A General Service List’

Published in 1953, A General Service List (hereafter GSL) is the outcome of almost three decades of major work in English lexicometrics. The main figures associated with this work are Michael West himself, whose work in English as a foreign language was concentrated in Bengal in India, and Harold Palmer – one of the founding fathers of English language teaching – who was Director of the Institute of English Language Teaching in Tokyo from 1923–1936. The ‘history’ of their association and academic collaboration on the development of vocabulary and other teaching materials has been lucidly charted by Howatt (1983, Chapter 17). West is also known for his New Method Readers and his New Method Dictionary, which make use of controlled vocabulary for, respectively, graded reading in a second language and for a lexicographic definition vocabulary (see Nolte 1937).

West’s General Service List grew organically from major studies in the 1930s on vocabulary selection for teaching purposes. These studies culminated in the Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection (1935) (known as the ‘Carnegie Report’) which in turn issued the first General Service List which was published in 1936. The revised GSL (1953) made particular use of word counts such as that of Thorndike and Lorge (1944) developed in the USA. It should also be noted that the GSL developed at the same time as and along not dissimilar lines to C. K. Ogden’s Basic English, and that the two schemes ran in parallel and in competition for many years. West’s GSL has had by far the most lasting influence, and the 1953 word list is widely used today forming the basis of the principles underlying the Longman Structural Readers. West’s notion of a limited defining vocabulary is one of the main informing design principles of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary’ English (1978). (See Chapter 3, pp. 52–4.)

The main criteria of West, Palmer and others for the selection of vocabulary for learning in the early stages of acquisition, are that:

a) the frequency of each word in written English should be indicated;

b) information should be provided about the relative prominences of the various meanings and uses of a word form.

Both these criteria, which were more extensively developed in the 1953 edition than in previous versions, provide particularly useful guidance for teachers deciding which words and which meanings should be taught first. The list consists of 2,000 words with semantic and frequency information drawn from a corpus of two to five million words. It is claimed that knowing these words gives access to about 80 per cent of the words in any written text, and thus stimulates motivation, since the words acquired can be seen by learners to have a demonstrably quick return. Other criteria adopted in the selection of words include their universality (words useful in all countries), their utility (enabling discussion on as wide a subject range as possible), and their usefulness in terms of definition value. The list can be seen to result from a mixture of subjective and objective selectional criteria.

A representative example of any entry for the General Service List, is that of the word act (GSL, p. 5). In the case of this word, 2184 here indicates the number of occurrences in five million words.

The advantages for teachers of this kind of detailed breakdown are considerable. But there are some disadvantages, too. One is that the list is to some extent outdated. It contains words from counts made in the 1930s and even earlier. A number of common 1980s words do not appear; for example, there are no entries for pilot, helicopter, television, astronaut. Another is that the corpus on which the lists are based is a written corpus. As a result not only do a number of the words appear distinctly ‘literary’, but data about spoken usage are not available for contrastive purposes. This does reflect one of West’s main aims, which was to provide a list for pre-reading or simplified reading materials. However, this main impulse to provide a practical research tool for basic literacy development conditions the ‘usefulness’ or ‘utility’ principles which, since they are mainly subjective, are in any case difficult to retrieve. Richards (1974, p. 71) has questioned the inclusion on this basis of certain items such as mannerism, vessel, ornament, mere, stock, motion, urge, which to him seem of limited utility , and has pointed to anomalies of exclusion from certain semantic fields. For example, doctor, engineer, teacher, nurse are included as occupations but carpenter, plumber and mason are excluded in favour of footman. Also, trader, merchant and dealer are all included when under the principles of definition value any one could effectively replace the others.

More serious, though understandable given available concord-ancing procedures at the time, is the absence of information on collocations and collocational frequ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Word lists and learning words Some foundations
• 2 Lexis and structure
• 3 Developments in the teaching of vocabulary
• 4 New directions in vocabulary studies
• Some vocabulary patterns in conversation
• 5 Lexis and discourse Vocabulary in use
• Bibliography
• Index