Teaching English Forum -Vol 42- Issue 1- 2004.pdf

A P ostcard f rom the E ditor

I t’s January, a new year—and it brings me an exciting new challenge

as I take over as editor of English Teaching Forum. This position gives me a

much-welcomed opportunity to explore my love of the English language and my

interest in other cultures.

My first exposure to the Forum was more than a decade ago when I was teach-

ing English as a foreign language as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa. Teaching

materials were scarce, and I was happy to have the Forum as a source of ideas I

could adapt for my classroom.

Shortly after I became editor, I went through the archives and found those same

issues of the Forum I had received as an English teacher in Africa. I paged through

them, experiencing a pleasant sense of recognition, like the feeling you get look-

ing through a long-forgotten photo album.

But now I am looking ahead to the new volume at hand. In each issue of Volume

42, we will present an authentic essay by a well-known American writer taken

from a publication called Writers on America. Each essay will be accompanied by

a lesson plan with various activities you can explore with your students. The

essay in this issue—“A Postcard from America”—tells, among other things, about

how Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story from the inspiration of an antique

postcard picturing a biplane (similar to the one on the cover).We hope you will

enjoy this special feature, which we think is a nice complement to the academic

articles.

And now, as I embark on this new endeavor, I’d like to thank Bill Ancker, Paulette

Estep, and David Hamill for helping to ensure a smooth take-off.

Above: An old postcard of St. Paul,

Minnesota, the editor’s hometown,

shows the Minnesota State Capitol, de-

signed by Cass Gilbert. Courtesy of the

Curt Teich Postcard Archives

Front Cover: Orville Wright is at the

controls of the “Wright Flyer” as his

brother Wilbur Wright looks on during

the plane’s first flight at Kitty Hawk,

North Carolina, December 17, 1903.

Made of wood, wire, and cloth by two

bicycle mechanics, the plane stayed aloft

for 12 seconds and traveled a distance of

120 feet. © AP/WideWorld Photos/John

T. Daniels.

—MK

Andrew Sheehan

C HILE

M A

KING S

W ORDS

OR CENTURIES , LANGUAGES HAVE BEEN CHANGING , AND E NGLISH IS NO EXCEPTION .

Samuel Johnson expected that his pioneering dictionary, published in 1755,

“[S]hould fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and

chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it.” In fact, English is changing

faster than most languages. For teachers, the fact that English is constantly

changing and evolving can be unsettling and sometimes even dispiriting. Thank

goodness for good old reliable grammar! But of course, MAKING SENSE OF

WORDS is what language teaching and learning is all about. A recent upsurge

in the interest in, and importance of, vocabulary in ELT has prompted a host of

new books on the subject, and the advent of corpus linguistics has added sup-

port to the movement. How far does this lexical revolution extend?

J ANUARY 2004

E NGLISH T EACHING F ORUM

ENS EOF

It depends on where in the world you are,

geographically and chronologically. While

methods and approaches may have come and

gone for many ELT academics in their univer-

sities, in many parts of the world where Eng-

lish is taught, and where contact with devel-

opments in ELT has been limited, working at

the chalk-face has remained the same for

decades. In my experience, the Lexical

Approach—or to be more specific, the

research on which the hypothesis is based—

has not reached many parts of the world, and

the majority of the teachers I have been work-

ing with recently are not familiar with corpus

linguistics.

This article will address the following ques-

tions:

• What is the current thinking on the role

of vocabulary in ELT, and how does cor-

pus linguistics support this?

• What does corpus linguistics tell us

about lexis and the importance of lexical

development?

• What are the implications for English

language teaching and learning?

• How can we help students learn, store,

and retrieve the words they need?

mar is a finite system, whereas vocabulary is

not. The reasoning is that a language teacher—

especially one who rarely reads in English and

has no access to English-language newspa-

pers— could not possibly keep track of even a

fraction of the words the English language now

contains, let alone its ever-expanding lexicon.

Consider, for example, such recent additions as

greenhouse effect, global warming, hip hop,

grunge, ethnic cleansing, cyberspace, CD-ROM,

hacker, and embedded reporter.

However, the argument in favor of placing

greater weight on vocabulary is strong. Meara

(1995) points out that knowing only 500

words is functionally useless. English learners

with such a minimal vocabulary who try to

process a text will encounter too many unfa-

miliar words, and frequently these are precise-

ly the words that convey the meaning of the

text. Consider, for example, the following:

While Argentina was celebrating the victory

of its team in the World Cup, the president

and his family took the opportunity to go on

vacation.

Given enough time, students reading this

sentence who have a low level of reading

vocabulary might recognize the italized words

because they are cognates, although they could

easily misinterpret the key signal word while at

the beginning of the sentence. But the same

students listening to a native speaker saying

this sentence at normal speed are not likely to

understand or recognize most of the words,

except perhaps, the words Argentina and

World Cup. Even the cognates are likely to

become incomprehensible because the pro-

nunciation of these words in English is com-

pletely different from that of, say, Spanish.

Even given Nation’s contention (1990) that

learners need know only half as many words to

understand spoken text as they need to under-

stand written text —because of the usually

greater lexical density of written text —listen-

ing, in my view, involves the additional prob-

lem of real time constraints on comprehen-

sion, which more than compensates for the

discrepancy noted by Nation.

Evidence from the field of corpus linguis-

tics shows clearly that it is lexical competence,

not the learning of grammatical structures,

that must be the priority for language learners

because lexical competence is at the heart of

What is the current thinking?

Vocabulary has been the neglected Cin-

derella of language teaching; preference has

always been, and still is, given to the two sis-

ters Grammar and More Grammar. There are

several reasons for the Cinderella status of

vocabulary. First, there is the legacy of previ-

ous language-teaching methods, particularly

the traditional Grammar Translation Method

with its emphasis on the learning of rules and

structures. As Brown (2000, 15) states: “[T]he

Grammar Translation Method remarkably

withstood attempts at the outset of the twen-

tieth century to reform language teaching

methodology, and to this day it remains a stan-

dard methodology for language teaching in

educational institutions.” The Audiolingual

Method (ALM), with its emphasis on repeti-

tive drills, did nothing to change the balance.

Brown goes on to observe that a key feature of

ALM is that “Vocabulary is strictly limited and

learned in context” (2000, 74).

Many English language teachers like to

stress grammar over vocabulary because gram-

E NGLISH T EACHING F ORUM

J ANUARY 2004

communicative competence. Richards (2000,

xi) states:

Vocabulary and lexical units are at the heart

of learning and communication. No

amount of grammatical or other type of

linguistic knowledge can be employed in

communication or discourse without the

mediation of vocabulary. Indeed, vocabu-

lary and lexical expressions can sustain a

great deal of rudimentary communication

without much support from other aspects

of the language system. Understanding of

the nature and significance of vocabulary

knowledge in a second language therefore

needs to play a much more central role in

the knowledge base of language teachers.

terms of its spelling and pronunciation, and

the learner may be able to apply it correctly

when describing color. However, all the

idiomatic expressions associated with red,

including in the red, to see red, and a red letter

day, may never be learned.

2. Recycling and revising words

We know that words should be recycled

and revised as soon as possible after they are

introduced; otherwise there is a tendency for

them to be forgotten. There are several options

for presenting and revising, or recycling,

vocabulary. Nation (1990, 3–4) lists four typ-

ical ways, from “most indirect to most direct,”

which teachers may follow. Here, I have cho-

sen McCarthy’s (1990) categories as being par-

ticularly useful. According to this viewpoint,

there are three main options:

1. By topic or theme, e.g., colors, rooms in

a house, in the supermarket, on vaca-

tion, crime

2. By focusing on meaning, e.g., collocation,

semantic sets, register, discourse analysis

3. By focusing on form, e.g., word forma-

tion, such as roots, suffixes, and prefixes;

compounds; phrasal verbs

I shall introduce each of these, and give

examples, in the Three Options section to fol-

low. The examples are meant to be representa-

tive of each category only; there are many

excellent books available that include a wide

range of similar activities.

3. Teaching vocabulary systematically

Another implication from the findings of

corpus linguistics is that vocabulary develop-

ment will have to be given much more promi-

nence in language teaching than it now gets. I

believe that vocabulary development in the

language classroom should be systematic.

There is, however, disagreement on the extent

to which vocabulary can or should be taught.

Nation (1990, 1) opens his book with the ques-

tion, “Should vocabulary be taught?” Until

recently, the unstated assumption has been

that learners must somehow learn vocabulary

but that teachers should not really try to teach

it, at least not systematically. This assumption

was clearly revealed by Coe in his 1997 article,

“Vocabulary must be learnt, not taught.” Now,

it seems, the introduction and development of

lexis, defined here as the input, storage, and

retrieval strategies for the development of an

Implications for English language

teachers and learners

Richard’s insistence on the importance of

vocabulary and lexical units has profound

implications for English language teachers and

learners. Six of them are discussed below:

1. What it means to know a word

Evidence suggests that language learners

need to learn as many words as possible as

soon as possible (initial 2000 word target, with

10,000 words as an ideal longer-term target).

Several definitions have been proposed con-

cerning what it means to know a word. I have

adapted Ellis and Sinclair’s (1989) list of crite-

ria for knowing a word:

• To understand the word when it is writ-

ten or spoken

• To recall it when you need it

• To use it with the correct meaning

• To use it in a grammatically correct way

• To pronounce it correctly

• To know which other words you can

(and can not) use with it

• To spell it correctly

• To use it in the right situation

• To know if it has positive or negative

connotations

• To know when (and when not) to use it

Of course, we know that all these cannot

occur simultaneously. We know that learning

and knowing words is an incremental process;

it may take years of learning to fully know a

word. A learner may learn the word red in

J ANUARY 2004

E NGLISH T EACHING F ORUM

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