Learning and Teaching Vocabulary
Learning and Teaching Vocabulary
Learning and Teaching Vocabulary
VOCABULARY
Prof. Tamar Mikeladze
Telavi State University
WORD FREQUENCY
What do you think are the ten most frequent words
in English? Would you teach them all to beginners?
Why do you think frequency is important?
Keyword:
word frequency: simply measured by counting how
often a word or word form occurs in a large sample
of spoken or written language, such as the British
National Corpus (BNC) (www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk)
FOCUSING QUESTIONS
What do you know about a word like man if you
speak English?
When you teach students the meaning of a word,
what do you mean by meaning and how do you
teach it?
Keyword:
argument structure: the aspect of a word that
dictates the structures in which it may be used, for
example, the verb give requires an animate
subject, a direct object and an indirect object: Peter
gave a stone to the wolf
Grammatical properties
Grammatical category noun, verb, possessive
form, plural, subject or object
Possible and impossible structures- She manned
the barricades, not They manned. the argument
structure of words is pivotal in language acquisition.
GRAMMATICAL PROPERTIES
Idiosyncratic grammatical information.The plural
spoken form of man is /men/; the written form is
men, that is, we know that it is an exception to the
usual rules for forming noun plurals in English
Word building. There is a whole family of related
words to man, such as mannish, manlike,
unmanly. These are made by adding various
prefixes such as un- and suffixes such as -ish to
the stem man.
LEXICAL PROPERTIES
Collocations. We know many more or less set
expressions in which the word man conventionally
goes with other words, such as my good man,
man in the street, man to man, Man of God, to
separate the men from the boys, my man Jeeves,
and many others.
Appropriateness. my man may be used as a form
of address Hi my man. The prime minister might
be surprised at being greeted with Hi my man, a
pop star might not. We have to know when and to
whom it is appropriate to use a word.
MEANING
General meanings. We know general properties
about the meaning of man, such as male, adult,
human being, concrete, animate. These aspects
of meaning, called semantic features or
components of meaning, are shared with many
other words in the language.
Specific meanings. We know a range of specific
senses for man. The OED has 17 main entries for
man as a noun, ranging from A human being
(irrespective of sex or age) to One of the pieces
used in chess.
The
TYPES OF MEANING
What do you mean by meaning?
What nouns can you remember learning first in your
first language? In your second?
Keywords
components of meaning: general aspects of
meaning which are shared by many words; boy
has the components male, human, young, and
so on
prototype theory: words have whole meanings
divided into basic level (car), subordinate level
(Ford) and superordinate level (vehicle)
Prototype theory claims that children first learn words that are
basic because they reflect aspects of the world that stand out
automatically from the rest of what they see prototypes.
Sparrow is a basic-level term compared to a superordinate
level term like bird, or a subordinate-level term like house
sparrow. The basic level of vocabulary is easier to use and to
learn. On this foundation, children build higher and lower levels of
vocabulary. Some examples of the three levels of vocabulary are
seen in Table 3.2.
PROTOTYPES
WAYS OF MEANING
Vocabulary strategies
To understand an unfamiliar L2 word, people make use
of a variety of strategies, such as guessing, using
dictionaries, deducing meaning from the words form
and relating it to cognates.
To acquire new L2 words, people use strategies such as
repetition, organizing them in the mind, and linking them
to existing knowledge.