Teaching vocabulary

Abstract

Designing the vocabulary programme of a course is similar to most examples of language course design. In addition to considering the situation in which the course occurs, it is necessary to decide what vocabulary will be selected for teaching, how it will be sequenced, and how it will be presented. In this review of vocabulary pedagogy, we will first look at these aspects of selection, sequencing, and presentation, and then explore in more detail two issues that have become a focus of recent research, namely, incorporating vocabulary development into communicative activities, and improving learners' access to vocabulary that has already been partly learned. Selection There has been a long tradition of research into what vocabulary will provide the best return for learning. The majority of these pieces of research have been frequency counts, which have provided lists of the most frequent and widely used words of a language. Particularly for the early stages of learning a language, these studies have provided very valuable information. The often repeated finding of frequency counts has been that the most frequent 2,000 headwords account for at least 85% of the words on any page of any book no matter what the subject matter. The same words give an even greater coverage of spoken language. Focusing learners' attention on the high-frequency words of the language gives a very good return for learning effort. Frequency and range, however, have not been the only factors that have guided the principled selection of vocabulary for teaching.

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