Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom

Abstract

Notwithstanding its few pages, it is a work of paramount importance on what concerns the use of corpus in language teaching.That is why this book is worth reading.Not only does it address fundamentals of corpus linguistics and how information about language derived from corpus research can be used to inform vocabulary teaching, but it also suggests practical classroom approaches to foster vocabulary learning and comprehension.Besides this, the content is organized in a simple and direct manner.There are four main chapters: 1. Lessons from the Corpus, 2. Lessons for the Classroom, 3. Concluding remarks and 4. Appendices.I shall then make a brief description of each chapter.The first chapter is the biggest one and is split in nine sections.It addresses some basic concepts on corpus and vocabulary issues.Right at the outset, the following two questions are posed: "How many words are there and how many words do we need to teach?" and "What can a corpus tell us about vocabulary?"The author attempts to answer the first question raising important concepts on vocabulary learning, such as the number of words one needs to know in order to get along in English.According to some research "learners who know the most frequent 2,000 words should be able to understand almost 80 percent of the words in an average text, and a knowledge of 5,000 words increases learners' understanding to 88.7 percent" (MCCARTEN, 2007, p. 1).On what concerns spoken language, according to the author, an understanding of 1,800 words would be enough as word repetition is much higher in speech.From these considerations, it is possible to point out the first lesson derived from a corpus: to identify and give priority to the most frequent 2,000 and 5,000 vocabulary items in teaching.

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