The rediscovery of vocabulary

Abstract

This article reviews four recent books of current research in vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary acquisition has moved from being a neglected backwater in second language acquisition (SLA) to a position of some importance, and this importance looks like increasing as lexical issues become more central to theoretical linguistics.The review suggests, however, that most vocabulary research in applied linguistics is based on a narrow linguistic agenda that was to a large extent defined by the concerns of the vocabulary control movement in the 1920s, particularly the work of H.E. Palmer and his successors (Smith, 1998; Institute of Research in Language Teaching, 2000). Current work in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics does not seem to have made much of an impact on the field, and this has led to a serious divergence between the theories of vocabulary acquisition that appear in these books, and the theories that are developing in other related fields.

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