The Forgotten Lexicon

The accusation has been leveled. The ball is in our court now. According to James Coady, Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University, teachers and linguists alike are responsible for a gaping hole in the curriculum for second language learners. Indeed, Coady says that while most students "feel that words are very important and are eager to learn them", in contrast, "teachers tend to feel that words are easy to learn -- grammar is the challenge. Many teachers and scholars feel that teaching vocabulary is a low-level intellectual activity unworthy of their full attention." (Coady, 2000). As a consequence, vocabulary development is receiving insufficient attention in the classroom.

Yet the challenge is there: some estimates put the number of word families in printed school English in Grades 3-9 at as high as 85,533. One of the most powerful predictors of a student's reading achievement is his or her vocabulary size and knowledge. To simply soak in the magnitude of the challenge facing an English Language Learner, or any student for that matter, just browse through the list of academic English words assembled by I.S.P. Nation based on a computer analysis of words in academic texts. Click here for an Excel spreadsheet of Nation's list (the numbers by each word is a category for its frequency, with 1 being the most frequent and 10 the least frequent). So, how to get English Language Learners up to speed in vocabulary development? Certainly not by ignoring or belittling the lexicon. That is the challenge of Professor Coady.

Our response to Professor Coady, rather than directly attacking his article, will be: "Oh yeah? We'll show you we care about vocabulary, and we know how to address it." (or do we?). But, to be sure we know our critic, read Professor Coady's article and make sure you understand what he thinks are important principles for second language vocabulary instruction. Also read another important background piece on vocabulary acquisition by Richard Anderson and William Nagy -- although this article is about native English students, the basic idea about the challenge of vocabulary development applies just as well to English Learners.

Now let's proceed to develop our response. First, let us begin by assessing our collective wisdom on how to help students build vocabulary (what Luis Moll would call our "funds of knowledge"). What explicit strategies and resources do you use, or have you used in the past? The point is to share with each other this wisdom.. So, the first step would be to identify to share with your colleagues in class a teaching strategy that you have employed, or one that you feel would be promising. If you are having difficulty identifying a strategy, please ask other teachers in your building for ideas. In any event, please bring your ideas to class on Tuesday to share.

Your write-up for this assignment should include the following:

Resources:

Anderson, R. C., & Nagy, W. E. (1992). The vocabulary conundrum. American Educator, 16(4), 14-18, 44-47.

Coady, J. (2000). L2 vocabulary acquisition: A synthesis of research. In J. Coady and T. Huckin (Eds.), Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy, (pp. 273-290). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

This problem was written by Kenji Hakuta 10/22/02, last modified 10/22/02.