Linguistic Treatises: Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition
Abdelmalek El Morabit2020, Linguistic Forum - A Journal of Linguistics
He who reviews recent vocabulary research finds out that the field is still half-grown. Despite the fact that a bundle of questions has been raised very earlier on, the field has witnessed groundless neglect for quite a long time. Presumably, Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics has shifted attention away from lexis to an introspective examination of syntactic structures. Also, with the advent of the communicative paradigm, little attention was given to lexis inasmuch as lexical competence was injudiciously viewed as part of the grammatical competence alongside other linguistic forms (phonological forms, morphological forms, syntactic patterns, etc.) (Canale & Swain, 1980). Interest in vocabulary only increased again around the eighteens when a few foundational articles by pioneers in the fields including Paul Meara and Paul Nation emerged. Regardless of the relative recency of vocabulary research, it has gone a good way linking research from a variety of areas to produce very interesting insights into how vocabulary is acquired, processed, attrited, and how it should be handled by language teachers in formal contexts.
