Teaching and Learning Grammar and Vocabulary

Vocabulary

Session 1: Word, Lexis and Vocabulary

Jing Huang
Workshop content

Definition of key terms

What to teach?

What are important in knowing a word?

• A word

• A lexical phrase / a lexico-

grammatical unit

• Lexis, lexicon, vocabulary

 Word

Lexis
Some
definitions Lexicon

Vocabulary
• A word is a single unit of language that can be represented in writing or speech. In English, a word has a space on
either side of it when it is written.

• Lexis is a Greek term meaning "word" or "speech." In linguistics, the words of a language can be referred to as the
lexis of that language. It refers to the totality of words in a language, including all forms having lexical meaning or
grammatical function.

• Lexicon: 1) The lexicon of a particular subject is all the terms associated with it. The lexicon of a person or group is
all the words they commonly use. 2) A lexicon is an alphabetical list of the words in a language or the words
associated with a particular subject. 3) A lexicon is a dictionary, especially of a very old language such as Greek or
Hebrew[old-fashioned].

• Vocabulary: 1) a listing, either selective or exhaustive, containing the words and phrases of a language, with
meanings of translations into another language. 2) the aggregate of words in the use or comprehension of a
specified person, class, profession, etc. 3) a range or system of symbols, qualities, or techniques constituting a
means of communication or expression, as any of the arts or crafts.

• The study of the overall structure and history of the vocabulary of a language is called Lexicology.
(in Collins English Dictionary)
• Lexicology
• Lexicography (an area of
work concerns with dictionaries,
both with the processes of
compilation and with the study
of the finished products.)
• Lexicology
• Lexicography (an area of work
concerns with dictionaries, both with
the processes of compilation and with
the study of the finished products.)

• Lexical Phrases
- Multiword phrases
- Lexico-grammatical units in actual
language
- ‘Chunks’ of language of varying length
that have an idiomatically determined
meaning
- The phrases have slots for various
fillers (e.g. a month ago, a year ago) and
are each associated with a particular
discourse function
(Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992:1)
• Lexicology
• Lexicography (an area of work
concerns with dictionaries, both with
the processes of compilation and with
the study of the finished products.)
• Morphology (the study of word
structure)

• Lexical Phrases
- Multiword phrases
- Lexico-grammatical units in actual
language
- ‘Chunks’ of language of varying length
that have an idiomatically determined
meaning
- The phrases have slots for various
fillers (e.g. a month ago, a year ago) and
are each associated with a particular
discourse function
(Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992:1)
Lexis - Lexicon - Vocabulary

• Lexis is defined as “the complete group of all words in a language”.

Languages with sufficiently productive morphology, for example, may have an
infinite set of words (lexis), but will still have a finite lexicon of lexemes that
can be listed in a dictionary.

• Vocabulary refers to a subset of words in a language that are used in a

particular context or known to a particular person. Thus, we have "my
vocabulary", "legal vocabulary", “academic vocabulary”…
• A word

• A lexical phrase / a lexico-

grammatical unit

• Lexis, lexicon, vocabulary

Question

What are essential

for a child to build a
lego castle?
Question
What are essential
for a middle school
student to write an
essay in English?
Question • Know the words

• Know the
grammatical rules

• Know the genre, the

conventions, the
purpose of the essay
• …

It starts from knowing

the words
 How many?

• Educated adult native speakers of English know

around 20,000 word families. (Goulden et al., 1990;
Zechmeister [Link]., 1995, cited in Nation, 2013 )

What to How much vocabulary do you need to use another

teach language?
• 3,000 to 4,000 word families are needed to get 95%
text coverage
• 6,000 to 9,000 word families are needed to gain 98%
text coverage (Nation, 2013:14)
 How many?

(Nation, 2006)

Texts 95% coverage 98% coverage Proper nouns*

What to Novels 4,000 9,000 1-2%

teach newspapers 4,000 8,000 5-6%

Children’s movies 4,000 6,000 1.5%
Spoken English 3,000 7,000 1.3%

Word families
* e.g. Argentina, Titanic, September
 Which ones?

• High-frequency words (Michael West 1953: General Service List of

English Words; Schmitt and Schmitt 2012: 3,000-word family high-frequency
vocabulary list)

• Mid-frequency words (general-purpose vocabulary, 6,000-7,000)

What to
teach • Low frequency words (beyond the first 9,000 words of English)

(Nation, 2013: 16-19)

 Which ones?

• Coverage of the British National Corpus by high-, mid- and low-

frequency words

Type of vocabulary 5 Coverage

High-frequency (2,000 word families) 86%
What to Mid-frequency (7,000 word families) 9%
teach Low-frequency (tenth 1,000 word level onwards) 1-2%
Proper nouns, exclamations etc. 3-4%
Total 100%
(Nation, 2013: 22)
 Which ones?

What to
teach
 Which ones?

Some exemplary lists:

Longman communication 3000

What to
teach Top 50(ish) Tier 2 words

Tier 2 and 3 common core vocabulary

…
 Which ones?

ursus arctos, terrestrial…

What to
teach omnivore…
habitat, hibernation,
grizzly bear, bruin

Winnie the pooh…

honey, cub,
cuddle, paw, fur
brown bear,
‘Teddy’
knowing a What does it mean by knowing a word?

word
What is involved in knowing a word
• Form (spoken, written, word parts)
• Meaning (form & meaning, concept & referents, associations)
• Use (grammatical function, collocations, synonyms, frequency, register,
syntagmatic patterning, constraints on use…)

Nation (2001:27)
The meaning of a word

• multiple meaning (e.g. mug)

• nuance in meaning (e.g. 'tall and lanky’, ‘chubby and fat’, ‘obedient and
deferential’)
• register (formal or informal, e.g. 'accommodate’ and ‘put someone up’ )
• synonyms ( e.g. 'big or large', ‘you're a large girl, you're going to school!', 'I just
bought an extra-big t-shirt' )
• homonyms (e.g. fan)
• Homophones (e.g. which, witch)
• homographs (e.g. read(present tense) and read(past tense) )
• Style and connotation( e.g. law, slang, taboo.)
The form of a word
• how to structure/write/spell a word
• irregular plurals (e.g. child-children, sheep-sheep, ox-oxen, focus-foci, … )
• irregular past tense and past participle of verbs (e.g. run-ran-run, ring-rang-
rung, …)
• non-countable nouns (e.g. vocabulary, advice, information, research, ...)
• prefixes and suffixes (e.g. un-, dis-, il-, im-; and -ful, -ly, -tion, -er, -est, -ism...)
• Collocation and colligation - the lexical units ( a. lexical chunks, e.g. best
wishes, heavy rain, 'merry/happy birthday', 'heavy/big smoker’… ; b.
grammatical forms that surround a word, e.g. 'love/like', 'do you love music?', 'I
love + an object’ )
• …
The pronunciation of a word
• The irregular sounds (e.g. bough, through, cough…)
• Word stress( e.g. photograph, photography, photographer, photographic)
• Phonetics and phonology
The use of a word
Is it static?
For examples:

• In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘selfie’ as the word of the year. Its
use had increased by 17,000 per cent in just 12 months, the OED revealed. In
2018 Wired magazine declared that ‘the selfie as we know it is dead’ — adding
that ‘Data from Google Trends has also shown a steady decline in the keyword
since it was added to the dictionary in 2013.’

• How to pronounce the word ‘issue’, /ˈɪʃuː/ or / 'ɪsjuː/..

 Thinking about multilingual learners

For example:
the use of ‘open’
(open the door, open the bottle, ‘open’ the light,
‘open’ the TV)
Teaching the Lexico-
grammatical units rather
than
Question
What can we do to transform the vocabulary ‘learning
burden’ into engaging activities and productive teaching
outcomes?
Discussion
[Link]
s-4i_95oWY2RAmsWJ4&index=2
Discussion
Contextualized
Up-to-date topic
Key lexical phrases
Explicit pronunciation and explanation
Use the phrases together in context
 • How to teach?
Next week