Week 1 - Vocabulary Flashcards
(15 cards)
What needs to be learned? (receptive/productive)?
meaning core meaning extended meanings form pronunciation spelling derived forms irregular past tense category complements modifiers
What needs to be learned? (receptive/productive)?
environment collocations common phrases (e.g., how do you say x? or I couldn’t say.) frequency in speaking in writing In various genres register formal neutral informal
What’s a word family
a word and its inflected and derived forms
How many word families does an average adult native speaker of English know?
- 20,000
What is the most important factor in formal measures of readability?
Vocabulary Knowledge
If learners know the most frequent 2,000 words of English, what percentage of running words in an academic text will be known to them?
about 80%
Roughly, how many word families would be known by students in CLB level 4?
1,000
Roughly, how many word families would be known by students in CLB level 6?
2,000
In order to have a good chance of guessing the meaning of an unknown word from context clues, what percentage of the running words in the text does the learner need to know?
98%
General Reading Coverage
Students need to know 99% of the words in a text to read it comfortably.
At 95%, they can guess, but it’s painfully slow.
Below 95%, reading is generally impossible without a dictionary and a lot of time.
When learners know the most common 2,000 words of English, the words that they have most difficulty with in reading academic texts in their specialist area are?
A - general purpose academic words like assume, concept, diverse
On average, how many encounters with a word will it take to learn it?
don’t know
or 12
Teachers should deal with low frequency words by
teaching the learners strategies to deal with them
Definitions of unknown words are most effective if
they are short and clear
What’s wrong with the way textbooks treat vocabulary?
- Most integrated coursebooks (e.g., Interchange, Touchstone, Passages, Connect, Headway, etc.) pay little attention to vocabulary,
- fail to sufficiently recycle vocabulary
- have no systematic or principled approach to vocabulary
- Most vocabulary textbooks are collections or low-frequency words. They’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.
- A few vocabulary textbooks focus on useful words
Typically, each word appears in a given “unit” and not in the rest of the book.
