Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching / Edition 1

by Keith S. Folse

Overview

In Vocabulary Myths, Keith S. Folse breaks down the teaching of second language vocabulary into eight commonly held myths. In debunking each myth, he introduces the myth with a story based on his 25 years of teaching experience (in the United States and abroad), continues with a presentation of what empirical research has shown on the topic, and finishes with a list of what teachers can do in their classrooms to facilitate true vocabulary acquisition.

The goal of Vocabulary Myths is to foster a paradigm shift that correctly views vocabulary as fundamental in any second language learning process and demonstrates that research supports this goal-that in fact there is a wealth of empirical evidence to support these views. In addition, an important theme is that teachers have overestimated how much vocabulary students really understand, and as a result, the so-called "comprehensible input" is neither comprehensible nor input.

The second language vocabulary acquisition myths reexamined in this book are:
*In learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas.
*Using word lists to learn L2 vocabulary is unproductive.
*Presenting new vocabulary in semantic sets facilitates learning.
*The use of translations to learn new vocabulary should be discouraged.
*Guessing words from context is an excellent strategy for learning L2 vocabulary.
*The best vocabulary learners make use of one or two really specific vocabulary learning strategies.
*The best dictionary for L2 learners is a monolingual dictionary.
*Teachers, textbooks, and curricula cover L2 vocabulary adequately.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472030293
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	03/10/2004
Series:	Myths
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	295,528
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Vocabulary Myths

Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

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By Keith S. Folse Ph.D.

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2004 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03029-3

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CHAPTER 1

MYTH 1

In learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas.

In the Real World ...

In 1988, I took a job teaching English at a university in Urasa, a small, rural town in Niigata Prefecture in Japan. It was so rural at that time that Urasa had only two food stores, both extremely small.

If you've ever lived abroad for any extended period, you know that there often comes a time when all you can think about is a certain kind of food or drink that reminds you of home — even if you rarely, if ever, ate this food when you were home. Well, I grew up in south Louisiana and Mississippi, and for whatever reason, on my third day in this tiny town in rural Japan, I had to have homemade biscuits. Never mind that I hardly ever ate biscuits growing up. That was not the point. I just had to have home-made biscuits.

To accomplish this culinary objective, I went to one of the small stores to buy flour, the one biscuit ingredient that I did not yet have in my apartment. Before coming to Japan, I had been teaching in Malaysia. There I took a short course in basic Japanese so that I would have some communicative ability in my new teaching country. Because this was the sixth language that I had studied (after French, Spanish, Arabic, Malay, and German), I was familiar with basic language courses and what you need to be able to say to function in a foreign language setting. In my basic Japanese class, we studied two of the "alphabets" (hiragana and katakana), some basic expressions, and some basic grammatical patterns. As I was on my way to the store, I thought about what language I would need to buy flour, and my brain focused in on the basic pattern of, "Sumimasen.______-wa doko desu ka" or "Excuse me, where is the______?"

I felt quite confident on this shopping mission: I had the basic grammar that I needed, and after all, I knew what flour looked like and I knew that the store was quite small, so how hard could this be? Well, in hindsight, even with some basic grammar knowledge, I was quite ill prepared.

When I entered the tiny store, two petite, demure older women bowed and bowed and bowed as they greeted me, "Welcome. Welcome to our store." I could tell that they did not speak a word of English, but that did not matter because I knew the grammar pattern that I needed for this purchase, and I knew how to bow and smile and be polite. What could go wrong?

After the greeting, I set out to find a small bag of flour. I remember thinking that I should look for a small paper bag with two gold sheaths of wheat on the front of the bag — reminiscent of the brands of flour that I remembered seeing in kitchens in my past. Within five minutes, I had scoured the whole tiny store and found no such bag or anything similar. What I did find was a section with several clear plastic bags with different kinds of powdered items in them. The problem: I couldn't read the kanji (the Chinese characters) or understand the words written in hiragana on them (though I could pronounce these aloud because hiragana is phonetically transparent). Was this powder in the bag flour? Or corn starch? Or baking soda? Or even powdered milk? Or perhaps some other more exotic Japanese food product?

The store was empty except for me, and the two women were carefully eyeing this "lost" foreigner in their store. I was no threat, but I must have looked confused to them. I kept walking to the bread section (I could recognize bread in these bags!) and tried to compare the written word for bread in Japanese (pan, from Portuguese) with the characters written on the other bags of powdered goods.

Unable to locate the main ingredient for making biscuits, I finally decided to ask the women for help. "Excuse me," I began. Then I realized that I did not have any idea how to say flour in Japanese. Being a good language learner, I tried to circumvent this by mentally going through possible strategies: a synonym, a definition, an explanation, a drawing. All of these were problematic. I don't know of a synonym for flour in English, let alone Japanese. I didn't have the vocabulary for a definition or an explanation either. I couldn't draw flour.

As the women stared at me, I said in Japanese, "I want bread. I eat bread." With that, we all looked at the lovely loaves of bread not ten feet from us. I then used my knowledge of grammar to say, "No, not bread. Before bread." If you know anything about the study of Japanese as a Second Language, you know that for a beginning Japanese learner to correctly use the prepositional phrase "before bread" is actually quite a feat since prepositions in Japanese go after the noun and require a special grammatical marker. "Pan no mae ni" came out of my mouth effortlessly because I knew my grammar. Unfortunately, they were as confused by "before bread" as a native English speaker would be if I had delivered this message in English. It just didn't make sense.

By sheer coincidence, one of my English students was walking in front of the store at that very moment. I ran outside and shouted to him as he was crossing the street, "How do you say flour in Japanese?" He answered, "Hana," and armed with this valuable piece of information, I rushed up to the women and smilingly and in my best, most polite Japanese said, "Sumimasen. Hana-wa doko desu ka" (Excuse me. Where is the hana?)

The women smiled, and I could see their sense of relief that the foreigner was about to make a purchase and actually leave them in peace. I, too, was ready to get this ordeal over with and make the biscuits. Unfortunately, my joy was shortlived as the happy women led me to the produce section.

It took me a minute to understand what had happened. There in front of us were several carefully wrapped clear plastic packages of beautifully arranged yellow chrysanthemums. Yes, they were flowers. When I asked my student for the Japanese word for flour, I had not specified whether I meant flour or its homonym flower, and since flower is a more common word than flour, my student told me hana instead of komugi. (Now I know!) Compounding this linguistic confusion was the fact that people in Japan do actually eat flowers in their salad, so they are sold as food products in stores.

Needless to say, I did not get the flour and I was unable to make biscuits on my third evening in Japan. It is important to note that all of my grammar knowledge — plus the fact that I was actually able to retrieve it and use it correctly in a "real" situation — was of little to no help to me. What I needed in that situation was one word: komugi. In this experience, I learned that vocabulary is actually more important than grammar.

This is not to say that I want to end up speaking Japanese in Tarzan-like delivery, but this is a real example of where vocabulary knowledge would have gotten me what I wanted/needed more than any grammar knowledge.

What the Research Says ...

Learning a second language entails learning numerous aspects of that language, including vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, composition, reading, culture, and even body language. Unfortunately, traditionally vocabulary has received less attention in second language (L2) pedagogy than any of these other aspects, particularly grammar. Arguably, vocabulary is perhaps the most important component in L2 ability. For more than 2,000 years, the study of a foreign language primarily entailed grammatical analysis, which was practiced through translation of written work (Hinkel & Fotos, 2002). As a result, vocabulary has been academically excluded from or at best limited within L2 curricula and classroom teaching. A perusal of ESL textbooks quickly reveals a lack of focus on vocabulary. Unlike books in French, Spanish, or other foreign languages, there are no vocabulary lists in the lessons/units or vocabulary index at the back of the book. Exercises practicing vocabulary may be found in reading books, but such exercises are rarely found in grammar books, speaking books, listening books, or writing books in spite of the importance of vocabulary in these areas. Language programs might have a grammar class or a reading class, but there is almost never a vocabulary class. For far too long, it has been incorrectly assumed that learners will pick up enough vocabulary without direct instruction.

One of the first observations that second language learners make in their new language is that they need vocabulary knowledge to function well in that language. How frustrating it is when you want to say something and are stymied because you don't know the word for a simple noun! In spite of the obvious importance of vocabulary, most courses and curricula tend to be based on grammar or a combination of grammar and communication strategies rather than vocabulary. As a result, even after taking many courses, learners still lack sufficient vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge is critical to any communication. Wilkins (1972) summarizes the situation best: "While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (p. 111).

Adult L2 learners are painfully aware of their plight. They see acquisition of vocabulary as their greatest source of problems (Green & Meara, 1995; Meara, 1980). In end-of-course surveys of ESL students in intensive academic programs (Flaitz, 1998; James, 1996; Folse 2004b), students expressed a strong desire for vocabulary instruction. In fact, when asked what could improve the ESL programs in which they were studying, students ranked "more vocabulary development" second only to "more opportunities to speak in class." Clearly, L2 learners know that vocabulary is critical to L2 success, and they consistently cite their lack of vocabulary knowledge as an area in which they are deficient. This is problematic because, as Meara (1980) notes, second language "learners themselves readily admit that they experience considerable difficulty with vocabulary, and once they have got [sic] over the initial stages of acquiring their second language, most learners identify the acquisition of vocabulary as their greatest single source of problems" (p. 221). These learners know that vocabulary is important; think about it: they do not carry grammar books with them but dictionaries (Krashen, 1989).

Richards (1976) notes that the "teaching and learning of vocabulary have never aroused the same degree of interest within language teaching as have such issues as grammatical competence, contrastive analysis, reading, or writing" (p. 77). This is not so surprising given the fact that vocabulary has not held as high a position in second language teaching and research as other language areas have. In the audiolingual method, teachers led students through drills of structures, with clear emphasis on grammatical structures over vocabulary, which served merely to fill in the slots in the drills. In more recent communicative methods, emphasis was placed on communicating meaning. While grammar was not emphasized as much anymore, vocabulary was still relegated to a step-child position in language study. Since grammar has been viewed as more important than vocabulary, it follows that a great deal more research on grammar exists than does for the lexicon. In the various debates that have raged over direct versus indirect approaches, or over grammatical versus notional-functional syllabi, or over explicit instruction versus natural acquisition, the focus was almost always on the grammatical structures of the L2. Vocabulary was not emphasized; in fact, it was hardly ever an issue. (The lone notable exception here is Michael Lewis's attempts [1993, 1997] to move the field toward vocabulary with his lexical approach.)

Vocabulary is a key component of reading ability. Numerous researchers (Alderson, 1984; Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Coady, Magoto, Hubbard, Graney, & Mokhtari, 1993; Davis, 1944; Haynes, 1993; James, 1996; Kameenui, Carnine, & Freschi, 1982; Laufer, 1992, 1997; Nation & Coady, 1988) have shown the relationship between L2 vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading ability. Discussing a cognitive model of strategies that L2 learners make use of when they attempt to infer an unknown word's meaning, Huckin and Bloch (1993) point out, "Research has shown that second-language readers rely heavily on vocabulary knowledge, and that a lack of vocabulary knowledge is the largest obstacle for second-language readers to overcome" (p. 154). Likewise, Haynes and Baker (1993) found that the main obstacle for L2 readers is not lack of reading strategies but rather insufficient vocabulary knowledge in English. Laufer and Sim (1985) list these areas in order of decreasing importance in reading ability in L2: knowledge of vocabulary, subject matter, discourse markers, and syntactic structure. In sum, Laufer and Sim find that vocabulary is most important, syntax least important.

In addition, studies have shown the effect that a large L2 vocabulary base can have on writing skills (Laufer & Nation, 1995; Laufer, 1998b) and in listening and speaking tasks (Joe, 1995; Joe, Nation, & Newton, 1996; Newton, 1995). While correlation does not necessarily imply causality, the fact is that empirical studies have shown that good L2 readers, writers, speakers, and listeners have a more extensive vocabulary under their control.

Following Krashen's influential writings (1982, 1989, 1993), many L2 programs adopted a curriculum that limits or excludes explicit instruction in any aspect of L2, including vocabulary. With the goal of focusing on providing comprehensible input, these programs primarily make use of communicative activities without explicit instruction in either vocabulary or grammar. (This philosophy appears to be somewhat in flux.) In other programs, grammar remains the primary focus of the curriculum. This lack of attention to vocabulary is most unfortunate for L2 learners, for as Lewis (1993) points out: "Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar." Without grammar, little communication may be possible; without vocabulary, no communication is possible.

As more and more empirical research in L2 is made available and results provide important insight into our questions about vocabulary learning and teaching, the education pendulum is swinging back toward some more "traditional" methods, including those that rely on explicit instruction from the teacher. This in turn begs the question of what kinds of classroom activities, especially vocabulary activities, are effective for L2 learners. Carter and McCarthy (1988) conclude that

although it suffered neglect for a long time, vocabulary pedagogy has benefited in the last fifteen years or so from theoretical advances in the linguistic lexicon, from psycholinguistic investigations into the mental lexicon, from the communicative trend in teaching, which has brought the learner into focus, and from developments in computers. What is perhaps missing in all this is more knowledge about what happens in classrooms when vocabulary crops up. (p. 51)

In a study of French immersion classes in Canada, Clipperton (1994) noted that his students had an acute problem with vocabulary. He went on to lament, however, that the emphasis in second language classroom instruction continues to be on syntax. This emphasis on grammar is surprising in current pedagogy that focuses on comprehensible input and communicative activities because people can generally communicate their meaning with less than perfect grammar whereas incorrect use of vocabulary can substantially impede communication.

Echoing these sentiments, Maiguashca (1993) noted that the role that vocabulary has played has been secondary, serving only to fill illustrations of grammar points. One possible reason for the inferior status of vocabulary vis-à-vis grammar is that language teachers themselves do not view vocabulary as being that complicated a matter. In their thinking, learning vocabulary seems to be at most a matter of memorizing lists of words and their meanings. Oftentimes, vocabulary is seen as something that learners can pick up on their own as they continue to focus on grammar and sentence patterns. This view, however, is changing as more and more research into how learners acquire L2 vocabulary is being conducted (de Groot & Keijzer, 2000; Grace, 2000; Gu 2003; Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001; Kitajima, 2001; Sanaoui, 1995).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse Ph.D.. Copyright © 2004 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

An Introduction to Second Language Vocabulary,
Myth 1: In learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas.,
Myth 2: Using word lists to learn second language vocabulary is unproductive.,
Myth 3: Presenting new vocabulary in semantic sets facilitates learning.,
Myth 4: The use of translations to learn new vocabulary should be discouraged.,
Myth 5: Guessing words from context is an excellent strategy for learning second language vocabulary.,
Myth 6: The best vocabulary learners make use of one or two really good specific vocabulary learning trategies.,
Myth 7: The best dictionary for second language learners is a monolingual dictionary.,
Myth 8: Teachers, textbooks, and curricula cover second language vocabulary adequately.,
Conclusion,
Works Cited,
Index,