Vocabulary in a Second Language
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Four Strands to Language Learning
International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching… ISSN: 2156-5716 Volume 1, Number 2 © 2012 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. APPLYING THE FOUR STRANDS TO LANGUAGE LEARNING Paul Nation1 and Azusa Yamamoto2 Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand1 and Temple University Japan2 ABSTRACT The principle of the four strands says that a well balanced language course should have four equal strands of meaning focused input, meaning focused output, language focused learning, and fluency development. By applying this principle, it is possible to answer questions like How can I teach vocabulary? What should a well balanced listening course contain? How much extensive reading should we do? Is it worthwhile doing grammar translation? and How can I find out if I have a well balanced conversation course? The article describes the rationale behind such answers. The four strands principle is primarily a way of providing a balance of learning opportunities, and the article shows how this can be done in self regulated foreign language learning without a teacher. Keywords: Fluency learning, four strands, language focused learning, meaning focused input, meaning focused output. INTRODUCTION The principle of the four strands (Nation, 2007) states that a well balanced language course should consist of four equal strands – meaning focused input, meaning focused output, language focused learning, and fluency development. Each strand should receive a roughly equal amount of time in a course. The meaning focused input strand involves learning through listening and reading. This is largely incidental learning because the learners’ attention should be focused on comprehending what is being read or listened to. The meaning focused output strand involves learning through speaking and writing and in common with the meaning focused input strand involves largely incidental learning. -
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SELF-REGULATION AND ITS RELATION TO MOTIVATION AND PROFICIENCY A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education By Sakae Onoda January, 2012 Examining Committee Members David Beglar, Advisory Chair, CITE/TESOL Mark Sawyer External Member, Kwansei Gakuin University Paul Nation, External Member, Victoria University of Wellington Peter Gu, External Member, Victoria University of Wellington James Sick, External Member, J. F. Oberlin University © Copyright 2012 by Sakae Onoda i ABSTRACT This study was an investigation of the relationships among willingness to communicate, two motivational variables (intrinsic goal orientation and self-efficacy), three self-regulated learning strategies (metacognitive during-task self-regulation strategies, effort regulation strategies and peer learning strategies), and measures of English speaking and listening proficiency. The study primarily drew on the concept of self-regulation derived from educational psychology. A sample of 279 English majors studying at a private university in eastern Japan participated in this study. Data from a Japanese version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and scores of an in-house proficiency test designed to measure speaking and listening skills were collected. Factor analysis and Rasch analysis were conducted to develop a reliable shortened Japanese version of the MSLQ. Multiple one-way ANOVAs indicated that students with higher speaking and listening abilities as measured by an in-house proficiency test, tended to use more metacognitive during-task self-regulation strategies and effort regulation strategies compared with those with intermediate and lower speaking and listening proficiency. There were no statistically significant differences in peer learning strategies for speaking and peer learning strategies for listening. -
Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition from an Authentic Novel: Do Things Fall Apart?
Reading in a Foreign Language April 2010, Volume 22, No. 1 ISSN 1539-0578 pp. 31–55 Incidental vocabulary acquisition from an authentic novel: Do Things Fall Apart? Ana Pellicer-Sánchez and Norbert Schmitt University of Nottingham United Kingdom Abstract Nation (2006) has calculated that second language (L2) learners require much more vocabulary than previously thought to be functional with language (e.g., 8,000–9,000 word families to read independently). This level is far beyond the highest graded reader, and would be difficult to explicitly teach. One way for learners to be exposed to mid- frequency vocabulary is to read authentic materials. The original A Clockwork Orange study (Saragi, Nation, & Meister, 1978) showed impressive amounts of incidental vocabulary learning with first language (L1) readers, but subsequent studies with L2 learners (using graded readers or simplified materials) showed only modest gains. This study explores the degree to which relatively advanced L2 readers can acquire spelling, word class, and recognition and recall of meaning from reading the unmodified authentic novel Things Fall Apart. After more than 10 exposures, the meaning and spelling could be recognized for 84% and 76% of the words respectively, while the meaning and word class could be recalled for 55% and 63%. Keywords: vocabulary acquisition, incidental learning, English as a foreign language (EFL), extensive reading, word knowledge In a landmark study, Nation (2006) calculated the amount of vocabulary necessary to function in English, using a 98% coverage figure (Hu & Nation, 2000). He found that it took much more vocabulary than previous estimates: 6,000–7,000 word families for spoken discourse and 8,000– 9,000 families for written discourse. -
POS Tagging for Improving Code-Switching Identification In
POS Tagging for Improving Code-Switching Identification in Arabic Mohammed Attia1 Younes Samih2 Ali Elkahky1 Hamdy Mubarak2 Ahmed Abdelali2 Kareem Darwish2 1Google LLC, New York City, USA 2Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU Research Complex, Doha, Qatar 1{attia,alielkahky}@google.com 2{ysamih,hmubarak,aabdelali,kdarwish}@hbku.edu.qa Abstract and sociolinguistic reasons. Second, existing the- oretical and computational linguistic models are When speakers code-switch between their na- tive language and a second language or lan- based on monolingual data and cannot adequately guage variant, they follow a syntactic pattern explain or deal with the influx of CS data whether where words and phrases from the embedded spoken or written. language are inserted into the matrix language. CS has been studied for over half a century This paper explores the possibility of utiliz- from different perspectives, including theoretical ing this pattern in improving code-switching linguistics (Muysken, 1995; Parkin, 1974), ap- identification between Modern Standard Ara- plied linguistics (Walsh, 1969; Boztepe, 2003; Se- bic (MSA) and Egyptian Arabic (EA). We try to answer the question of how strong is the tati, 1998), socio-linguistics (Barker, 1972; Heller, POS signal in word-level code-switching iden- 2010), psycho-linguistics (Grosjean, 1989; Prior tification. We build a deep learning model en- and Gollan, 2011; Kecskes, 2006), and more re- riched with linguistic features (including POS cently computational linguistics (Solorio and Liu, tags) that outperforms the state-of-the-art re- 2008a; Çetinoglu˘ et al., 2016; Adel et al., 2013b). sults by 1.9% on the development set and 1.0% In this paper, we investigate the possibility of on the test set. -
Vocabulary Research Into Practice
Date of delivery: Journal and vol/article ref: LTA 1100026 Number of pages (not including this page): 11 Author queries: Q1: Should there be a reference to Thorndike (1908) here? Q2: Do you mean ‘exceptional’ as in ‘exceptionally high standard’, or ‘few in number’? Q3: Please check my rewriting of this paragraph. I was confused by the reference to negative evidence ‘on’ (for?) deliberate learning, when the rest of the paragraph is about incidental learning. Q4: I’m afraid I don’t know what this means. Are the percentages increases in numbers of words learned? If so, in comparison to what? Typesetter queries: T1: Please check the position of editorial note. Non-printed material: Lang. Teach. (2011), 44.4,1–11 c Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S0261444811000267 1 Thinking Allowed 2 Research into practice: Vocabulary 3 I. S. P. Nation LALS, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand 4 [email protected] 5 This article is a personal view of the application of research on vocabulary to teaching and 6 how there are three different types or categories of relationship between that research and 7 the teaching to which it is applied: first, where the research is not applied or not applied well, 8 second, where it is reasonably well applied, and third, where it is over-applied. For each of 9 these three categories, I look at what I consider to be the most important areas of research 10 and suggest why they fit into that category. The topics covered include planning vocabulary 11 courses, distinguishing high frequency and low frequency words, extensive reading, the 12 deliberate learning of vocabulary, academic vocabulary and vocabulary teaching. -
SELECTING and CREATING a WORD LIST for ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING by Deny A
Teaching English with Technology, 17(1), 60-72, http://www.tewtjournal.org 60 SELECTING AND CREATING A WORD LIST FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING by Deny A. Kwary and Jurianto Universitas Airlangga Dharmawangsa Dalam Selatan, Surabaya 60286, Indonesia d.a.kwary @ unair.ac.id / [email protected] Abstract Since the introduction of the General Service List (GSL) in 1953, a number of studies have confirmed the significant role of a word list, particularly GSL, in helping ESL students learn English. Given the recent development in technology, several researchers have created word lists, each of them claims to provide a better coverage of a text and a significant role in helping students learn English. This article aims at analyzing the claims made by the existing word lists and proposing a method for selecting words and a creating a word list. The result of this study shows that there are differences in the coverage of the word lists due to the difference in the corpora and the source text analysed. This article also suggests that we should create our own word list, which is both personalized and comprehensive. This means that the word list is not just a list of words. The word list needs to be accompanied with the senses and the patterns of the words, in order to really help ESL students learn English. Keywords: English; GSL; NGSL; vocabulary; word list 1. Introduction A word list has been noted as an essential resource for language teaching, especially for second language teaching. The main purpose for the creation of a word list is to determine the words that the learners need to know, in order to provide more focused learning materials. -
Modeling and Encoding Traditional Wordlists for Machine Applications
Modeling and Encoding Traditional Wordlists for Machine Applications Shakthi Poornima Jeff Good Department of Linguistics Department of Linguistics University at Buffalo University at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA Buffalo, NY USA [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Clearly, descriptive linguistic resources can be This paper describes work being done on of potential value not just to traditional linguis- the modeling and encoding of a legacy re- tics, but also to computational linguistics. The source, the traditional descriptive wordlist, difficulty, however, is that the kinds of resources in ways that make its data accessible to produced in the course of linguistic description NLP applications. We describe an abstract are typically not easily exploitable in NLP appli- model for traditional wordlist entries and cations. Nevertheless, in the last decade or so, then provide an instantiation of the model it has become widely recognized that the devel- in RDF/XML which makes clear the re- opment of new digital methods for encoding lan- lationship between our wordlist database guage data can, in principle, not only help descrip- and interlingua approaches aimed towards tive linguists to work more effectively but also al- machine translation, and which also al- low them, with relatively little extra effort, to pro- lows for straightforward interoperation duce resources which can be straightforwardly re- with data from full lexicons. purposed for, among other things, NLP (Simons et al., 2004; Farrar and Lewis, 2007). 1 Introduction Despite this, it has proven difficult to create When looking at the relationship between NLP significant electronic descriptive resources due to and linguistics, it is typical to focus on the dif- the complex and specific problems inevitably as- ferent approaches taken with respect to issues sociated with the conversion of legacy data. -
The Four Strands
C:/3B2WIN/temp files/illt039_S100.3d[x] Wednesday, 31st January 2007 19:39:24 The Four Strands Paul Nation Department of Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand The activities in a language course can be classified into the four strands of meaning- focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. In a well designed course there should be an even balance of these strands with roughly equal amounts of time given to each strand. The research evidence for the strands draws on the input hypothesis and learning from extensive reading, the output hypothesis, research on form-focused instruction, and the development of speaking and reading fluency. The paper concludes with 10 princi- ples based largely on the four strands. The strands framework and the principles provide a basis for managing innovation in language courses. doi: 10.2167/illt039.0 Keywords: four strands, curriculum, input, output, fluency Innovation in language teaching needs to take account of research on language acquisition. One way of doing this is to make the innovation within a framework that fits with research findings. This paper describes a framework for looking at language courses to see if they provide an appropriate balance of opportunities for learning. The opportunities for learning language can be usefully divided into four strands: meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. These are called strands because they can be seen as long continuous sets of learning conditions that run through the whole language course. Every activity in a language course fits into one of these strands. -
Language Difficulty and Prior Learning Influence Foreign Vocabulary Acquisition
languages Article Language Difficulty and Prior Learning Influence Foreign Vocabulary Acquisition Sayuri Hayakawa *, James Bartolotti, Aimee van den Berg and Viorica Marian Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA; [email protected] (J.B.); [email protected] (A.v.d.B.); [email protected] (V.M.) * Correspondence: [email protected] Received: 4 November 2019; Accepted: 22 December 2019; Published: 27 December 2019 Abstract: When learning a foreign language, words that are the hardest to learn are often the easiest to forget. Yet, there is also evidence that more challenging learning contexts can lead to greater long-term retention. Here, we investigate the effect of language difficulty on vocabulary retention by teaching participants novel words that varied in both imageability and similarity to a known language over a period of four weeks. We found that easier words (high-imageability and familiar) were generally retained better than harder words (low-imageability and unfamiliar). However, when words were fully learned during training, the more difficult unfamiliar words were later recalled with higher accuracy than easier familiar words. The effect of language difficulty on vocabulary retention therefore varies depending on how well words were initially encoded. We conclude that greater challenges can reap greater long-term rewards so long as learners establish a strong foundation during initial acquisition. Keywords: foreign language acquisition; desirable difficulties; imageability; language similarity; vocabulary 1. Introduction When learning a new skill, whether it be computer programming, tennis, or a foreign language, many of us have experienced a ‘honeymoon period,’ where the transformation from complete novice to competent newcomer prompts a rush of excitement and confidence. -
THE IMPACT of USING WORDLISTS in the LANGUAGE CLASSROOM on STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACQUISITION Gülçin Coşgun Ozyegin University
International Journal of English Language Teaching Vol.4, No.3, pp.49-66, March 2016 ___Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK (www.eajournals.org) THE IMPACT OF USING WORDLISTS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM ON STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY ACQUISITION Gülçin Coşgun Ozyegin University ABSTRACT: Vocabulary has always been an area of interest for many researchers since words represent “the building block upon which knowledge of the second language can be built” and without them people cannot convey the intended meaning (Abrudan, 2010). Nation (1988) emphasised if teachers want to help their learners to deal with unknown words, it would be better to spend more time on vocabulary learning strategies rather than spending time on individual words. However, Schmitt in Schmitt and McCarthy (1997:200) stated that among vocabulary learning strategies only ‘guessing from context’ and ‘key word method’ have been investigated in depth. Therefore, there is need for more research on vocabulary learning whose pedagogical implications may contribute to the field of second language learning. Considering the above- mentioned issues, vocabulary is a worthwhile field to investigate. Hence, this paper aims at proposing a framework for vocabulary teaching strategy in English as a foreign language context. KEYWORDS: Wordlists, Vocabulary Teaching, Word walls, Vocabulary Learning Strategies INTRODUCTION Vocabulary has always been an area of interest and concern for many researchers and teachers alike since words represent “the building block upon which knowledge of the second language can be built” and without them people cannot convey the intended meaning (Abrudan, 2010). Anderson and Freebody (1981) state that a strong correlation exists between vocabulary and academic achievement. -
The Quality and Frequency of Encounters with Vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes Programme
Reading in a Foreign Language April 2010, Volume 22, No. 1 ISSN 1539-0578 pp. 117–138 The quality and frequency of encounters with vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes programme Angela Joe Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand Abstract This longitudinal case study tracks an adult second-language (L2) learner’s quality and quantity of encounters with 20 vocabulary items in an English for Academic Purposes course over 3 months. The learner completed pretest and posttest vocabulary knowledge interviews, submitted course materials and notes for analysis, and was observed during class lessons. The results show that frequency of encounters contributes more to vocabulary learning than contextual richness does. In addition, the case study data illustrate the highly incremental nature of L2 vocabulary acquisition in a naturalistic context. Keywords: longitudinal, case study, vocabulary frequency, vocabulary depth, contextual richness, generative processing A common concern among teachers and learners in intensive English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes is the extent to which previously learnt, known and new vocabulary items encountered in text are available for subsequent use in the immediate and longer term. Learners who are faced with reading and understanding academic texts are often frustrated by their inability to retrieve words or their meanings on demand. Given the incremental nature of vocabulary acquisition, longitudinal studies that track learners’ encounters with words in particular contexts can provide insights into precisely how learners approach vocabulary learning, both within and beyond language classes. They can also reveal the types of vocabulary encounters that are likely to contribute to long-term retrieval of word form and meaning and to productive use This case study illustrates the role of three contributing factors to vocabulary learning: quality of input, quality of output, and frequency of occurrences with target vocabulary items. -
An Introduction to Applied Linguistics This Page Intentionally Left Blank an Introduction to Applied Linguistics
An Introduction to Applied Linguistics This page intentionally left blank An Introduction to Applied Linguistics edited by Norbert Schmitt Orders: please contact Bookpoint Ltd, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4SB. Telephone: (44) 01235 827720. Fax: (44) 01235 400454. Lines are open from 9.00 to 5.00, Monday to Saturday, with a 24-hour message answering service. You can also order through our website www.hoddereducation.co.uk If you have any comments to make about this, or any of our other titles, please send them to [email protected] British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN: 978 0 340 98447 5 First Edition Published 2002 This Edition Published 2010 Impression number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Year 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Hachette UK’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.