Review of Paul Nation, Learning vocabulary
in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. 477 + xiv
pp.
Reviewed by Tom Cobb, Dépt. de linguistique et
de didactique des langues, Université du Québec à Montréal, 9 January 2002, for
Canadian Journal of Linguistics.
Until
recently, vocabulary learning was seen as peripheral to language acquisition,
both theoretically and practically. Linguistic theory assigned word learning to
a simple functional-associative model which of course could not accommodate
syntax, and applied language researchers and teachers largely concurred with
this view in an effort to be aligned with proper theories, and also in the
knowledge that vocabulary was anyway too vast a quantity for direct instruction
(but fortunately could be picked up more or less by itself).
Much of
this view has now been reversed. Theoretically, it now seems likely that
language acquisition begins with word learning rather than syntax triggering,
with words gradually "grammaticalized" through experience on a
largely associative basis. Practically, studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s
showed that vocabulary skill and knowledge are the precondition for most other
language abilities and, in addition, the main source of variance in the final
state of such abilities. It now seems clear that vocabulary acquisition does
not happen by itself to any satisfactory degree, particularly as needed for
first language literacy or a second language generally. Lexical growth must
therefore be provisioned in language instruction. Yet one perception that has
not changed is that the lexicon is dauntingly vast. It is not obvious that, or
how, lexical growth can be affected by instruction to any useful extent.
The applied
linguist who has done most to demonstrate that and how a lexicon can be a
subject for instruction is Paul Nation, along with his colleagues and students
from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Drawing together several
earlier word frequency studies and validating and extending them with
computational corpus analysis, Nation and colleagues have argued that the core
vocabulary of a language can be identified and used as a systematic and
comprehensive basis for testing and instructional design in language teaching.
A program of research on this and related ideas extending back to the 1970s and
comprising dozens of small, precise experimental studies came together in 1990
in a now classic volume, Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. For anyone
who read it, this book definitively returned vocabulary to the ESL/EFL syllabus
(or that of any language).
The core
idea of the 1990 book is that through careful analysis of both the target
language and the needs of particular groups of learners, instructable portions
of a second lexicon can be identified and the effects of knowing them
predicted. For example, computer analysis shows that about 80% of the
individual words in most written English texts are members of the 2000 most
frequent word families, so that any second language reading course should
ensure that its users meet and know these words. After roughly the 2000 mark,
however, the pay off for direct learning trails off, and at that point learners
should either rely on inferencing strategies or else move on to direct study of
items that are frequent not in the language at large but in chosen areas of
study or interest such as academic texts in general or domains of study like
economics in particular. Either way, the goal is to arrive at a point where 95%
of the running words are known in an average text, which a series of
experiments show is the point where independent reading and further acquisition
through inference become reliable. The book included a series of frequency
based tests to enable course designers to determine where their learners are,
lexically speaking, and hence what type of approach will best reward their
continuing investment of time and energy. This systematic approach to
vocabulary growth contrasts strongly to most of the approaches that preceded
it.
So the
question that poses itself now is, What's new in 2001? Almost unbelievably,
nearly 25% of the roughly 600 studies cited in the new book are post-1990.
Vocabulary research has clearly taken off, much of it inspired by the earlier
book and its framework. The Nation group appears to be at the centre of a rare
occurrence in the fledgling discipline of applied linguistics, the
establishment of an abiding program of research. The emphasis in this program
is not entirely on the new, however, since another near 25% of the studies are
from before 1970 (some long before), confirming the continuity of vocabulary
research before and after the Chomskyan interregnum.
Learning
vocabulary in another language pushes forward on almost every front; space permits only a brief
listing here. Mainly, what it means to know a word is much more developed than
in the previous volume. The cumulative nature of word knowledge, the components
of word knowledge, the different types of word knowledge (active and passive,
declarative and procedural) are incorporated into the framework and moreover
into the practical instruments on offer for the course designer or teacher. For
example, the tests already mentioned now appear in several standardized
versions as well as active and passive formats, along with a new 0-1000 level
test that was notably lacking in the previous book (the most frequent 1000 word
families comprise 90% of spoken English and hence this test will provide
crucial information for designers of speaking and listening courses). The
University World List (UWL) of high frequency academic vocabulary across
disciplines is replaced by the shorter yet more powerful Academic Word List
(AWL) on the basis of coverage evidence from corpus analysis.
Over the
course of the book, a number of the sacred cows of vocabulary teaching are
toppled by research findings. For example, there is no reason that learners
should not use L1-L2 translation equivalents to remember words, and some good
reasons that they should. There is no reason that learners should not use
bilingual dictionaries. Words should not be presented in closely related groups
(this causes interference and forgetting). Natural occurrence will not furnish
learners with even a minimal lexicon. The debate that has raged for decades
between direct teaching of vocabulary and strategy training is sterile: these
are simply applicable to different and definable stages of learning. Teachers
may find these ideas counterintuitive, yet the evidence seems clear.
Vast
amounts of recent corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic research have been
thoughtfully digested and incorporated. New sections deal with recent work on
the collocational nature of lexical knowledge, on language testing, on the
conditions of vocabulary acquisition, and on the issues attached to strategy
training. Complex research is synthesized and summarized in plain language, and
unambiguous pedagogical implications invariably follow--the work contains
dozens of concrete ideas for teaching, testing, and learning. And throughout,
open issues are indicated where Master's studies or instructional design projects
might usefully be focused. The whole framework is ripe for application to other
languages (such as French). The book is backed up by substantial Internet
resources; an even more complete bibliography of vocabulary research is
available online, as are most of the wordlists and software tools used in the
various studies.
However,
the book is not without imperfections. In some places, it may have been let
down by its editors at Cambridge University Press. There are references to line
number in texts without lines (p. 186); the UWL and AWL word lists are confused
at least once (p. 17); similarly the terms "decontextualized" and
"contextualized" (p. 64). On another level, the chapters of the book
have clearly been written as somewhat independent modules, and the editors have
sometimes failed to weave these together. Studies that have already been cited
in one context are sometimes cited later in another, but without signposting
words like "In a study previously mentioned…" Readers are unlikely to
remember every study they have previously encountered, and even the author
himself has occasional difficulty holding it all together. In one study of
acquisition from story reading, a correlation of .42 between word learning and
importance of word to plot is described as "moderate" (p. 64) and
then later as "strong" (p. 118). A sharp editor might have queried
this; however, not every slip can be laid at the editor's door. In referring to
a Quebec study of the classroom as a lexical environment (Meara, Lightbown
& Halter, 1997), the author writes that "the learners were exposed to
plenty of unknown words" while the actual finding was that they were
exposed to no more words than they would have been in a 1960s audiolingual
classroom with explicit limitations on new vocabulary.
On another
level, as a vocabulary researcher myself I wonder about some of Nation's
emphases and omissions. For example, he devotes a chapter to acquisition
strategies and the instruction thereof. There is an unresolved question about
strategy training for language learners, which is that any strategy we are
imparting may already exist in the learner's first language (L1) repertoire but
cannot be activated in L2 until a certain threshold of language proficiency is
reached. And, hence, do we not serve learners better by helping them across the
proficiency threshold rather than teaching them the strategies they (probably)
already have? Since all L2 learners have acquired one lexicon in their lives,
presumably through implicit strategies of contextual inference and cumulative
hypothesis testing, the case for further inference training is not obvious.
Especially since there are studies showing that strategy variance
"explained only about 20% of the variance" in L2 vocabulary size (p.
225). I was hoping to find an exploration of this issue in the section on
strategy training.
But these
are minor criticisms. Reading this book has been tremendously satisfying for
me, and indeed has set my own research agenda for the next several months. It
has shed light on every research project I am currently working on, and has
given me a list of must-copy articles, much as Nation (1990) did a few years
ago. The new book will soon be as dog-eared and scribbled over as the first
one! We can only wonder what the next decade will bring in vocabulary research,
but it seems certain that Nation and his colleagues will be at the centre of
it. I recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in vocabulary
acquisition, graduate or undergraduate. Either will profit from a pre-reading
of the earlier book, which the author recommends as an introduction to the new
book.
Language
researchers and practitioners of all types should read this book. After
all, despite recent successes in redressing the balance between syntax and
vocabulary, these successes are not widely known in the broader language
teaching industry. Many TESL teacher training programs still do not have a
course in "pedagogical lexis" while the standard course in
pedagogical grammar is offered year after year without a second thought. This
is truly odd, given that the jury is still out on whether grammar is even
teachable. As this book makes clear, vocabulary instruction is fascinating, it
can be done systematically, and its results are predictable. And language
learners walk around with dictionaries in their pockets not grammar books.
Nation, P.
(1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Meara, P.,
Lightbown, P., & Halter, R. (1997). Classrooms as lexical environments. Language
Teaching Research 1, 28-47.