Words, Words, Words

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By Peter McKenzie-Brown

You are studying a foreign language, you want to learn ten new words every day, and the mental task of managing your growing word list seems formidable. To put the job into context, consider the following from linguist Stephen Pinker.

“Children begin to learn words before their first birthday,” he says, “and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

Smaller than a toddler’s daily intake, your ten-word vocabulary list suddenly seems like a pauper in a palace. And the problem of properly learning vocabulary involves much more than remembering words. In the classroom, only a few words and a small part of what the learner needs to know about a word can be dealt with at any one time. For the common words, which often have multiple meanings and complex nuances, you can only teach a bit at a time. The more information you present, the more likely your learners are to misunderstand.

For both teacher and learner, vocabulary is a huge challenge. But help is at hand from vocabulary researcher Paul Nation, whose magisterial 480-page tome, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, offers endless insights into the science and practice of teaching and learning vocabulary. He calls his preferred method of vocabulary teaching the direct approach.

Nation describes vocabulary learning as a “meeting” between the learner and the word, and he stresses that it only makes sense to have close encounters with common, useful words. Most teachers emphasize the most common 2000 English words. The most widely accepted list is available on the Internet by googling Michael West’s General Service List.

“Useful vocabulary needs to be met again and again to ensure it is learned,” Nation says. “In the early stages of learning the meetings need to be reasonably close together, preferably within a few days, so that too much forgetting does not occur. Later meetings can be very widely spaced with several weeks between each meeting.”

There are essentially four ways to learn and teach high-frequency words.
• One is direct teaching, mentioned earlier. For the language teacher, explaining vocabulary is a critical part of classroom duties.
• Also, encourage your students to participate in direct learning, which involves study from word cards and dictionary use.
• A third method, incidental learning, can involve guessing from context in extensive reading or through word use in communicative activities.
• The fourth method Nation calls “planned encounters.” These encounters include vocabulary exercises and graded reading – that is, using reading materials like shortened novels with reduced vocabulary for language learners.(Graded readers are available in many language teaching bookstores.)

Nation’s direct approach to vocabulary teaching is built upon three main ideas. First, vocabulary teaching should focus on high-frequency words that will be of continuing importance for the learners. As a teacher, you have a duty to pass over low-frequency words completely or with little comment. Also, you have to make sure the learners come back to the word frequently, to diminish the power of forgetfulness.

Also, when you teach a word you should focus on its “learning burden” – that is, the features of the word that actually need to be taught. These can differ quite dramatically from word to word. Take the word “think.” You need to explain that it is an irregular verb; that it includes the irregular spelling “thought”; and that “thought” can also be a noun.

Finally, direct teaching should be clear and simple. To learn a word in all its complexity, learners need to meet it many times. Don’t try to teach a complex word – for example, the many meanings of the word “right” – in one sitting. That kind of intensive vocabulary teaching takes place in boring classrooms, and it frequently leads to perplexed students.

Confessions of a Language School Junkie

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Many people in Thailand’s expat community teach English, and many more are learning Thai. Combined, they have more than a passing familiarity with the frustrations of language learning. But help may be at hand: “If you follow a few basic rules, you can take the ordeal out of language learning,” says Dr. Lynn Morris. The occasion was a presentation at Chiang Mai University (CMU), and Lynn called his talk “The Confessions of a Language School Junkie.”

An economist by training, during the last 12 years Lynn has studied five languages in seven countries at 15 different language schools. He only moved to Chiang Mai three years ago, but has already developed conversational fluency in Thai.

In his seminar, he offered ideas about language study from a learner’s perspective – and in his case, a learner with a bad memory. His audience included foreign students training to be English teachers in Thailand, and English instructors from CMU. Lynn’s presentation offered suggestions for learners based on his own experience and research. Noting that the great majority of language school students give up long before they reach conversational fluency, he stressed motivation above all. “Motivation matters.”

But suppose you are motivated. What can you do to speed up your language learning? You need to begin by understanding that most students study too little and try to learn too much. No one can realistically learn more than ten new words a day, for example, but learn new words you must. Says Lynn, “Vocabulary is king in language learning, and verbs are the queen. Ninety-nine percent of the time that I can’t do something in language, it’s because I don’t know the right word.” As a personal aid to his language study, he has created a system of vocabulary cards and voice recordings for pronunciation practice. Technically speaking, this system uses a principle known as anticipated graduated interval recall.

Lynn’s language regimen has five deceptively simple rules. First, “Repetition is the mother of mastery.” Use it. Another imperative is this: learn the most common words in your early days of language learning and move progressively on to those less frequently used. Third, get the pronunciation right. “If you can’t pronounce a word,” Lynn says, “you can’t memorize it.” Vowels are the biggest pronunciation problem for most people, so make this an area of special effort. Fourth, learn the vocabulary before you begin a reading practice. After all, reading exercises are about developing reading fluency rather than acquiring new words. Finally, spend 80 percent of your study time reviewing what you have already learned.

A vocabulary fetishist in every way, Lynn suggests that you can actually define the stages of language learning by word count. For example, a learner who has only mastered 500-1,000 English words can have no more than functional proficiency. By contrast, fluent conversation in social settings requires 3,000-8,000 words. And to understand TV news, read newspapers or participate in group conversation, you need 5,000-10,000 words. To put all this in context, an adult native speaker can typically use or recognize more than 20,000 words.

A rare few schools can teach languages quickly. America’s government-run Foreign Service Institute, for example, has supremely motivated students (career diplomats, military officers); highly expert instructors; and vast financial and training resources. Even with these enormous advantages, the FSI needs at least ten months to train an adult to work effectively in Thai.

By contrast, most language learners have limited resources and average teachers, so the period of mastery is much longer. Unlikely though it may seem after your first Thai lesson, however, there is no reason why a serious adult learner can’t become conversationally fluent. It just takes time and dedication.

Peter McKenzie-Brown is head TEFL instructor at Chiang Mai University’s Language Institute. This column is the first in a monthly series.

March 2003