Chapter 1 Theoretical considerations on vocabulary

Vocabulary could be broadly defined as knowledge of words and word meanings, but we should take into consideration the fact that vocabulary is more complex than this definition suggests. A very important aspect which should be reminded is that words come in two forms: oral and print. Oral vocabulary includes those words that we recognize and use in listening and speaking. Print vocabulary includes those words that we recognize and use in reading and writing. If we refer to vocabulary as all the words known and used by a particular person, this definition does not take into account a range of issues involved in knowing a word. The first major distinction that must be made when evaluating word knowledge is whether the knowledge is productive (also called active) or receptive (also called passive). Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman (Working with words, Cambridge Universty Press, 1986) used the terms as follows: receptive vocabulary to mean language items which can only be recognised and comprehended in the context of reading and listening material productive vocabulary to be language items which the learner can recall and use appropriately in speech and writing. In most cases, a person's receptive vocabulary is the larger of the two. For example, although a young child may not yet be able to speak, write, or sign, he or she may be able to follow simple commands and appear to understand a good portion of the language to which he or she is exposed. Thus, the child's receptive vocabulary might consist of hundreds of words but his or her active vocabulary is zero. When that child learns to speak or sign, however, the child's active vocabulary begins to increase. It is possible for the productive vocabulary to be larger than the receptive vocabulary, for example in a second-language learner who has learned words through study rather than exposure, and can produce them, but has difficulty recognising them in conversation. When teaching vocabulary, teachers should bear the distinction in mind and the selection of the items to be taught should be based on the students needs (particularly in the case of ESP students) and learning environment (e.g. the intensiveness of the course, the time of the day, whether students have enough time to study outside their language classroom, etc.). Learners of a second language are challenged to make correct connections between the form and the meaning of words, to use the correct form of a word for the meaning intended, to take into account factors such as oral or written use of language, degree of formality, style and others, this is why students have to acquire a large amount of words so that they could understand and produce language. There are many facets to knowing a word, so several frameworks of work knowledge have been proposed to better operationalise this concept. One

such framework includes different facets: orthography (dealing with the written form), phonology (dealing with the spoken form), reference ( the meaning of the word), semantics (referring to concept and reference), register ( appropriacy of use), collocation (lexical neighbours), word associations, syntax (referring to grammatical function), morphology (word parts). Knowing how words are described and categorised could help students broaden their vocabulary to express themselves correctly and appropriately in a wide range of situations. Words fall into different word classes: Nouns Pronouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs Prepositions Conjunctions Determiners disapproval, hardship, metaphor he, his, ours, them nominate, fit, bear, pitch heroic, icy, pitying, monthly unfortunately, smartly, grossly in, under, for, of but, and, however