Wow! eBook
Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Foreign Language Acquisition Collector's ed. Edition
Author(s): Vi¿nja Pavi¿i¿ Taka¿ (Author)
- Publisher: Multilingual Matters
- Publication Date: 15 Feb. 2008
- Edition: Collector's ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 150 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847690386
- ISBN-13: 9781847690388
Book Description
This is the first book that deals primarily with vocabulary learning strategies as a specific and integral subgroup of language learning strategies. Its aim is to define the concept of language learning strategies in general and their features on the basis of cognitive theory and relevant models of second language acquisition as the basis for empirical research. Furthermore, the book gives a survey of relevant research on vocabulary learning strategies and describes three original empirical studies. Thus, the book integrates the approaches of theories of second language acquisition, the theory and practice of instructed foreign (second) language learning, and the findings of current empirical research.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Takac's book is a significant contribution to LLS in the field of SLA. Each chapter is clearly laid-out and well written, with excellent end-of-chapter summaries. I believe that this much needed book will be an invaluable resource and will be thought-provoking for the reader, not only on learner strategy use, but also on the relationship between strategy training and language acquisition. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to those researchers involved in LLS and of vocabulary acquisition, and for teachers and teacher educators. The wealth of illustrations and the elaborate discussion makes this book an extremely useful reference for those involved in strategy teaching and training.
The book is well-written, nicely organized, and reader-friendly, and it should be quite accessible to teachers, researchers, and graduate students alike. It provides excellent coverage of relevant theories of vocabulary learning and useful data through its empirical chapters. It should be essential reading for language teachers and graduate students working on language learning and teaching strategies and can also be enthusiastically recommended as a supplementary text for courses on methodology in second and foreign language teaching.
This book provides a timely, thoughtful, and welcome contribution to the current surge of articles and edited volumes on L2 strategies. Researchers interested in vocabulary and strategies will appreciate its concentrated, theoretical accounts of vocabulary learning, whereas classroom practitioners will value the pedagogical applications it provides on topics such as L2 strategy instruction.
This much needed book will be an invaluable text for researchers of language learning strategies and of vocabulary acquisition, and for teachers and teacher educators. It will stimulate the reader to reflect at length, not only on learner strategy deployment, but also on the problematical relationship between instruction and acquisition. The elaborate and detailed review of studies in the field makes the book suitable for those new to the field while the results of new research particularly in the second and third studies will appeal to those with more advanced knowledge and experience in the area.
About the Author
Visnja Pavičic Takač is Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. Her professional and research interests include individual differences in FL learning, language learning strategies, communicative competence, lexical development, cross-linguistic studies, metadiscourse in FL writing, and pre-service teacher education. For many years, she was a reviewer of state school-leaving exam in Croatia. She has been a member of a number of international and national scientific projects and has presented more than 40 papers at national and international conferences. She has more than 50 published papers and book chapters and has authored and co-authored three books and four edited volumes.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Foreign Language Acquisition Collector's ed. Edition
By Vi?nja Pavicic Takac
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2008 Vi?nja Pavicic Takac
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-038-8
Contents
Introduction: An Outline of the Book,
1 Factors Affecting Vocabulary Learning and Acquisition,
2 Theoretical Anchorage,
3 Survey of Research on Vocabulary Learning Strategies,
4 Studies on Vocabulary Learning Strategies,
5 Summary: Some Implications for Practice and Research, and Conclusions,
Appendix A. Vocabulary Learning Strategies Questionnaire (Pilot Version),
Appendix B. VOLSQUES: Vocabulary Learning Strategy Questionnaire for Elementary Schools,
Appendix C. Results of the Factor Analyses (Pilot Study),
Appendix D. Vocabulary Teaching Strategies: Criteria and Results of Analyses,
References,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
Factors Affecting Vocabulary Learning and Acquisition
Despite the abundance of research on vocabulary acquisition that has been conducted by linguists, psychologists and theorists of L2 acquisition, there is still no generally accepted theory of vocabulary acquisition (for further discussion, see Meara, 1997). This fact may be partially attributed to the lack of cooperation or agreement among experts. On the one hand, psycholinguists have a particular interest in vocabulary development and exploration of the formal models of vocabulary acquisition, and ignore the L2 vocabulary literature because it is model-free. Applied linguists, on the other hand, are mainly concerned with the descriptive aspects of vocabulary and do not draw on existing psycholinguistic models of bilingual lexicon even when this implies an immediate pedagogical significance. Differences in the research focus have caused the two fields to develop at different rates, which has led to an even larger gap between them. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to list all the significant factors and the ways in which they influence vocabulary acquisition. In this section, a selection of the factors most frequently discussed in the relevant literature is presented.
Linguistic Features of Lexical Items
When it comes to linguistic features of lexical items, several issues need to be taken into consideration. To begin with, there is the problem of defining a 'word'. Intuitively, vocabulary could be defined as a 'dictionary' or a set of words. This general view is reflected in the lexicographical approach to the traditional way of listing words in a dictionary. However, it is obvious that for linguistics and L2 acquisition theory this interpretation is far too simplistic and limited. Linguists' attempts to specify what speakers of a language traditionally regard as a 'word' have resulted in so many formally different definitions of this term that their number alone suggests the complexity of the problem.
Firstly, according to the orthographic definition, a 'word' is '... any sequence of letters (and a limited number of other characteristics such as hyphen and apostrophe) bounded on either side by a space orpunctuation mark' (Carter, 1992: 4). Its flaw is not only its limitation to the written language, but the fact that it is formalistic, inconsistent and incomplete because it neglects differences in meaning and the issues of polysemy, homonymy, grammar functions, etc.
Secondly, based on semantics, a word can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit of language (Carter, 1992). As there is still no satisfactory definition of what 'meaning' is, i.e. what is the relationship between the linguistic sign and what it denotes outside the language, this definition is not reliable enough. Namely, some units of meaning consist of several words (e.g. bus conductor), for some the meaning cannot be determined without looking into their function in structuring and organising information (e.g. if, but), and certain 'integral' parts of words cannot stand on their own even if we know their meaning (e.g. the prefix 're-' in retell).
Thirdly, by the same token, the definition that restricts a word to a single stressed syllable allows for many exceptions: words like if and but do not have a stress, and bus conductor would be regarded as a single word in this view.
Next, Bloomfield's definition, according to which a word is a minimal free form, i.e. the smallest form that has a meaning when standing on its own (kiljan, 1994), encompasses most of the categories and, without excluding further reduction of forms, provides a word with a degree of stability. Again, the problem of marginal cases arises and undermines every attempt to define a word in a formalistic way: firstly, items like a and the appear only in contextual relations to other words and secondly, idiomatic expressions, which consist of several orthographic words and cannot be reduced without radically changing their meaning (Carter, 1992).
Furthermore, McCarthy (1994) claims that a word, as a free meaningful unit of language, must contain at least one potentially freestanding morpheme. From this view a conditional definition of a word may be derived: a word is a combination of morphemes that comprise a firm unit suitable for the formation of higher level units (kiljan, 1994). In addition, in Carter's view (1992), one of the greatest problems of defining a word, along with the abovementioned constraints, is the fact that words have different forms that would not intuitively be regarded as different words. Moreover, words can have the same form with completely different and unconnected meanings.
Finally, by way of attempting to solve this problem, a neutral term lexeme or lexical unit has been introduced. It is an abstract unit that includes various orthographic, phonological, grammatical and semantic features of a 'word'. Thus, this term covers inflections, polysemy, as well as multi-word items with different degrees of fixedness, such as compounds, phrasal verbs, and idioms. The difference between holistic multi-word items and other kinds of strings (i.e. multi-word inflectional forms, such as verb phrases are going or has been chosen) may be determined by applying the following criteria: institutionalisation or lexicalisation (the degree to which a multi-word item is considered as being a unit by the language community), fixedness (the degree to which a multi-word item is frozen as a sequence of words) and non- compositionality (the degree to which a multiword item cannot be interpreted on a word-by-word basis, but has a specialised unitary meaning) (cf. Moon, 1997: 44).
The second issue that needs to be discussed arises from the lack of an unambiguous and universally accepted definition of a word: vocabulary of any language consists of a wide range of lexical forms. Thus, many linguists and theorists of L2 acquisition agree that vocabulary is made up of a variety of forms, such as morphemes, both free and bound (e.g. laugh, or the prefix un-), their combinations, i.e. derivatives (e.g. laughter, unbelievable), compounds (e.g. bus conductor), idioms, i.e. units that cannot be reduced or changed, and whose meaning cannot be retrieved from individual meanings of their components (e.g. to bite the dust), and other fixed expressions, such as binomials and trinomials (e.g. sick and tired; ready, willing and able), catchphrases (e.g. they don't make them like that any more), prefabricated routines or prefabs (e.g. if I were you), greetings (e.g. How do you do?)...
