Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The goals of vocabulary learning
- 2 Knowing a word
- 3 Teaching and explaining vocabulary
- 4 Vocabulary and listening and speaking
- 5 Vocabulary and reading and writing
- 6 Specialised uses of vocabulary
- 7 Vocabulary learning strategies and guessing from context
- 8 Word study strategies
- 9 Chunking and collocation
- 10 Testing vocabulary knowledge and use
- 11 Designing the vocabulary component of a language course Goals
- Appendixes
- References
- Subject index
- Author index
1 - The goals of vocabulary learning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The goals of vocabulary learning
- 2 Knowing a word
- 3 Teaching and explaining vocabulary
- 4 Vocabulary and listening and speaking
- 5 Vocabulary and reading and writing
- 6 Specialised uses of vocabulary
- 7 Vocabulary learning strategies and guessing from context
- 8 Word study strategies
- 9 Chunking and collocation
- 10 Testing vocabulary knowledge and use
- 11 Designing the vocabulary component of a language course Goals
- Appendixes
- References
- Subject index
- Author index
Summary
How much vocabulary do learners need to know?
Whether designing a language course or planning our own course of study, it is useful to be able to set learning goals that will allow us to use the language in the ways we want to. When we plan the vocabulary goals of a long-term course of study, we can look at three kinds of information to help decide how much vocabulary needs to be learned: the number of words in the language, the number of words known by native speakers and the number of words needed to use the language.
How many words are there in the language?
The most ambitious goal is to know all of the language. However, even native speakers do not know all the vocabulary of the language. There are numerous specialist vocabularies, such as those of nuclear physics or computational linguistics, which are known only by the small groups who specialise in those areas. Still, it is interesting to have some idea of how many words there are in the language. This is not an easy question to resolve because there are numerous other questions which affect the way we answer it, including the following.
What do we count as a word? Do we count book and books as the same word? Do we count green (the colour) and green (a large grassed area) as the sameword? Do we count people's names? Do we count the names of products like Fab, Pepsi, Vegemite, Chevrolet?
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- Information
- Learning Vocabulary in Another Language , pp. 6 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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