Aspects of Vocabulary

            The effective vocabulary teaching involves working out what needs to be taught about the vocabulary aspects. There are several aspects that need to be taken into account when teaching vocabulary. According to Gairn and Redman (1986: 11) to teach vocabulary means to learn or to teach its form, meaning, and usage. Form, meaning, and usage are called the learning burden of a word. They differ from word to word according to the ways in which the word relates to first language knowledge and already existing knowledge of the second language or other known languages.

Table 2.1 Learning Burden

NO	ASFECTS	DIMENSION	FUNCTIONS
1	MEANING	CONCEPT	What does the word mean?
			What word should be used to express this meaning?
		ASSOCIATION	Does the word fit into the same sets as in L1 word of similar meaning?
2	FORM	SPELLING	What does the word look like?
			How is the word written and spelled?
		PRONOUNCIATION	What does the word sound like?
			How is the word pronounced?
3	USE	GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION	Sentence completion
		COLLOCATION	Collocation matching

 

Vocabulary mastery begins with a word. What is a word? According to Arnold (1989: 64) the term "word" denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment.

Words do not exist as isolated items in a language. That is, words are interwoven in a complex system in which knowledge of various levels of a lexical item is required in order to achieve adequate understanding in listening or reading or produce ideas successfully in speaking and writing. Richards (1976: 25) contends that knowing a lexical item includes knowledge of word frequency, collocation, register, case relations, underlying forms, word association, and semantic structure. Nation (2001: 17) applies the terms receptive and productive to vocabulary knowledge description covering all the aspects of what is involved in knowing a word: form, meaning, and use. They are the three main parts at the most general level.

The word is structural and semantic entity within the language system. According to the American Heritage, words are usually separated by spaces in writing, and are distinguished phonologically, as by accent, in many languages. For all the differences in definition of a word it is of great importance for us that a word is a basic tangible unit of a language and it is a structural and semantic entity of a language system. Words as single units cannot provide the act of communication by themselves: a boy, I, saw, little. They provide the act of communication when they are combined in a certain way: I saw a little boy.

Usually the first thing we learn about a new English word is what it means and its translation in our own language. Tolman (1988: 11) states that meaning is the generalization of reality that is crystallized and fixed in its sensuous vehicle, normally in a word or a word combination. This is the ideal, mental form of the crystallization of mankind's social experience and social practice.

The range of a given society's ideas, science, and language exists as a system of corresponding meanings. Meaning, thus, belongs primarily to the world of objective, historical phenomena. Meaning, however, also exists as a fact of the individual consciousness. We perceive the world and think about it as a social, historical entity and at the same time limited by the ideas and knowledge of time and society.

As a matter of fact the meanings into which we classify our experience are culturally determined or modified and they vary considerably from culture to culture. Some meanings found in one culture may not exist in another. The meaning of horse didn't exist in American Indian languages until the Spanish conquest and colonization brought horses to America; similarly, the meanings of 'corn' and 'potatoes' But even when the reality is available to the culture, the meaning will differ, or does not exist in some cases.

Meanings can be classified according to the forms they attach to; meanings that attach to words as words are lexical meanings, for example the meaning, "a building for human habitation", that attaches to the form “house” is a lexical meaning in English.

The most important aspect of vocabulary teaching for the learners is to foster learner independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course.

The graphic form of a word (spelling) is one of an important thing to consider. Spelling (graphic) form of English words cannot always be inferred from the pronunciation or rules because English spelling is in part conventional which means that the spelling of some English words does not correspond to their pronunciation, certain letters are silent as /gh/ in night or /w/ in wrong, while others stand for sounds which are different from their primary phonetic value, as /o/ in do, or /a/ in many.

Effective spelling addresses to three objectives: students learn the major principles and patterns of English spelling, students learn reliable spelling strategies that they can apply to both familiar and unfamiliar words, and students become aware of the rich network of spelling-meaning relationships that can significantly extend their vocabulary.

Although English spelling is based on an alphabetic principle, it also works on other levels. There are three basic layers of information that spelling can represent: there are alphabetic layer, a pattern layer, and a meaning layer (Henderson & Templeton, 1993: 162).

The alphabetic layer is based on the relationship between letters and sounds. For example, in the word cat, a single letter represents each sound. Students blend the sounds for /c/, /a/, /t/ to read the word cat. The pattern layer overlies the alphabet layer because there is not always a single sound for each letter. In English language, single sound is sometimes spelled with more than one letter or is affected by other letters. When students look beyond single letter and sound match-ups, they must search for patterns. For example, a final e will often make the preceding vowel stand for the long vowel sound, like in the word cape. It follows a pattern of consonant-vowel-consonant-silent e.

In contrast to the alphabetic layer, the pattern layer is more conceptually advanced because learners come to understand that spelling does not always work in a strictly left-to-right fashion. In order to understand how the "silent e" works in words such as make, for example, learners must skip to the end of the word and think in a right-to-left sequence.

The meaning layer focuses on the groups of letters that represent meaning directly. Examples of these groups or letters include prefixes and suffixes. Prefix re- whether students pronounce it as ree like in rethink. The meaning layer reflects the consistent spelling of meaning elements, or morphemes, within words, despite sound change. For example, the spelling of the base in the following pairs of words is spelled consistently even though the sounds that the letters represent change: define/definition; local/locality; sign/signature.

The distribution of words is important to us because at any given moment in the history of a language the speakers of that language carry with them the habits of the restriction in distribution and different languages have different restrictions. There are grammatical restrictions so that in English, "water" may be a noun as in "a glass of water", a verb as in "water the garden", a noun adjunct as in "water meter", but not an adjective without some change in form e.g. "watery substance"; in other cases restriction may be greater.

Words are not only restricted geographically and socially. They are often restricted as styles of speaking and writing. The main strategy for the learners is to turn their receptive vocabulary items into productive ones. In order to do that, we need to refine their understanding of the item, exploring boundaries among conceptual meaning, polysemy, synonymy, style, register, possible collocations, etc. so that students are able to use the item accurately.

We must take into account that a lexical item is most likely to be learned when a learner feels a personal need to know it, or when there is a need to express something to accomplish the learner's own purposes. Therefore, it means that the decision to incorporate a word in ones productive vocabulary is entirely personal and varies according to each student's motivation and needs. Task-based learning should help teachers to provide authentic, meaningful tasks in which students engage to achieve a concrete output, using appropriate language for the context. 

The numerous aspects of knowledge constitute the learning burden of a word, namely “the amount of effort requires learning it” (Nation 2001: 23). Learners from different first language backgrounds thus experience different levels of difficulty in learning a word, depending on how the patterns and knowledge of the word are familiar to them. Generally speaking, the receptive aspects of knowledge and use are more easily to be mastered than their productive counterparts, but it is not clear why (Nation 2001: 25).