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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 49 of 319 09 April 2014 at 10:55am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't agree. Anything about the definition of words that makes the estimation of receptive (or passive) vocabulary complicated will also apply to any kind of measurement of productive (or active) vocabulary. And with the latter we have a host of additional problems to deal with, like getting a sample of everything a person has said, written or even thought during a long period. I should know because I'm probably the only one here at HTLAL who ever have tried to do a serious estimation attempt - namely when I in my early days as a member here collected everything I had written in English during a three months period and with the help of a computer calculated the number of words I had used. But even this didn't cover all the English words I could have used. For instance I visited Kenya in 2000 and made a list of all the animal species I saw (around 100 hundred) - but apart from elephants and cheetas and dung beetles and a few other iconic critters I doubt that I ever used the names of those animals here at HTLAL. But I could have written about the lilac-breasted roller and the ferruginous duck and the whitebreasted white-eye if I had had a reason to do so. So even measurements based on actually used words will at best give a partial view of your active vocabulary. Which other measurement methods are then possible? Maybe giving a context with 'holes' and then counting the slots you can fill out in a relevant way? I wouldn't totally exclude this possibility, but the effects of different choices of context are probably impossible to estimate beforehand so it would at least take in insane amount of calibration to offer a trustworthy test. The last possibility would be to ask people to look through a lot of words and ask them whether they knew that they had used them - or at least might conceivably see themselves using them without gentle prodding. But it is quite obvious that such questions can't yield anything just vaguely resembling scientific data. That being said, after scores of word counting sessions I do have a decent sense of the proportion of my passive words in any given language which also are active. But because my criteria for declaring a word active are purely personal and based on vague gut feelings the results are irrelevant for everybody except myself. The only general claim I can make is that I have a higher proportion of active words in the languages I know best and use most. The rest is silence. Edited by Iversen on 09 April 2014 at 3:05pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 50 of 319 09 April 2014 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Especially if you're learning English/French in Canada, Spanish in the USA or English in a Nordic country. Other combinations of languages/countries can be much more difficult. Heck even learning Swedish in Finland is more difficult than French in Canada, because the languages are far less similar and many borrowings are obvious only to linguists. Do you read any logs at all here? Especially outside these language combinations, of course. I'm not questioning your experience (in either sense), it's just that you generalize way too much and appear to have zero interest in other learners' situations/challenges but still have a solution for everyone. It's such a huge contrast to how for example emk has always acknowledged that French is considered relatively "easy" for him (and easy languages have their tough times too!), even before he started Ancient Egyptian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 51 of 319 09 April 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As always, Iversen makes some comprehensible and perceptive comments and has brought the debate higher.
When I said that it is relatively easy to measure what people actually use, I meant that, unlike guessing about receptive vocabulary, we can actually record and measure what people say or write. This has been done extensively for written English publications such as works of fiction, newspaper articles and scientific writing. Although we have lots of corpora of spoken English from the media and sociolinguistic studies, what is admittedly rare are detailed monographs or systematic studies of individuals speaking in a wide variety of situations. I would think that with today's technology it would be possible to equip an individual with a recording device and record every utterance over a month. As Iversen has pointed out, he is the only person here who has taken the courage and time to actually measure his own output here at HTLAL. Iversen's study confirmed what we all know but often refuse to admit: most of the time we use a small number of all the words we could use. I don't remember the exact number of different words but it was quite low. Here is where I disagree with Iversen. I call productive vocabulary that one uses on a regular basis. Potentially productive vocabulary is made up of all the words one knows how to use correctly. This of course would include any technical or specialized terms that one may know. This is where I would put all those exotic animal names. Unless they are used regularly. What Iversen's study did not measure, unless I'm mistaken, is text coverage. But I don't think there are any surprises here. We know that a very small number of words cover a very large portion of the text. I believe for example that a study of everyday conversations would yield very low word counts with high coverage. Technical and scientific works would be different. But all this is just part of the story. The other question is how well these words are used. This is a very tricky and complex question. We could measure readability using one of many tests. But how does one measure correct word choice, word order, clarity, logic, reasoning? The use of synonyms, idioms, metaphors and punctuation? I don't have the answer. What i do know is that I enjoy reading some authors here at HTLAL, even when, as is wont, we don't agree. And there are others that I can hardly understand. Edited by s_allard on 09 April 2014 at 2:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5565 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 52 of 319 09 April 2014 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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'Receptive vocabulary takes care of itself through exposure. You learn words as you
encounter them.' I do not disagree with that. However, to go back to the study of the students found in Professor Milton's paper set out in the OP - and the recommendations of Nation and Waring in the paper helpfully present by s_allard (itself built on Nation's massive work on vocabulary acquisition) - it is clear that receptive vocabulary is not taking care of itself in the English (and perhaps US) education system. Which suggests to me that the problem is systemic and ideological - by that I mean that not enough exposure to enough vocabulary is factored into school language learning. For example I remember it taking 3 years of school French to get to the verbs that take être in the passé composé and then running through the verbs (without the help of the Dr and Mrs Vandertramp mnemonic or such like) in about 5 minutes, never to be returned to again. Such exposure is too little for students to pick up - vocabulary and grammar need to be seen and seen again in use in native materials. For a 13 year old it probably needs to be pointed out over and over again by the teacher. It is easy to blame school teachers, but I would say that the fault lies with the limited resourcesof the schooling system and a curriculum that only pays lips service to language learning. Rather like grammar translation courses like the old 1950s Teach Yourself, it is a case of 'done that, tick the box, move on' - but as is stated above - constant (and preferably guided) exposure is necessary. As to ideology - recently I read the comments attached to this well known blog: http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/02/the-way-we-teach-math-and -language-is-wrong/ It seems to me, from the language teachers' comments, that many of them are repeating ideological elements of the communicative approach - such as criticising the use of word lists etc, and talking about mystical sounding things such as what we know about 'cognitive' approaches and 'linguistic creativity'. In my view that is a canting language that has its roots in the ideology of the communicative approach rather than in the studies of people like Professors Milton or Nation. Edited by Elexi on 09 April 2014 at 2:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 53 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The point I have made again and again is that it is too easy to bash people because of supposedly low vocabulary
numbers. I've never said that a small vocabulary is better than a bigger one. I do question the measurement methodology but that's not the main issue. For me the real issue is how one uses the vocabulary. I've never worked as a CEFR examiner but I've done a lot of our local university French placements tests. When it comes to the oral proficiency tests, we typically follow a protocol of asking questions to explore various facets of the language. The questions become progressively more complex. At the highest level, of course I see more vocabulary than at the lower levels, but that is not what is really striking. What impresses all the examiners is the perception that the speaker is in control of the language. There is spontaneous fluency and no stumbling. Sentence construction is more complex. The tenses are well mastered. The functional words are used properly. For example, I ask: "What did you do last weekend?" to see how the student can speak about past events. I'm looking for use of the imperfect and the compound past tenses. But French also has the historic present and historic future tenses. If anybody uses those, then I'm really impressed. And maybe the speaker uses the idiom "la grasse matinée" for sleeping in. Wow, now we're cooking. I'm not looking for exotic words. I'm not looking for fancy technical vocabulary. I really don't care if the student does not know how to say clutch in French. I'll even volunteer a technical term myself because everything else is so impressive. It's all about quality over quantity. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 54 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't disagree either. I'm just saying that getting comprehensible input is not always trivial. And the lexical usage is also best picked up through context - even if you use a dictionary, you'll still need the example sentences from it at the very least.
And the grammatical component of usage extends itself to any new words you pick up. For me it's less about "knowing few words well" and more about knowing the grammar well enough to apply it. Of course I'm aware that most languages aren't as regular as Finnish or Esperanto, and for example in the Romance languages you can't add new verbs with the same ease. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 55 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
"knowing a word", in the context of these tests, means understanding the writer's intention if you see it in a post like this one.
That would be writing it in a post like this and not causing the reader problems. So all the words you wrote in your post would seem to be part of your active vocabulary. I'll assume that you know what "crude" means and just disagree with @emk's assessment of the usefulness of the test. As for tests in general, it is difficult to design a test that covers curriculum X, where X is something that is expected to take multiple years to study, but only takes a reasonable time to sit and still eliminates the possibility that a certain grade does not accurately reflect your actual ability. I tried that vocab test and scored 42,700. If I went through all the unknown (to me) vocab and retook the test, I presume I could get back to the ~65,000 that I scored on the last such test only a few months ago. (Assuming that the test doesn't vary the vocab presented ... I've not checked). If you want to use one of these tests as an indication of whether you might be ready to sit a C2 exam, then you'd only be fooling yourself by "gaming" the test. There's much more to C2 ability than just words, which is what I think you are saying,but I'm not quite sure why you frown on the vocab tests themselves. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't subscribe to the statement 'Receptive vocabulary takes care of itself through exposure. You learn words as you encounter them.' I learn most of my words through activities that focus on the words and expressions themselves, and then I use extensive activities to fixate them and broaden my knowledge about the use of each item. But of course it is possible to learn words in more then one way - after all I learnt those African bird names while looking for their owners and trying to put a name on anything with feathers.
I have thought about making a new 'used words' study based on my log thread, which I have in a copy in MS Word. It will however take a fair amount of time to limit the sample to my own messages and then sort everything according to language, make an Excel file with all words in a given language in one column, find unique values and eliminate all derivations and morphological variants and finally publish the result. Actually that was how I did it in 1986 (or 87?), except that I had to copy directly from the homepage back then. As far as I remember the original result turned out to be some 2400 or 2500 words (or rather wordfamilies), whereas my passive vocabulary in English always has been 30.000 words or more according to my dictionary based estimates. But I also know that I could see myself use at least half of the English words I have met during those test sessions - I have just not had a reason to use them here or elsewhere. Edited by Iversen on 09 April 2014 at 4:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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