Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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wh-questions: many languages make a difference between questions that demand
a yes or no answer ‘Can you drive a lorry?’ and questions that are open-ended ‘What
can you drive?’; the latter are called question word questions, or wh-questions, in
English because question-words mostly happen to start with ‘wh’, such as ‘when’
and ‘who’
word order: for many languages the order of the main elements in the sentence
is crucial, whether subject (S) verb (V) object (O), as in English, SOV in Japanese,
VSO in Arabic, or whatever; other word order variations are whether the language
has prepositions ‘in New Orleans’ or postpositions ‘Nippon ni’ (Japan in) and
whether questions or subordinate clauses have distinctive word orders.
Some grammatical terms 45

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3
Learning and teaching
vocabulary
The acquisition of vocabulary at first sight seems straightforward; we all know you
need a large number of words to speak a language. Just how many is anybody’s
guess: one estimate claims 20,000 word ‘families’, that is, counting related words
as one word – ‘teacher’ / ‘teaches’ / ‘teaching’/ ‘taught’, and so on.
But there is far more to acquiring vocabulary than the acquisition of words.
Since the late 1980s there has been a massive explosion in research into the acqui-
sition of vocabulary, seen in books such as Nation (2001). However, much of it is
concerned with the acquisition of isolated words in laboratory experiments and is
tested by whether people remember them, not whether they can use them. While
such research gives some hints, much of it has little to say about how we can teach
people to use a second language vocabulary.
3.1 Word frequency
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What do you think are the ten most frequent words in English? Would you
teach them all to beginners?
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Why do you think frequency is important?