Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 3.2 Frequency of words
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Frequency is usually established nowadays from a large corpus of a
language, such as the BNC for English.
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Words vary extremely in how often they are used.
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Frequency is only one factor in the choice of words to teach.
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What do you know about a word like ‘man’ if you speak English?
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When you teach students the meaning of a word, what do you mean by
‘meaning’ and how do you teach it?
Focusing questions
3.2 Knowledge of words

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Most people assume that knowing a word is a matter of knowing that ‘plane’ in
English means 
or that the English word ‘plane’ means the same as ‘l’aereo’ in
Italian. Learning vocabulary means acquiring long lists of words with their mean-
ings, whether through some direct link or via translation into the first language.
Coursebooks often have vocabulary lists that organize the words in the course
alphabetically, sometimes with brief translations. The Italian coursebook Ci Siamo
(Guarnuccio and Guarnuccio, 1997) indeed lists ‘l’aereo plane’.
However, a word in the Lang
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sense of language as knowledge in the mind is
more than its meaning. Let us illustrate some aspects of vocabulary by using the
word ‘man’. What does any person who knows English know about ‘man’?
Forms of the word
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Pronunciation. We know how to pronounce ‘man’ as /
mn/. Each word is asso-
ciated in our memory with a specific pronunciation and is tied in to the pronun-
ciation rules of the language; for instance, ‘man’ is pronounced /
mɘn/ in
compounds such as ‘chairman’.
●
Spelling. If we can read, we know that the word is spelled as 
man. Words
have specific spellings and are linked to the spelling rules of the language. The
letter
n in man, for example, needs to be doubled when followed by 
-ing: ‘Overmanning is a real problem in the car industry’.