Editorial
The article first appeared in a special issue of the ETAI Forum 2013, celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Lexical Approach.

Targeting Vocabulary Acquisition for JHS – Introducing a Lexical Syllabus

Chemda Benisty, Israel

Chemda Benisty has been an EFL teacher for the past 30 years. She completed her M.Ed. in TEFL at Oranim College of Education. The final paper for which she compiled the lexical syllabus was inspired by courses taken in the program especially with Dr. Elisheva Barkon who also supervised the writing of the paper. E-mail: ori_bori@hotmail.com

In the early 1990s' the Lexical Approach challenged the traditional view that language divides into grammar and vocabulary. Instead, it identified vocabulary as the basis of language, both for comprehension and production (Lewis, 1993). Lewis was not alone in his claim for the centrality of vocabulary in language acquisition. Researchers like Laufer (2003), Nation, (2001) and Schmitt, (2008), among many others, realized how crucial vocabulary is for the functioning of the four skills of the language: listening, speaking, reading and writing – much more than grammar. In fact, these researchers argue that the teaching of useful vocabulary should be considered a primary goal in language acquisition.

In addition, advances in information technology have facilitated the development of various linguistic corpora which include the use of a large, representative database of natural spoken and written texts, and the employment of computer-tools to quantitatively analyze this natural language (O'Keeffe et al., 2007). Sinclair was the first to propose the utilization of computational analysis for TEFL, and Willis (1990) pioneered the utility of frequency-based wordlists in the design of what was later known as the first Lexical Syllabus.

The strongest argument in favor of this syllabus focused on the centrality of the most frequent words in natural language (Willis, 1990). An observation of the frequency of these words in a large corpus of English revealed a picture where the first approximately 2,000 word-forms accounted for more than 80% of all the words in spoken and written texts, and each consecutive band of 2,000 words covered a progressively smaller proportion (Nation, 2001). This empiric categorization has made researchers, such as Nation (2001), Schmitt (2008), and Willis (1990), reach the conclusion that this group of 2,000 most frequently used words has an enormous power and should, therefore, comprise the most important vocabulary learning goal. They claim that these words deserve all kinds of attention so that they are well learned as quickly as possible. Though frequency cannot be the sole criterion in designing a syllabus, the idea of using corpora to specify which lexis to include in a syllabus clearly emerged as a result of this first lexical syllabus (Lewis, 1993).

In the context of teaching English as a foreign language in Israel, despite wide recognition of the value of lexis, in practice there is no clear instruction which lexis should be taught at each grade level. In 2001, the Ministry of Education published The Israeli English Curriculum for All Grades, which does not incorporate a lexical syllabus. Unlike its predecessor, this syllabus does not include a list of specific lexical items to be taught in every grade level. Vocabulary is not defined in it as a domain, but rather as a means of assessing students' progress in each of the four language domains outlined in it. Consequently, each teacher or school can decide which vocabulary and how much of it to teach in each grade level. In this case, teachers tend to rely on textbooks for their choice of vocabulary and on the activities suggested in them for its mastery. Although publications must be approved by the Ministry of Education, not all implement the insights on vocabulary presented in professional literature. Thus, the consequences of no lexical syllabus are evident in a lack of uniformity and emphasis on vocabulary which has, in turn, been marginalized in favor of a focus on grammatical structures (Willis, 1990).

In light of the research on the importance of vocabulary acquisition, a lexical syllabus is a crucial component of any foreign language curriculum. It itemizes what vocabulary is needed for a specified purpose in the form of decontextualized lists of words and patterns of the language, initially categorized by criterion of utility – namely frequency and range. These lists rely on evidence from computational linguistics and discourse analysis (O'Keeffe et al., 2007). Though a syllabus' primary goal is to define the content and sequence of a program, a lexical syllabus also encourages the use of communicative methodology to exemplify the target vocabulary, which also helps learners make productive generalizations about natural language, including its grammar (Willis, 1990).

As part of my M.Ed. studies in TEFL at Oranim College of Education, I compiled a lexical syllabus which was inspired by courses taken in the program especially with Dr. Elisheva Barkon who also supervised the process. This lexical syllabus is an experimental supplement for Israeli intermediate schools designed to complement the current Israeli English Curriculum (2001) which, until writing these lines, still does not include such a syllabus. The suggested syllabus is designed to help junior high school teachers facilitate vocabulary acquisition by setting goals for its acquisition and addressing methodological aspects enhancing its use.

Research advocates setting numerical goals for vocabulary acquisition only after analyzing students' needs. To that end, vocabulary tests were administered to ninth grade students in A and B level classes at a typical school serving a middle-class population in the northern area. The tests were meant to assess vocabulary size and dimensions of knowledge- receptive knowledge and one aspect of productive knowledge. The results indicated that students in the A stream scored 80% on knowledge of the first 1,000 most frequent words but only 56% on the second 1,000 most frequent words. Students in the B stream scored 53% for the first 1,000 most frequent words and only 20% for the second 1,000 most frequent words.These results clearly highlighted the pressing need to focus on the minimum of the 2,000 most frequently used word families which professional literature describes as essential for all learners and, therefore, must be well learned as quickly as possible. These tests also confirmed the assertion that the vocabulary component of language instruction must take into consideration the importance of the productive aspects of the target vocabulary in addition to its size, and this is especially true for the first 2000 most commonly used words in the language. Even though it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the two correlate and that active vocabulary increases with vocabulary growth, productive aspects of vocabulary must be explicitly aimed at to enable fluency (Laufer & Paribakht, 1998; Nation, 2001).

As stated above, frequency cannot be the sole criterion in designing a syllabus. Although researchers like Koprowski (2005) and Nation (2001) amongst many others agree that utility is the most basic criterion for vocabulary selection for a course, they also call for a cautious and logical use of information provided by various corpora. Sometimes the boundary between high-and low-frequency words can be an arbitrary one (Nation, 2001). In many cases, a lexical item which is categorized into one of the first 2,000 high-frequency word family lists of a certain corpus can be located in the low-frequency list of another. Therefore, researchers point out other criteria that must be considered other than frequency and range when designing a lexical syllabus for a certain purpose.

There are a number of other criteria, presented below, to be taken into consideration when designing a lexical syllabus. Willis (1990) and Schmitt (2008) advocate the importance of the lexis particularly useful in classroom management, and the selection of vocabulary that students want to learn to motivate their learning. They also point out the importance of taking into account the students' environment and culture in selecting vocabulary for instruction. This takes expression in words pertaining to the social, political and religious context of the specific country, which, while they do not appear on the first and the second frequency lists, must be considered to enable the students' functional and meaningful use of the language.

Lastly, teachers must take into account Laufer's (1990) finding that words differ in the level of difficulty involved in their learning. This difficulty can be determined both by intralexical features stemming from features in the words themselves (phonological, morphological and semantic) and interlexical features, namely the interaction between the new words and other words familiar to the learners in their native language or the foreign language. Nation (2001) maintains that the specialized vocabulary emerging from the application of all these criteria should be treated with the same importance as the high-frequency vocabulary.

Thus, in addition to frequency, three other criteria were used in compiling the suggested lexical syllabus: (1) usefulness for teaching English as a foreign language (2) relevance to the learners' world, and (3) learning burden – a term introduced in Nation (2001) - which refers to the amount of time and effort required to learn the various aspects of a lexical item, implying that knowing a word means much more than learning its meaning and sound. The underlying principle for the learning burden suggests that the more the learners know about the item, from diverse sources like their mother tongue, previous knowledge in the target language or any other language, the less the burden of learning.

The starting point in compiling the complementary lexical syllabus was the list of first- and second- thousand high-frequency words. The West's General Service List was adopted as a recommended linguistic reservoir, as the words in it assured the most reasonable coverage in any usage, both spoken and written (Nation, 2001; O'Keeffe et al., 2007; Schmitt, 2008). All inflections of verbs, adjectives and nouns were excluded from the lists. This decision is supported by the fact that learners in the JHS are assumed to have acquired some basic understanding of the inflectional system of the English language, especially in the case of the singular and plural forms of nouns and the existence of different verb forms. Function and content words that learners are expected to have mastered by the JHS stage were also excluded from the lists. In addition, irrelevant items for learners in the context of TEFL in Israeli schools were removed from the lists and replaced by others considered relevant according to the three other selection criteria listed above.

In line with the perspective that vocabulary growth is incremental in nature and that depth of vocabulary knowledge is as important as vocabulary size (Schmitt, 2008), the remaining items in the vocabulary lists were massively extended to provide such depth. Using both the Oxford Student's Dictionary and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English, different common chunks essential for basic communication and fluency were manually identified and added to most of the head words, incorporating all criteria identified in the literature as essential for designing a lexical syllabus. It should be noted that despite the advances computer software has made and the developments in corpus linguistics over the years, computers still do not recognize idioms or collocations. At present, computers can generate massive lists of recurring strings of words based on their frequency of occurrence which in many cases lack semantic or syntactic integrity (O'Keeffe et al., 2007). The lists of chunks that do display integrity can be compared to the manual lists as described below. When software improves its linguistic applications, this complementary lexical syllabus can be further changed and adapted.

The outcome is a syllabus comprised of two vocabulary lists for two consecutive stages in junior high school: the first stage estimated to end roughly by the middle of the eighth grade and the second, at the end of ninth grade. The syllabus is presented in American English as it is assumed to be more common in Israel; learners should, however, be informed that some words are spelled differently in British English. These words are often given in parentheses next to the American spelling to help develop this awareness. The basic unit of counting used in this lexical syllabus is the word family, with the exception of chunks that cannot be found in any other category. Headwords are alphabetized and bolded to enable effortless access, other parts of speech are underlined to ensure their recognition. Different senses of the same part of speech are distinguished by the use of lower case letters in brackets and short definitions are provided for further explanations. Collocational information is usually entered with all other parts of speech the item naturally combines while gearing towards the most common choice of collocations and expressions learners in the JHS level can cope with. In regard to collocations, it is important to note that due to time limitations, not all the collocational information for each of the lexical items can be explicitly taught. Yet, when aiming at developing the productive aspect of learners' knowledge, basic collocations are among the crucial factors, contributing to this development. The complete syllabus appears on a disc as this format was considered most appropriate in light of the length of the lists and the wish to encourage adaptability and changes required by its users.

The methodological aspects proposed for the lexical syllabus are designed to facilitate the productive utilization of the selected vocabulary. They highlight the importance of teaching vocabulary not only for passive use in listening and reading, but also for active use in speaking and writing. The focus on this dimension relies on both research and the needs analysis conducted prior to the planning of this syllabus which indicate that the transition between the two cannot be taken for granted and that specific methodology should be applied to promote productive language usage.

Multi-word lexical items or "chunks," are recognized in the literature on corpus linguistics and by proponents of the Lexical Approach as a key factor contributing to successful language acquisition, especially its productive aspects. Corpus linguistics provides the statistical basis for the claim of chunk density in both oral and written language, while the Lexical Approach advocates describe the important contribution of chunks to the production of language, maintaining that this should lead to a paradigm shift in the way language instruction is perceived. Both approaches underscore the importance of deliberate instruction of functional, everyday lexical phrases, especially collocations and expressions, for the development of language use at any level (Koprowski, 2005, Nation 2001, Schmitt, 2008).

The importance of analyzing students' needs before applying any lexical syllabus strongly emerges from the process of the planning and designing of this syllabus. The syllabus was designed based on the needs of students in a specific school, and, therefore, will require many revisions when adapted to other schools. Furthermore, in the future, an evaluation, another most important component of any curriculum, must be carried out to assess the efficacy of the experimental lexical syllabus. This is particularly important in light of the fact that this syllabus focuses on phrasal vocabulary and not only on isolated words as has been the case so far. Teachers are strongly encouraged to contribute their insightful comments and suggestions.

References

Koprowski, M. (2005). Investigating the usefulness of lexical phrases in contemporary coursebooks. ELT Journal, 59(4), 322-332.

Laufer, B. (2003). Vocabulary Acquisition in a Second Language: Do Learners Really Acquire Most Vocabulary by Reading? Some Empirical Evidence. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 59(4), 567-587.

Laufer, B. (1990). Why are some words more difficult than others? Some intralexical factors that affect the learning of words. International Review of Applied Linguistics 28, 293-307.

Laufer, B. & Paribakht, T.S. (1998). The relationship between passive and active vocabularies: effects of language learning context. Language Learning 48, 365-391.

Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.

O'Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. & Carter, R. (2007). From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Schmitt, N. (2008). Review article: Instructed second language vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research 12(3), 329-363.

Willis, D. (1990). The lexical syllabus: A new approach to language teaching. London: Collins.

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