BACKGROUND(Vocabulary)

Vocabulary

◈ BACKGROUND

 

▶ RECEPTIVE VERSUS PRODUCTIVE VOCABULARY

■ First, the notion of receptive versus productive vocabulary is very important. Users of any language, including both native and nonnative speakers, have much more receptive than productive vocabulary. English readers may understand many words like adumbrate and anent when they encounter them in a text, yet they may well be unlikely to use these words in their own speech or writing. This is because such readers have receptive but not productive control of these words; productive control implies receptive control, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

 

 

■ There do seem to be ways of teaching large amounts of receptive vocabulary fairly quickly and efficiently by having learners simply associate words with meanings out of context using word lists, vocabulary cards, and so forth. (See Nation, 1990).

 

 

 

■ Such strategies, even if they turn out to be effective for improving receptive knowledge and reading comprehension, are not necessarily effective for teaching productive use of lexis; however, it must be acknowledged that receptive knowledge of vocabulary is a first step toward achieving productive use, i.e., toward learners' becoming skillful speakers and writers in their second languages.

 

 

 

 

■ Lack of productive vocabulary and lack of word-associated grammatical information are, in fact, major factors contributing to the poor writing skills of many university-level ESL students.

 

 

 

 

■ In research related to Holten's observation, Santos (1988) found that subject matter university instructors who were asked to respond to L2 student essays were more annoyed by lexical errors than grammatical errors in the L2 students' writing, indicating that language teachers should take care to evaluate learners' lexical choices in their written work as well as their ability to use lexical items in grammatically appropriate ways, e.g., correct part of speech, correct inflections, correct article or preposition, correct collocation, and the like.