Building up a useful vocabulary is central to the learning if a foreign language at primary level. Children can learn foreign language words clearly by participating in the discourse of the classroom activities. The interaction of vocabulary and grammar in language learning will be taken further in the next chapter.
The chapter begins with an overview of vocabulary development. Children are still building up their first language vocabulary, and this development is tied up with conceptual development. In planning and teaching a foreign language, we need to take account of this first language background to know what will work and what may be too difficult for children. It also becomes quickly apparent that learning a new word is not a simple task that is done once and then completed.
Vocabulary development in children’s language learning
The word as unit
Vocabulary development is about learning words, but it is about much more than that. Vocabulary development is also about learning more about those words, and about learning formulaic phrase or chunks, finding words inside them and learning even more about those words. Children will ask what a particular word means, or how to say a words in the foreign language, and in learning to read the word is a key unit building up skills and knowledge. The role of words as language units begins with the early use of nouns for naming object in first language acquisition, and of use other words to express the child’s wants and needs e.g. “more!’ or ‘ no’ infants go through a period of rapid vocabulary growth as the starts to name, as well as interact with, the words around them.
Remember! The acquisition of word meanings takes much longer than the acquisition of the spoken form of the words, and children use words in their speech long before they have a full understanding of them. ( Lock 1993) we can think of words as rather like flowers growing in the soil. Vocabulary is development is about words, but that learning words is not something that is done and finished with. Learning words is a cyclical! Process of meeting new words and initial learning, followed by meeting those words again and again, each time extending knowledge of what the words mean and how they are used in the foreign language
Vocabulary size
Vocabulary size is usually measured to the nearest thousand, and count ‘ words families’, in which a base word and all its infected forms and derived forms counts as one e.g. the words family is the base form walk plus walking, walked, walks, a walk the English language is said to contain around54.000 (54K)words family. When these are counted in a large dictionary (Nation and Waring 19997). No one knows all the words in the language.
What it means to know a word.
Many types of knowledge covered in ‘knowing a word’ consider the following classroom extact, in which a native speaker teacher is talking with a second language learner of English about the equipment needed to draw a pie chart (a circular graph that shows proportions like a pie or cake cut into slice).
Developing meanings in childhood
Conceptual knowledge grows as children experience more and more of the world in their daily lives. As children depend on their word knowledge, they increase both syntagmatic and paradigmatic knowledge, but also shift over the years of childhood towards more emphasis on the paradigmatic and the abstract. Because these developments occur deep in a child’s mind, they will be applicable to foreign language learning too, in that children will increasingly be able to handle paradigmatic aspects of word meaning, and words with less concrete meanings.
By Armin Ade
