Evaluating Second Language Vocabulary and Grammar Instruction

A Synthesis of the Research on Teaching Words, Phrases, and Patterns

Frank Boers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367437664
• eBook ISBN: 9781000356786
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Providing a much-needed critical synthesis of research on teaching vocabulary and grammar to students of a second or foreign language, this book puts the research into perspective in order to distil recommendations for language teaching. Boers evaluates a comprehensive range of both well-established and lesser-known research strands and classroom practices to draw out the most effective instructional approaches to teaching words, multiword expressions and grammar patterns. Chapters discuss learning as a by-product of communicative activities, language-focused instruction, diverse types of exercises, mnemonic techniques and more, with a view to building bridges between the available research on such instructional approaches and how they are commonly implemented in actual language courses and textbooks.

This book helps teachers make research-informed decisions regarding their instructional approaches to words, phrases and patterns, and direct researchers to specific areas in need of further inquiry. Boers not only demonstrates how research findings can inform effective teaching, but also calls for a deeper appreciation on the part of researchers of the realities of the teaching profession, making this a worthwhile text for preservice teachers, teacher educators, graduate students and scholars.

PART I

Introduction

1.

The Aim, Scope and Organization of This Book

The Aim of This Book

This book has a two-fold objective. One aim is to help teachers and students aspiring to become teachers of a second or foreign language (henceforth L2) to make informed decisions regarding their instructional approaches to words, phrases and patterns. It does so by evaluating a range of classroom procedures through the lens of published research findings in the discipline of L2 pedagogy. The other aim is to help researchers, including (post)graduate students interested in pedagogy-oriented applied linguistics, to identify topics relevant for vocabulary and grammar instruction which have not yet attracted much empirical inquiry, or which invite alternative methods of inquiry to what researchers have tried so far.

Valuable steps to distil pedagogical recommendations from research findings have of course been taken before, but for a long time authors of books addressing the needs and interests of L2 practitioners had to rely to a considerable degree on descriptive work regarding second language acquisition, which charts L2 development (often in immersion settings) and the factors that influence it. In addition, recommendations for teaching accrued from theories of learning proposed in educational psychology and from laboratory-type experimental work in the field of cognitive psychology rather than experiments conducted with L2 learners in their classroom settings. However, the past few decades have seen a proliferation of empirical classroom-based work on the merits of instructional interventions for (certain facets of) L2 learning. Not only have several new journals devoted to this line of inquiry been founded in recent years (e.g., Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, Instructed Second Language Acquisition, Language Teaching for Young Learners and Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning), but longer-established journals have substantially increased their annual volume (e.g., Language Teaching Research, TESOL Quarterly, System and The Modern Language Journal). The time therefore seems ripe for a review of this growing collection of studies that specifically examines the effectiveness of instructional interventions as a source of information from which recommendations for language teachers may be drawn. At the same time, it will be worth considering this body of research with a questioning attitude, acknowledging the limitations of the studies and pointing to areas in need of further exploration. It is in this regard that this book is intended to be a resource for researchers as well as teachers.

Dealing with Vocabulary and Grammar in One Book?

As the title suggests, this book examines instructional approaches to words, phrases and patterns. Put differently, it encompasses issues of vocabulary and grammar teaching. Readers may wonder if this scope is not too ambitious, and if vocabulary and grammar are not distinct components of language, whose learning and teaching must involve very different mechanisms and thus invite separate treatment. It is indeed not unusual for language learners and teachers to view language as being made up of 2 distinct components—some sort of grammar manual on the one hand and some sort of dictionary on the other (Taylor, 2010). In such a view, the grammar provides a finite and fixed set of sentence templates and a set of “rules” that words should abide by, while the dictionary provides the large repertoire of words to be slotted into the templates in their appropriate form as dictated by the grammar rules. The position taken in the present book, however, is that vocabulary and grammar are inseparable, and that an alternative view to the grammar-plus-dictionary conception of language needs to be adopted.

That vocabulary and grammar cannot be divorced from one another can be illustrated in several ways. One is to consider what knowing a word involves. Knowledge of a word clearly includes more than knowing its (phonological/orthographic) form and its meaning; it also includes its phraseological behaviour (e.g., that make rather than do is the verb that goes with an effort; that decide is followed by to + infinitive rather than an –ing form) and its morpho-syntactic behaviour (e.g., that advice is not pluralized by adding –s; that sneeze is not normally used as a transitive verb—one does not normally say that somebody has sneezed something). Conversely, even though grammar patterns are often labelled rules, mastering these includes knowing what words the given rules apply to and what words (so-called exceptions) they do not apply to. Put differently, the application of grammar rules depends on word characteristics as much as word use depends on grammar rules. Or, as Lewis (1993) put it, instead of viewing language as lexicalized grammar, we could also view it as grammaticalized lexis. Grammar and vocabulary are 2 sides of the same coin.

One could nonetheless argue that mastering grammar patterns involves a greater amount of “system learning” than does mastering vocabulary and that building vocabulary knowledge involves a greater amount of “item learning”. This not a clear-cut distinction, however. For example, vocabulary exhibits patterns of derivational morphology, such as the creation of adjectives by adding the suffix –ful to nouns (e.g., doubtful, playful, stressful). Appreciating the existence of this recurring pattern is clearly a case of system learning, but it is just as much a feature of the lexicon. Learning derivational patterns does not suffice because one needs to learn which words they apply to (e.g., friendly, not friendful; hazardous, not hazardful). System learning involves item learning, and vice versa.

Upholding a clear-cut distinction between vocabulary and grammar is difficult also because a typical grammar book contains sections on so-called function words (also called grammatical or closed-class words): articles (the, a, an), pronouns (she, who, him, mine), auxiliary verbs (have, do, will, may), conjunctions (but, unless, that, while) and so on. As these are obviously words, they are also included in dictionaries, and so recognized also as members of the vocabulary club. It might nonetheless be argued that vocabulary is different from grammar because it is so-called content words (or open-class words), such as nouns and adjectives, that should be considered the more prominent members of the vocabulary club. As suggested by the label content words, these are considered different from grammar patterns and from said function words, because they more clearly convey meaning. According to popular perception, grammar provides structural frames, and it is the words chosen to fill the frames that communicate meaning. However, also this is too simplistic, because many grammatical forms do carry meaning, even though it is often meaning of an abstract nature. For example, the –s ending in books carries meaning (i.e., there is more than one book). The –ed ending in She danced carries meaning (i.e., the dancing happened in the past). The definite article the in Would you like the red one? carries meaning (i.e., there is only one red item among the available options). The word order in the previous example carries meaning (i.e., it indicates a question). Sentence patterns more generally carry meaning. That is why one can try to guess the meaning of the following sentences, even though they contain made-up content words: Helen clackoped the strimpot into the bramster; My wife dibroidered me a strafferick this morning; Shirley sprighted her hair bimbulore. So, while it is undeniable that lexical items stand out as conveyors of meaning, grammar patterns are meaningful, too, even though their meaning will typically be abstract. It is worth noting in this context that also content words display considerable variation in degrees of concreteness or specificity of meaning (e.g., pear has a more concrete meaning than fate; sprint is more specific than run). Many words have both concrete and abstract meanings (e.g., on in on the table vs. on purpose; have in I don’t have a smart phone vs. I haven’t slept well). If vocabulary and grammar were different nations, then many items would have dual citizenship.

There is a long tradition in applied linguistics circles to distinguish between meaning-focused and form-focused instruction (e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998), where the latter refers to a focus on grammar. This terminology is potentially misleading as it disregards the fact that many grammatical forms are meaningful in their own right—if they were not, their existence would probably be pointless. In this book, I will instead distinguish between activities with a primary focus on the communicative content of discourse (or content-focused activities, for short) and activities with a primary focus on the linguistic means to convey content (or language-focused activities, for short), where both broad types can be applied to vocabulary as well as grammar.

Perhaps grammar is different from vocabulary in the sense that it is more rigid, more fixed or more rule-like than vocabulary? When considering the notion of linguistic accuracy, this is indeed often associated with “grammaticality”. A good command of grammar is popularly associated with “correct” use of the language. Such associations, as far as English is concerned, hark back as far as the 18^th century when the first prescriptive grammar manuals were published. One of those early grammarians, Robert Lowth (1762) (quoted in Freeborn, 2006, p. 396), put it as follows:

The principal design of a grammar of any language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety in that language, and to be able to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not. The plain way of doing this, is to lay down rules, and to illustrate them by examples. But besides showing what is right, the matter may be further explained by pointing out what is wrong.

What such a normative conception of grammar ignores is that grammar fulfils communicative functions and is adaptable to fulfil those functions. Like vocabulary, grammar constitutes a set of options available to the user of a given language to package messages. For example, a teenager may prefer to tell his parents that the screen of his new phone got broken (using passive voice) rather than I broke the screen of my new phone (using active voice). It is of course undeniable that one option will often be more conventional than another. For example, the verb mean is more commonly used in simple tenses (e.g., I meant to say that I was sorry) than in progressive ones (e.g., I was meaning to say that I was sorry). Still, it is ultimately the language users themselves who decide how to deploy the available resources of their language to package a message in a way that best fits the intended meaning. For example, it is not so difficult to imagine a context where a speaker is having a hard time trying to express an apology and uttering what I am meaning to say is that I’m sorry (even though old prescriptive grammar manuals may tell learners of English that mean is a verb that is not to be used in this way). These options for deploying grammar to meet communicative needs are not dissimilar from the options available in the lexicon, where lexical choices (e.g., between saying he’s fat vs. he’s chubby) also depend on context and communicative intent. A certain lexical option may seem the default just like a certain grammar pattern may be, but this does not exclude irregularities. For example, it is undoubtedly more conventional to talk about a mug of coffee than a bucket of coffee, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the latter fits a person’s intended meaning—jokingly referring to an unusually large mug.

There is yet another reason why the dictionary-plus-grammar view of language is difficult to maintain. Dictionaries have traditionally (in the case of English at least since the efforts to develop a dictionary by Samuel Johnson in the 18^th century) treated words as the building blocks that make up a language’s lexicon. However, since the 1990s there has been growing recognition that languages ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Author Biography
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: IMPROVING THE CHANCES OF INCIDENTAL ACQUISITION
• PART III: LANGUAGE-FOCUSED LEARNING
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
• Index