APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
Vocabulary
Selecting Vocabulary
While teachers select vocabulary to teach they generally take two factors into consideration. The first one is frequency – how frequently the word is used by native speakers. Nowadays computers are used to determine how frequently a word is used. Words which are used more often are taught first but this is not a direct order. There is, for example, a word ‘way’ which is the fifth commonest word in English, but we do not teach it fifth. The second important criterion we have to take into consideration while selecting vocabulary is coverage. By coverage we mean how many things are covered with a given word. A word is more useful if it covers a lot of things than if it has only one specific meaning. For example, the word book occurs in a lot of compounds such as ‘notebook’, ‘textbook’, ‘bookcase’, ‘bookshelf’, ‘bookkeeping’, etc. Authors of course books select vocabulary items on the basis of these principles. If teachers teach extra vocabulary, they take other criteria into consideration. These criteria are the following:
- if the word is useful to them,
- if it fits into certain groups of words, topics that they teach,
- if it can be used with the structures, functions the students already know (e.g. reporting verbs must be presented before reported speech is taught).
