Introduction

Vocabulary is the fundamental constructing bricks of a language, key to all the four language skills — reading, listening, writing and speaking (Richards and Renandya 2002). Wilkins (1976) comments that without vocabulary, we can communicate nothing. However, vocabulary is not sufficiently emphasised in many contexts. This essay explores the major issues in terms of second language vocabulary learning, and the implications in teaching beginner secondary school Chinese learners of English. In the Literature Review, I will discuss the definition of vocabulary and word mastery before digging deep into the difference between receptive and productive knowledge, and the distinction between vocabulary size and depth. The next section is a detailed discussion in light of my specific teaching context, from word selection and sequencing to the choice of teaching strategies, teaching practice in class and an extracurricular supplemental learning practice. In both sections, details and research data will be given to the necessary degree. In the end, a conclusion will be drawn to inform teaching in my context.

Literature Review

What Is Vocabulary?

Among studies testing vocabulary size (such as Imma and Carmen 2018), a word family (closely related word forms) is conventionally counted as a vocabulary unit. However, vocabulary entails more than that. It could also mean the combination of lemmas (words ‘consisting of the stem form and inflected forms with the same part of speech’) and word groups (words that are usually used together, including idioms and collocations, etc.) (Nation and Meara 2020: 35).

In this essay, ‘vocabulary’ is equivalent to lexical items, but it will be used sometimes synonymously with ‘words’. In a stricter sense, they can be distinguished based on the specific context.

What is it to know a word?

The meaning of knowing a word seems, at first glance, that once you understand the meaning of the specific word, you know it. However, this is an oversimplification. Even though basic word meanings were used as the main measurement for vocabulary acquisition in many studies, they are far removed from its formal aspects (de la Fuente 2006). This denotes a discrepancy between knowing the meaning of a word and knowing a word.

A general definition of what is to know a word is to know its ‘form, meaning and use’ (Nation 2001: 26). Nation (2001) has given the informative table of subcategories concerning knowing a word (see table 1). This table is rather comprehensive, made up of nine aspects in total. However, these aspects of a word are not entirely independent of each other. A study (Zhong 2018) featuring 628 Chinese secondary school students in year eight doing controlled writing tasks suggested that at least some major aspects (meaning and form, word class, collocation and association), if not all, are positively interrelated, and the positive or negative change in one aspect would trigger corresponding change in other aspects. In this study, statistics also showed that ‘meaning and form explained 74.1% variance in controlled productive use of a word in writing sentences’ (Zhong 2018: 366). This explains why ‘most vocabulary tests focus, directly or indirectly, on this link’ (Laufer and Goldstein 2004: 402).

Hence, I argue that at the most basic level, knowing a word means to know its form-meaning link and the more aspects you know, the better you know the word.

Receptive and Productive Knowledge

There is one intriguing feature in Nation’s table: the distinction between receptive and productive knowledge. Simply put, receptive knowledge is used for language comprehension (recognising knowledge) while productive knowledge is for language production (recalling knowledge) (González-Fernández and Schmitt 2017; Nation 2001). For example, with respect to the written form of a word, the receptive knowledge is to recognise the written form, whereas the productive knowledge is to recall the exact letters of the word. This recognition knowledge is significantly different from recall knowledge (González-Fernández and Schmitt 2020). However, this distinction may not be clear-cut. De la Fuente (2006) believes that the receptive-productive difference is a cline. This seems to be supported by Webb’s study (2008: 85), where the figure in the partial knowledge test is higher than that in the fuller knowledge test, indicating that ‘the participants might have partial productive knowledge of forms for all of the words known receptively’.

From the above example, we can infer that having the receptive and productive knowledge can both be counted as knowing a word. Nevertheless, the degree of knowing the word is different. Melka (1997) argued that productive knowledge is superior to, and is acquired after its counterpart. Schmitt (2014) also believed that productive knowledge is more advanced for the reason that productive mastery requires more vocabulary components and they are more time-consuming to master in various contexts. A L2 learner who only knows the receptive knowledge of some word can hardly recall the form according to its meaning in L2 production unless they have acquired the productive knowledge.

Vocabulary Size and Depth

When we talk about receptive vocabulary, we usually mean the lexical items we can identify when they are given. The total number of such lexical items is often generally regarded as vocabulary size, and how well we know them is seen as vocabulary depth (Schmitt 2014). Schmitt further justifies this distinction by listing examples where learners have large vocabulary size but have very limited knowledge about their vocabulary or the reverse.

From the specification above, it may appear that vocabulary size is equivalent to the quantity of receptive lexical items. However, it is a misconception. We have drawn the line between receptive and productive vocabulary in the last section and a likewise distinction should be made between receptive and productive vocabulary size accordingly. Hence, receptive vocabulary size relates to how many lexical items a person can recognise and productive vocabulary size relates to how many lexical items a person can recall and use in language production. Research (Webb 2008) demonstrates that this distinction is true and necessary, and that L2 learners’ total amount of productive vocabulary is smaller than receptive vocabulary (the ratio of them is 93% and 77% in partial and fuller knowledge scoring respectively), and that the discrepancy expands as word frequency declines (three frequency bands ranging from 701st to 6,600th).

In addition, vocabulary size (receptive in this context) could be a powerful predicting factor of language proficiency, as a study (Miralpeix and Muñoz 2018) suggests that vocabulary size can significantly account for overall language proficiency (r = 0.618 p<.001 in Pearson correlation test, adjusted R square = 0.366 in standard regression analysis), despite a decreasing explaining power in advanced learners with large vocabulary sizes (the approximate equation is ‘EFL Proficiency = 2.299 + .00073*vocabulary size’).

Vocabulary depth, on the other hand, is more elusive. The table 1 given by Nation (2001) suggests that vocabulary depth is an incremental process. In order for vocabulary depth to develop, other kinds of word knowledge other than the form-meaning link should be acquired and its mastery demands many exposures in various contexts (Schmitt 2008).

However, in spite of the difference, vocabulary size and depth are not completely independent measurements. They have a positive correlation, not least in intermediate and low level L2 learners (Enayat and Amirian 2020) (r = .510, p < .001 in lower-intermediate, r = .399, p < .01 in upper-intermediate and r = .345, p > .05 in advanced learners). This denotes that vocabulary size and depth can be seen as an organic integration whereby they grow together.

What Vocabulary to Teach

It is inevitable that vocabulary must be selected for students to learn. However, the selection must not be arbitrary. Rather, it should be approached based on rigorous principles. Nation and Meara (2020: 37) pointed out that there should be two considerations, namely ‘the needs of the learners and the usefulness of the vocabulary items. It was further mentioned that the traditional approach was to use the frequency and range to represent their usefulness. In fact, such principles are not new. Nation and Newton (1997: 238) had already explicitly written that ‘the most frequent 2,000 headwords account for at least 85% of the words on any page of any book no matter what subject matter’. Hence, they believed learning the most frequent words would be most rewarding. Thus, for an ESL or EFL teacher, it would be sensible to teach the most frequent vocabulary first before approaching low-frequency vocabulary and teach other vocabulary according to the learners’ needs. It is here that I end my general review of the literature before heading to the context related discussion.

Discussion

In this section, I will discuss the most effective teaching strategies in light of my specific context in which all students (13-14-year-old) are in secondary school seventh grade, at a beginner level of English with a vocabulary size of around 1000 words, equivalent to CEFR A1. As a teacher in a private teaching company, I will teach them one lesson lasting for one hour each day on weekends. The goal of teaching vocabulary is to enable them to develop comprehensive vocabulary.

Word Selection and Sequence

The first task is to select an appropriate list of vocabulary. According to the importance of word frequency above (Nation and Newton 1997; Nation and Meara 2020), I should teach my students the most frequent words first. With access to corpus like British National Corpus, a list of words in the frequency range between 1200 to 2000 would take form. The vocabulary should incorporate commonly-used word groups or collocations, as these can add to overall L2 proficiency (Nation 2001). This is a simplified and less sensitive approach in choosing the list, because my students’ vocabulary is unlikely to be exactly the most frequent 1200 words. However, it is quite time-efficient at the cost of a little precision.

Subsequently, I should group and order the words for a set of lessons. However, this should not be an arbitrary process. I should design a ‘lexical syllabus’ as specified by Long (2015: 210) as this course’ major focus is vocabulary, and I should steer clear of one imperceptive pitfall — words that are alike phonologically, orthographically or semantically should not be taught simultaneously or around the same time as this would give rise to confusion and more difficulty (Folse 2012).

Meanwhile, to make sense of the set of words within each lesson, the grouping should be done in such a way that they can be matched with authentic English texts, or allow for the formation of logical passages. This provides my students with contexts, which are conducive to incidental learning (form-meaning recognition and recall) according to Godfroid et al’s eye-movement-technology-based study (2018).

Vocabulary Teaching Approach

What is a good vocabulary learning strategy? Involving 160 ninth-graders (similar age to my students), Rodríguez and Sadowki’s study (2000) investigated the effects of four vocabulary learning methods — rote rehearsal, keyword, context, context/keyword. Results showed that the context/keyword method was 1.5 to 4 times as good as the other methods in delayed vocabulary recall, with rote rehearsal being the least effective.

Although retrieval theory (Folse 2006) can give rote rehearsal some credits in the effectiveness of receptive vocabulary acquisition, it needs nothing but basic logic to dismiss this rote memorisation method as ineffective in productive vocabulary acquisition or vocabulary depth development. Hence, I should promote the more effective context/keyword method, instead of pure mechanical rote memorization.

Another issue is to justify the importance of teaching activities. Research based on 50 Chinese high school students (Min 2008) has corroborated that vocabulary-enhancement activities (such as matching and fill-in-the-blank exercises) have better acquisition and retention than incidental learning from reading. Moreover, Mohd Tahir’s study (2020) involving 60 Malaysian Form Two students (equivalent to seventh grade in China) has proven that explicit teaching to students is considerably better than them learning implicitly (the total improvement scores are 131.1% and 42.1% respectively). This high effectiveness underpins the role of explicit teaching activities and gives credit to intentional teaching in class.

In respect to actual vocabulary teaching, communicative vocabulary teaching (CLT) has proven to be effective. Hall’s study (1992) involved 11–13-year-old students instructed to engage in split information interactive activities. The discovery is that these interactive activities have better vocabulary learning effects than traditional teacher-centered reading tasks. Further up in this interactive direction, a study in Turkey (Halici Page and Mede 2018) has indicated that a Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) approach could generate statistically significant improvements with ‘pretest value scores (M = 16.91, SE = 0.44, SD = 2.09) and posttest (M = 17.44, SE = 0.42, SD = 2.02)’.

So far, I can establish the TBLT approach in my specific context, with vocabulary-focused learning elements, such as the context/keyword method and vocabulary focused activities.

Teaching in Class

Since I have established the glossary, the teaching materials, the auxiliary vocabulary learning method and teaching approach, it is time I conducted the teaching in class corresponding to the discussed literature findings. To begin with, I would encourage students to use a notebook, as the empirical evidence has proven its positive relation with vocabulary acquisition (Walters and Bozkurt 2009). At the start of actual teaching, in order to make targeted vocabulary more salient, I should write down the words on the blackboard and ask the students to guess their meanings, so that every student can notice them, enhancing vocabulary acquisition in the later stage. This is in accordance with the noticing hypothesis put forward by Schmidt (2001) which identifies conscious noticing of learning goals (target words in this context) as a prerequisite for effective learning. Reading should be the next stage, where students can access the marked words in the context to check if their understanding is correct for the first time. Afterwards, I will initiate a discussion regarding the meaning of words among my students before I explain all of the words. Then, I would help them use the context/keyword method to link target words to a familiar concept, word or mental image based on meaning.

During the actual teaching, I would use a TBLT approach specified by the four principles set up by Ellis (2003) — meaning-focused, gap, students’ own resources and a defined outcome. Teaching activities can entail role plays (for example, in a transactional task dealing with telephone complaints) where students act as the characters in the teaching material after being given time to prepare, pair work or group work where each pair or group of students engage in a cooperative task (for example, each pair or group try to paint a whole map with each one holding one piece of treasure hunt map), simplified debates where usually two teams defend their own stances, etc. Undoubtedly, these tasks should have built-in vocabulary focus. For instance, debates can be conducted with winning points for the productive use of the target words. Exercises should also be incorporated both in class and outside class, ranging from word-definition matching to cloze exercises and to writing.

In teaching or learning, one feature has a prominent effect on the vocabulary retention of learners, and that is the retrieval of words. Based on a study on 156 American university students with varied English proficiency in an intensive English course, Folse (2006) has observed the outstanding value of retrievals by finding that the retention rates of students doing three fill-in-the-blank exercises (2) were significantly higher (p < .0001 in one-way repeated measures ANOVA) than those doing one such exercise (1) and those mechanically copying the words (3)  (effect size between 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 2 and 3 are 1.01, 0.09, 0.91). Applying this, I should consciously promote retrievals both in class such as applying a retrievals-based pre-class test and outside of class such as initiating a review of retrievals-based vocabulary flashcards in an application like Anki.

Supplement to Class Teaching

Although explicit teaching leads to better vocabulary acquisition than implicit learning, explicit teaching time is limited owing to my teaching occurring merely on weekends. That is how extracurricular English input fits into the overall learning of my students. To maximise the learning effect, reading, rather than listening, should be favoured. A study (Vidal 2011) probing whether reading is better than listening regarding learning vocabulary, demonstrates that ‘the reading subjects made greater vocabulary gains than the listening subjects’ (Vidal 2011: 219) (the former nearly tripled the latter in a TOFEL-score-457 group) and this disparity is negatively correlated with students’ proficiency levels. This study justifies my judgement, but still leaves some key questions unanswered (i.e., what reading materials should I choose? What skills should I teach my students to enable them to get by with extracurricular reading?).

In regard to reading materials, the smallest get-by vocabulary size an English learner should have which has 95% written coverage of British National Corpus is 4,000 (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski 2010). This appears to suggest that English learners with a much smaller vocabulary size cannot get by. However, this is not true. My students can still do well if they read graded readers that match their English levels. Nation and Meara (2020) recommend graded readers in that they can contribute to the vocabulary learning of, notably, intermediate and elementary learners, thus fitting well into my context. To boost the effectiveness of vocabulary learning in extracurricular reading, I would also need to teach my students some useful strategies, such as guessing from the context and using a dictionary (Thornbury 2002). All of this should make up a good supplemental approach.

Conclusion

Within this essay I have attempted to include the major issues that are key to teaching vocabulary in my context. At this point, I will draw a conclusion of my findings. Firstly, vocabulary depth or productive knowledge should be developed in addition to vocabulary size and receptive knowledge. Secondly, word selection should be frequency-based, and be divided into small units where chosen words can be embedded in contexts and do not cause confusion. Thirdly, teachers should apply context/keyword strategy and an interactive teaching approach (CLT or TBLT). Fourthly, teachers should attach great importance to the retrieval of words, encouraging students to be aware of target vocabulary and to keep a notebook as a learning tool. Lastly, teachers should launch a supplementary reading plan thereby students can access graded reading materials to promote incidental vocabulary learning. To comment, these teaching strategies are not exhaustive regarding effective vocabulary teaching in light of my context and it leaves good space for improvement in future research.

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