Vocabulary teaching and testing

Here are some resources for conceptualising, teaching and testing vocabulary. Many of them were recommended, or inspired, by Paul Meara, a world expert on the subject; his comments are preceded by ‘PM’.

• Books:
  • Bauer, Laurie. 1998. Vocabulary. London: Routledge.
    • A brief and very clear introduction for schools by a leading researcher.
  • Aitchison, Jean. 1994. Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Second Edition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
    • A widely acclaimed and accessible popular book about recent developments in scientific research on the ‘mental lexicon’ – how we store and use words in our minds.
  • Diack, Hunter. 1975. Test your own word power. London: Paladin.
    • A popular book based on an academic monograph. PM: “He gives a number of words (ranging from 0-36,000). The figures strike me as quite plausible – slightly larger than the estimates that you will find in the ELT literature, which typically go up to about 20,000.”
  • Dale, E, T Razik & W Petty. 1973. Bibliography of vocabulary studies. 3rd edition. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.
    • PM: “Anyone working in the field is likely to cite this, so you can go to Google Scholar and find the most recent sources.”
  • McKeown, M & M Curtis. 1987. The nature of vocabulary acquisition. Lawrence Erlbaum.
    • PM: “a good summary of the position about 20 years ago. To be honest, things haven’t moved on much since then.”
  • Nation, Paul. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in another Language (second edition). Cambridge University Press.
    • PM: “a really good overview of the whole field. It is L2 focussed, but not exclusively so. Paul has a really good knack of picking out core issues.”
• Journals
  • PM: “For L1 work, the best place to look would be back issues of Reading Research Quarterly. Vocabulary is a major concern in this area, and RRQ has a very good reputation for publishing high quality relevant research. Anything authored by WE Nagy is worth reading”
  • Seashore, R & L Eckerson. 1940. The measurement of individual differences in general English vocabularies. Journal of Educational Psychology 31. 14–38.
    • PM: “S&E come up with a vocabulary size in six figures, and a lot of the later work is concerned with why these estimates are just implausibly large.”
  • Ellegard, A. 1960. Estimating vocabulary size. Word 16. 219–244.
    • PM: “This is a linguist’s eye view on vocabulary.”
    • PM: This and the preceding, Seashore and Eckerson 1940, are the two classic papers.
• Websites for measuring (and reporting) the user’s vocabulary size:
  • Lognostics
    • A website (maintained by Paul Meara) full of digital tools for measuring different aspects of vocabulary.
  • University of Ghent
    • “PM: The tests available on the Ghent site are a spin off from some work I did in the 1970s. They strike me as pretty good. Marc Brysbaert is a solid researcher, and these tools are probably the best of their type. “
    • The user decides whether each of a series of ‘words’ is a real English word or not.
    • The user’s result is an estimated percentage showing how much of the total vocabulary they know.
    • The research results are reported in a very accessible article.
    • Apparently there are significant differences
      • between men and women
      • between people in Britain and America
  • Victoria University of Wellington (NZ)
    • The user selects from four meanings for a series of words, each with an example sentence.
    • The user’s result is an estimated vocabulary size measured in separate word families (e.g. nation, national and nationalize all belong to the same word family). A typical adult native speaker knows 20,000 families.
  • Test your vocab
    • The user sees a long list of words and chooses those for which they know a meaning.
    • The user’s result is an estimated vocabulary size measured in dictionary entries (e.g. nation, national and nationalize would be separate entries). A typical adult native speaker knows 20,000 – 35,000 entries.
• Educational theory
  • PM: “There is a general agreement that you cannot teach large quantities of vocabulary explicitly, so most of the uptake must come from implicit learning, particularly reading. However there is a sort of chicken and egg situation here, where kids with small vocabularies don’t usually read for pleasure, so they don’t read enough to pick up the words they need to be functional. This leads to a large literature on how you can simplify texts so that they are accessible to readers with limited vocabularies.”
  • PM: “Otherwise, the best research on the questions you are asking goes on in Holland, where they seem to have a lot of issues with language for immigrants. The names to look out for here are Rob Schoonen and Marianne Verhallen.”