Focus on vocabulary (review)

Paul Nation is the foremost authority on the teaching and learning of second language vocabulary. This book, co-authored with his colleague Peter Gu, is his latest effort at disseminating research-based pedagogical advice, following Teaching and learning vocabulary (1990) and Learning vocabulary in another language (2001). It appears in the NCELTR 'Focus on . . .' series, which is aimed at practising and trainee ESL/EFL and literacy teachers. The series positions Focus on vocabulary as a basic introduction to pedagogical vocabulary issues. It sets out to cover three main areas: identifying the vocabulary that learners need, ideas for teaching and learning vocabulary, and the assessment of vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces four categories of vocabulary – high frequency, academic, technical, and low frequency – and provides examples of each in both general and school texts. Chapter 2 introduces a sample of computerized tools for teachers to select appropriate vocabulary for in-class teaching. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 introduce a variety of ways for including vocabulary in lessons, with the latter two chapters specifically focusing on the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Chapter 6 provides an in-depth discussion of the importance of developing learner strategies for independent vocabulary learning. Chapter 7 familiarizes teachers with a variety of methods for measuring the vocabulary size of learners. Chapter 8 wraps up with answers to a set of frequently asked questions.

The book provides much useful background on the nature of vocabulary learning and guidance for teaching, including a range of interesting sample activities. However, it also has a number of limitations common to books of this type. The authors attempt the difficult, if not impossible, job of trying to speak to several distinct audiences in one slim volume. While I was pleased to see a book that addresses subject teachers with L2 learners in their classes and teachers in countries where schools offer an English-medium curriculum, as I read I found a continual shift in audience focus as some chapters assumed the background knowledge and experience of a trained ESL or EFL teacher.

Another limitation is the discussion of vocabulary size requirements. Vocabulary size targets are essential because they indicate the number of lexical items necessary to function in English, and the authors take time to explain these targets and how they are derived. The problem arises from a lack of consistency in the unit of counting. The discussion alternates between words and word families, and it is often unclear which of these is being referred to. In addition, the targets themselves shift throughout the book, from 5,000–6,000 for unsimplified reading texts or undergraduate study (pp. 4, 33) to 8,000–9,000 for newspapers, novels, and academic texts (p. 44), and to 10,000 for academic texts (p. 100), with a supporting example showing that 9,000 words are needed to read an introductory economics text (p. 103).

The biggest limitation, however, is one I believe no vocabulary specialist has yet successfully addressed. The authors both give sound advice in dealing with the most frequent few thousand words and promote the use of independent strategies to handle low frequency vocabulary. The problem lies in the gap between these two frequency extremes, the 3,000–10,000 frequency range. Previously, it was thought that around 2,000 word families enabled oral skills, while 3,000–5,000 families were required for independent reading. The advice to focus explicitly on the first few thousand word families seemed reasonable enough when the learning targets included fewer than 5,000 families because those most frequent families got learners more than half way to the target. However, in an influential CMLR article, Nation (2006) argues that in fact much more vocabulary is needed to read and listen to English. The following word families are needed to comprehend various media at 98% coverage: newspapers, 8,000–9,000; novels, 9,000; children's movies, 7,000; unscripted spoken English, 6,000–7,000; and an introductory economics book, 9,000 (Sutarsyah, Nation, & Kennedy, 1994).

With these new, substantially...