Ward, J (2009) A basic engineering English word list for less proficient foundation engineering undergraduates English for Specific Purposes, 28, 170–182 doi:10.1016/j.esp.2009.04.001 West, M (1953) A general service list of English words London, England: Longman, Green Applying L2 Lexical Research Findings in ESL Teaching KEITH FOLSE University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida, United States doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.254529 & English language learners face a debilitating lexical gap between the words they know and the words they need to know Although educated native speakers of English know approximately 20,000 word families (Nation, 2001), or roughly 70,000 words, one estimate of ELLs’ lexical needs is approximately 2,000 words to maintain conversations, 5,000 to read authentic texts, and perhaps 10,000 to comprehend challenging academic materials (Schmitt, 2000) Unfortunately, even well-educated ELLs may know less than a quarter of their native counterparts’ vocabulary (Laufer & Yano, 2001) Within the last 15 years, this lexical gap has prompted a number of useful studies addressing issues relevant to both learners and teachers Though much of this work has investigated reading (e.g., Cobb, 2008), lexical knowledge impacts all skill areas, including writing (Engber, 1995; Ferris, 1994), listening (Chang, 2007), and speaking (Joe, 1998) The purpose of this short article is to present several teaching applications from the current body of L2 vocabulary research This information focuses on four key pedagogical questions (Readers interested in research details should see the timeline of influential L2 vocabulary studies of vocabulary acquisition presented by Laufer [2009], the review of extant research on vocabulary instruction by Schmitt [2008], and the extensive vocabulary bibliography by year or topic at the Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group Archive [2011] at http://www.lognostics.co.uk/varga/.) PEDAGOGICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT L2 VOCABULARY RESEARCH Why Should Teachers Teach Vocabulary? Native speakers not learn most of their vocabulary through explicit instruction, so common wisdom in TESOL pedagogy has favored a 362 TESOL QUARTERLY natural approach involving substantial communicative interaction with authentic language (e.g., extensive reading), especially comprehensible input, as the best way for ELLs to develop their lexical proficiency According to this limited thinking, ELLs simply pick up vocabulary from context naturally as native speakers For many reasons, however, relying on guessing the meaning of new words from context clues is not an especially good strategy for ELLs whose goal is to learn a lot of vocabulary in a short time (Folse, 2004; Hulstijn, 1992; Laufer, 1997; Nassaji, 2003; Schatz & Baldwin, 1986) Unlike native speakers who develop their L1 skills over many years, ELLs face an extremely tight time crunch Cobb (1999) aptly sums up ELLs’ lexical dilemma: ‘‘Students typically need to know words measured in thousands, not hundreds, but receive language instruction measured in months, not years’’ (p 345) One of our principal pedagogical questions, therefore, is how learners can overcome their lexical gap as quickly as possible Though lexical learning can take place through natural exposure (e.g., Pigada & Schmitt, 2006), many more studies have shown ELLs learn and retain vocabulary more effectively when it is explicitly taught (e.g., Laufer & Shmueli, 1997; Min, 2008; Zimmerman, 1997) Based on this research, teachers should cover vocabulary explicitly During class discussions, teachers should write important vocabulary from the discussion on the board to aid noticing and retention Teachers should choose textbooks that have overt attention to vocabulary in each lesson Teachers could dedicate one area of the classroom walls for the posting of new vocabulary (e.g., a word wall) Likewise, teachers should include vocabulary items in assessments to complete the learning cycle Which Words Should Teachers Teach? Work from corpus linguistics, currently using corpora measured in the hundreds of millions of words (e.g., Davies, 2011), has provided amazing insights into not only the frequency of words but also the usage of these words Useful corpus-based vocabulary lists teach academic vocabulary (e.g., Coxhead, 2000), idioms (e.g., Liu, 2003; Simpson & Mendis, 2003), phrasal verbs (e.g., Gardner & Davies, 2007), and collocations (e.g., Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, & Maynard, 2008) Teachers should choose a list that is appropriate for their ELLs’ actual objectives (e.g., conversation, academic work, business) and proficiency level In addition to teaching directly from word lists, one way to use lists indirectly is to choose textbooks incorporating extensive use of one or more lists, for example, Essential Academic Vocabulary: Mastering the TEACHING ISSUES 363 Complete Academic Word List (Huntley, 2006), Inside Reading: The Academic Word List in Context (Zimmermann, 2008), or Vocabulary Mastery 3: Using and Mastering the Academic Word List (Wells & Valcourt, 2010) At first glance, using lists may seem counterproductive In the rush toward natural language learning, word lists were downplayed, but there is no empirical research showing learning words from a list to be unproductive (cf Myth in Folse, 2004) In fact, research comparing studying words in a list versus various kinds of context has shown that lists yielded better results than extended context (Laufer & Shmueli, 1997; Prince, 1996) Teachers should not give students a whole alphabetized list to students to learn Instead, the most frequent and therefore most useful words should come first, with the number of words in one list based on logistical factors such length of the course and class meetings or the time interval between class meetings Teachers should not hesitate to teach 20 to 30 words but should make sure the words on the day’s list are not similar phonologically, orthographically, or semantically, as learners may confuse words that sound or look alike (e.g., chicken and kitchen) In addition, all relevant research shows that members of a semantic set (e.g., color words, clothing names, directions) should not be presented simultaneously because students have more difficulty learning new words presented in semantic groupings than they learning semantically unrelated words (Tinkham, 1993) How Should Vocabulary Be Practiced? The single most important aspect of any vocabulary practice activity is not so much what ELLs with the word but rather the number of times ELLs interact with the word The number of learner retrievals of a word is key, and teachers can and should control this factor (Folse, 2010) In a large study of the effectiveness of three different types of written activities, completing three short fill-in-the-blank exercises was better than writing original sentences once, even though both took an equivalent amount of time (Folse, 2006) This information is especially important for novice teachers who often mistakenly believe that writing original sentences is better for vocabulary acquisition because it is supposedly cognitively more demanding and personally involving The number of encounters of each word is important (Webb, 2007) Research has also shown the value of spaced rehearsals, that is, the intervening time between each encounter Thus, teachers should incorporate multiple retrievals and spaced rehearsal into their courses For example, teachers could choose textbooks with explicit vocabulary 364 TESOL QUARTERLY presentations and multiple occurrences of new vocabulary throughout subsequent lessons In class, teachers can encourage multiple retrievals through short oral interactions with words For example, when 15 to 20 words from a discussion of a current event have been written on the board (e.g., voters, election, president, majority, incumbent, running mate, citizens, at least, party, poll, ballot, politicians), the teacher should ask questions requiring single and multiple answers and demonstrating recall of multiple aspects of knowing a word, including meaning (Which word is often a piece of paper? [ballot]), category (Which words are people? [voters, president, incumbent, running mate, citizens, politicians]), collocation (Which word goes after Democrat or Republican? [Party]), and personalization (Which word is the most difficult for you to pronounce? Why? [Answers will vary]) This vocabulary drill should take no more than minutes In addition, teachers should use questions with only one answer, with multiple answers, and with varying answers to make the activity less predictable and therefore more interesting and interactive Most of the Discussion Is About What Teachers Can Do, But What Should Students Do? While classroom vocabulary instruction is important, the number of unknown words is too great to be explicitly taught or even indirectly encountered in reading or listening within the very limited time frame that most ELLs have ELLs must also become independent vocabulary learners, making use of the most efficient vocabulary learning strategies There is no magic list of best strategies that will guarantee success in learning vocabulary (Folse, 2009), and the most successful learners are those who have a very specific concrete plan of action and consistently carry it out (Folse, 2004; Sanaoui, 1995) One example of a concrete action that promotes vocabulary learning is keeping a vocabulary notebook (Folse, 2004; Hedgcock & Ferris, 2009) This notebook is only as valuable as the number of times ELLs refer to it to practice their words, so ELLs should arrange their notebooks based on their individual preferences, not their teacher’s For example, many ELLs write translations in their vocabulary notebooks, a practice often frowned upon by ESL teachers (McCann, 2005) However, numerous research studies have convincingly shown that translation is in fact effective in learning vocabulary (e.g., Hulstijn 1992; Laufer & Girsai, 2008; Prince, 1996) Testing both passive and active vocabulary knowledge, Walters and Bozkurt (2009) found that ELLs who kept a vocabulary notebook learned significantly more vocabulary than similar learners in a control TEACHING ISSUES 365 group that did not Perhaps more important, ELLs who kept a vocabulary notebook then demonstrated a greater tendency to use the target words in freewriting compositions When my ELLs freewriting, I require them to use and underline two vocabulary items in their writing Students must use one word that we recently studied and one unknown word from their dictionary or other source I grade these short homework assignments based on the inclusion of the two underlined words (100), only one underlined word (50), or no underlined words (0) This activity challenges the status quo in which our ELLs continue to make with the limited vocabulary they know and therefore never expand their lexical base This simple assignment requires ELLs to push their lexical limits It also gets them more accustomed to taking responsibility for their vocabulary growth SUMMARY Second language vocabulary research has given us better information on which words to teach as well as how to teach them We also have more information about how people learn vocabulary, and this information can inform the design of classroom activities, books, and software for vocabulary Despite this growing information, many questions are still unresolved, such as, Is there an ideal number of words to be learned in one lesson? How can vocabulary best be presented in textbooks to optimize learning? Should vocabulary be given more attention in curricula than grammar? What connections are there between grammar and vocabulary? Vocabulary is perhaps the most crucial component in learning a foreign language Wilkins (1972) summarizes the situation best with ‘‘While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed’’ (p 111) The field of TESOL has seen much valuable lexical research in recent years, so practitioners are hopeful that this line of classroom-based research will continue to inform teachers, curriculum planners, and materials writers in order to improve second language vocabulary acquisition and the learning of English THE AUTHOR Keith Folse is Professor of TESOL at the University of Central Florida, in the United States, where he trains undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in teaching ESL He is the author of many textbooks on language learning and is especially interested in vocabulary 366 TESOL QUARTERLY REFERENCES Chang, A (2007) The impact of vocabulary preparation on L2 listening comprehension, confidence and strategy use System, 35, 534–550 doi:10.1016/ j.system.2007.03.001 Cobb, T (1999) Breadth and depth of lexical acquisition with hands-on concordancing Computer Assisted Language Learning, 12, 345–360 doi:10.1076/ call.12.4.345.5699 Cobb, T (2008) Commentary: Response to McQuillan and Krashen Language Learning & Technology, 12, 109–114 Coxhead, A (2000) A new academic word list TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238 doi:10.2307/3587951 Davies, M (2011) Corpus of contemporary American English Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://corpus.byu.edu/ Ellis, N., Simpson-Vlach, R., & Maynard, C (2008) Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL TESOL Quarterly, 42, 375–396 Engber, C (1995) The relationship of lexical proficiency to the quality of ESL compositions Journal of Second Language Writing, 4, 139–155 doi:10.1016/10603743(95)90004-7 Ferris, D (1994) Lexical and syntactic features of ESL writing by students at different levels of L2 proficiency TESOL Quarterly, 28, 414–420 doi:10.2307/ 3587446 Folse, K (2004) Vocabulary myths: Applying research to second language classrooms Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press Folse, K (2006) The effect of type of written exercise on L2 vocabulary retention TESOL Quarterly, 40, 273–293 doi:10.2307/40264523 Folse, K (2009) Research on vocabulary learning strategies: Applications for English language teachers In R Courchene & H McGarrell (Eds.), Special Research Symposium Issue of ESL Ontario’s Contact, 34(2), 8–19 Folse, K (2010) Is explicit vocabulary focus the reading teacher’s job? 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