Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
The Aims of the ESRC Seminar Series
- Introduction
- Interdisciplinary Research
- A link between the academic community and practitioners
- Language Learning
- Psycholinguistic research
- Stylometry
- Clinical linguistics
- References
Introduction
The Seminar Series aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in vocabulary acquisition and measures of vocabulary in fields as diverse as first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylometry, psycholinguistics, and clinical linguistics (early language impairment, aphasia, Alzheimer’s disease).
Interdisciplinary Research
The seminar aims, first of all, to bring together researchers from different disciplines, with a view to exchanging ideas ideas about the best ways to study vocabulary acquisition, knowledge and use and to evaluate which models and measures can best be applied in a range of contexts. A number of new measures have recently been proposed by researchers in the M4 Applied Linguistics group, all of which are considerable improvements on traditional measures, but these need to be tested on different data sets, as this will make it possible to assess their suitability in different research contexts. The measures that members of the group have developed so far include D (Malvern and Richards 1997 ; Malvern, Richards, Chipere, and Durán 2004), P_lex (Meara and Bell 2001), and the Advanced Guiraud (Daller, van Hout and Treffers-Daller 2003). The contexts in which models and measures of vocabulary acquisition, knowledge and use are being applied include research in first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylometry, psycholinguistics, and clinical linguistics (early language impairment, aphasia, Alzheimer’s disease). As findings and methods of, for example, stylometry or corpus linguistics are largely unknown to researchers working in first and second language acquisition, and findings of clinical linguists are insufficiently perceived in studies of bilinguals, it is of utmost importance to create links between these disciplines.
A link between the academic community and practitioners
In the second place, it is the aim of the seminar series to foster links between
the academic community and practitioners in different fields. More specifically,
a central concern of the series is to make research and theory accessible enough
to be of use in informing best practice in the classroom and in speech therapy.
In teaching of EFL and other modern foreign languages and in clinical practice
vocabulary is a key issue. Thus, part of the seminar (in particular meetings
3 and 5) will focus on an exchange of views between researchers and practitioners,
to facilitate communication in both directions.
There are a number of reasons why a seminar on knowledge and use of vocabulary
would be of interest to a wide range of researchers as well as to practitioners.
It is widely accepted that lexical knowledge is one of the main prerequisites
for academic achievement of monolingual and bilingual children (see Cummins
1991; Daller 1999; Dickinson and Tabors 2001). According to Meara and Bell (2001),
teachers’ judgements of L2 texts appear to be based to a large extent
on the type of vocabulary used by the students, a result echoed by Malvern and
Richards (2002) who showed that teachers’ subjective rating of students’
range of vocabulary in oral interviews of second language learners correlated
very highly (all values above 0.97) with their judgements about fluency, complexity,
content, and accuracy.
Language Learning
Many applied linguists have demonstrated that the language threshold for reading is largely lexical. Anderson and Freebody (1981) reported a high correlation between tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension across a range of studies in first language reading research. Laufer (1989, 1992) points to similar results for second language acquisition. She also provides evidence that for text comprehension a vocabulary large enough to provide coverage of 95% of the words in a text is needed. In line with the Lexical Learning Hypothesis, Ellis (1997) has shown that vocabulary knowledge is indispensable to acquire grammar.
Psycholinguistic research
Psycholinguistic research into the organisation of the lexicon and processing among monolinguals (Levelt 1989, 1999; Levelt & Indefrey 2001) and bilinguals (Green 1998; Grosjean 1997) led researchers to adopt much more complex models of the lexicon. It is now widely assumed that words form complex networks with other words (Meara 2004; Singleton 2003) and that the lexicon contains many prefabricated chunks: Thus, there are many fixed expressions based around ‘think’ (come to think of it, I haven’t had time to think, I thought you’d never ask, who would have thought it, think again, etc) that are unconsciously memorised, and then deployed readily in our conversation as ‘prefabs’. Lewis (1993; 1997), the protagonist of the lexical approach, applied this idea to teaching practice, and argued that vocabulary should be at the centre of language teaching. As a result, the paradigm of language teaching shifted to a large extent from grammar to lexis (Schmitt 2000).
Nowadays pre-fabricated chunks are usually referred to in terms of e.g. collocation (Sinclair 1991), or phraseological patterns (cf. Hunston & Francis 2000). The view of language that emerges from work in corpus linguistics and forensic linguistics is one in which no strict distinction can be made between lexicon and grammar, since lexical items must be characterized in terms of their distributions in grammatical patterns, and many patterns are, like lexical items, specific and conventional and must be learned.
Stylometry
In a similar vein, researchers in stylometry assume that each individual writer will have a linguistic ‘fingerprint’ visible in his/her unconscious choice of certain linguistic features, be these simple or collocative, syntactical or vocabularic (Holmes 1994; Tweedie 1996). As the methods used in these fields are largely unknown to researchers working in L1 and L2 (and vice versa), it is of utmost importance to create links between these disciplines. In addition, it is important to investigate how the analysis of corpora can be made useful for (foreign) language teaching in departments, because many researchers have found that there are considerable differences between what textbooks are teaching and how native speakers actually use language as evidenced in the corpora (Beeching 1997; Sealey & Thompson 2004).
Clinical linguistics
Finally, in clinical linguistics, a key issue is how deficits in vocabulary knowledge interact with phonological and morphosyntactic issues in child language development, and how therapy can address these issues (Roulstone 2004; Roulstone et al 2003). Although lexical development lies at the core of language acquisition, and most children with SLI are impaired in vocabulary development, the reasons for this deficit remain obscure (Marchman &Bates 1994; Windfuhr et al 2002). More interaction between researchers from different disciplines may contribute to shed new light on these and other issues.
References
Beeching, Kate (1997) French for specific purposes : the case for spoken corpora. Applied Linguistics 18, 3
Broeder, P., Extra, G. and R. van Hout. (1993), Richness and variety in the developing lexicon. In: Clive Perdue (ed.), Adult Language Acquisition. Volume II: The Results. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 145-163.
Cowie, A. (ed.) (1998). Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Cummins, J. (1991). Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children. In: Bialystok, E. (ed.). Language processing in bilingual children. Cambridge University Press, 70 - 90.
Daller, H. (1999). Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit. Der Sprachstand türkischer Rückkehrer. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
Daller, H., Roeland van Hout and Jeanine Treffers-Daller (2003) Lexical Richness In Spontaneous Speech Of Bilinguals Applied Linguistics 24 (2), 197-222.
Dickinson, D. K. & Tabors, P. O. (2001). Beginning literacy with language. Baltimore: Paul Brookes.
Green, D.W. (1998). 'Mental control of the bilingual lexicosemantic system'. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2): 67-81
Grosjean, François (1997) Processing mixed language: issues, findings, and models. In A.M. de Groot and J.F. Kroll (eds) Tutorials in bilingualism. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 225-54.
Hick R. F; Joseph K. L; Conti-Ramsden G. ; Serratrice L. ; Faragher B. (2002) Vocabulary profiles of children with Specific Language Impairment. Child Language Teaching and Therapy , vol. 18 (2), 165-180.
Holmes, David I (1994) , "Authorship Attribution," Computers and the Humanities 28 (1994): 87-106
Holmes, David (1998) The Evolution of Stylometry," Literary and Linguistic Computing 13 (1998): 113-114
Hunston, Susan & Gill Francis (2000) Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levelt, W.J.M. (1989) Speaking: from intention to articulation. MA: MIT Press.
Levelt, W.J.M. (1999). Producing spoken language: A blueprint of the speaker. In C.M. Brown, & P. Hagoort (Eds.), The neurocognition of Language (pp. 83-121). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levelt, W.J.M., & Indefrey, P. (2001). The Speaking Mind/Brain: Where do spoken words come from. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), Image, Language, Brain (pp. 77-94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, Michael (1993) The lexical approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. Hove, UK: Language Teaching Publications.
Lewis, Michael (1997) Implementing the lexical approach: putting theory into practice. Hove (UK): Language Teaching publications.
Malvern, David and Brian Richards (2002) Investigating accommodation in language proficiency interviews using a new measure of lexical diversity. Language Testing 2002, vol 19/1, 85-104.
Malvern, David D., Brian J. Richards, Ngoni Chpaere and Pilar Durán (2004) Lexical diversity and language development. Quantification and Assessment. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan
Marchman, V. & Bates, E. (1994). Continuity in lexical and morphological development: a test of the 'critical mass'. Journal of Child Language, 21, 339-366.
Meara, Paul (2004) Modelling vocabulary loss. Applied Linguistics 25 (2), 137-155.
Meara, P. and H. Bell. (2001). P_Lex: A simple and effective way of describing the lexical characteristics of short L2 texts. In: Prospect 16 (3), 5 - 19.
Nation, P. (1993). Using dictionary to estimate vocabulary size: essential, but rarely followed, procedures. Language Testing, 10 (1), 27-40.
Roulstone, Sue (2004) A prospective follow-up study of a cohort of children referred to speech and language therapy for early speech/language delay. The Research Findings Register. Summary number 1248. Retrieved 6 February 2005
Roulstone S.; Peters T.J.; Glogowska M.2; Enderby P. (2003) A 12-month follow-up of predepartment children investigating the natural history of speech and language delay. Child: Care, Health and Development, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 245-255
Schmitt, Norbert (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Sealey, A. and Thompson, P. (2004) "What do you call the dull words?" Primary department children using corpus-based approaches to learn about language. English in Education 38 (1), 80-91
Singleton, D., 2003b. Perspectives on the multilingual lexicon: a critical synthesis. In J. Cenoz & B. Hufeisen & U. Jessner (eds.), The multilingual lexicon. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, pp. 167-176.
Tweedie, Fiona J. et al., "Neural Network Applications in Stylometry: The Federalist Papers," Computers and the Humanities 30 (1996): 1-10
Windfuhr, K., Faragher, B & Conti-Ramsden, G. (2002). Lexical learning skills in young children with specific language impairment (SLI). International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 4, 415-432
