The empirical studies in this text address key issues in the development and use of vocabulary by child bilinguals and older second-language learners. The thematic focus in this collection of articles is on the assessment of lexical development in bilinguals at different points in the lifespan.
Research into lexical issues has been one of the most rapidly growing areas of second language acquisition studies in recent years, and understandably so: the importance of vocabulary can hardly be denied. Words are the key to every instance of communication, both spoken and written. This volume concentrates on vocabulary in written language, mostly in academic settings. The writers of the chapters come from different countries and universities, and, naturally, represent their own academic backgrounds, though they all share a common interest in investigating the characteristics of L2 lexis as it manifests itself in the written production of students at various stages of their language learning careers. The target language (L2) in the studies reported in the volume is English, except in one study on the lexical competence of multilingual learners of French. The subjectsâ (TM) native languages include Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Swedish, thus representing several different language families. Each chapter constitutes an independent unit, but together the studies reported in them give the reader a varied and extensive picture of lexical issues in L2 writing. The authors approach their topics from different perspectives and use diverse research methods, adding to the multifaceted nature of the volume. The book will be of interest to researchers, educators and students of second language acquisition and applied linguistics.
In addition to the approaches and methods covered in the first edition, this edition includes new chapters, such as whole language, multiple intelligences, neurolinguistic programming, competency-based language teaching, co-operative language learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, and The Post-Methods Era.
This book explores how lexical competence develops in a foreign language, and also argues for the importance of lexical accuracy as a measure of the quality of foreign language writing and as an indicator of receptive vocabulary knowledge.
Lexical Processing and Second Language Acquisition provides a comprehensive overview of research on second language lexical processing, integrating converging research and perspectives from Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition. The book begins by introducing the dominant issues addressed by research in the field in cognitive science and discussing the relevant models in the literature. It later moves toward exploring the different factors that impact second language lexical processing as well as cognitive neuroscientific approaches to the study of the issues discussed throughout the book. A concluding chapter offers a global summary of the key issues and research strands, in addition to directions for future research, with a list of recommended readings providing students and researchers with avenues for further study.
Research into lexical issues has been one of the most rapidly growing areas of second language acquisition studies in recent years, and understandably so: the importance of vocabulary can hardly be denied. Words are the key to every instance of communication, both spoken and written. This volume concentrates on vocabulary in written language, mostly in academic settings. The writers of the chapters come from different countries and universities, and, naturally, represent their own academic backgrounds, though they all share a common interest in investigating the characteristics of L2 lexis as it manifests itself in the written production of students at various stages of their language learning careers. The target language (L2) in the studies reported in the volume is English, except in one study on the lexical competence of multilingual learners of French. The subjects’ native languages include Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Swedish, thus representing several different language families. Each chapter constitutes an independent unit, but together the studies reported in them give the reader a varied and extensive picture of lexical issues in L2 writing. The authors approach their topics from different perspectives and use diverse research methods, adding to the multifaceted nature of the volume. The book will be of interest to researchers, educators and students of second language acquisition and applied linguistics.
The nine major empirical studies of "Lexical Issues in Language Learning" address key issues in the development and use of vocabulary by child bilinguals and older second language learners. The thematic focus in this collection of "Language Learning" articles is on the assessment of lexical development in bilinguals at different points in the lifespan; the psycholinguistic factors that determine the learnability of second language lexis; and the conditions on communication tasks that promote the learning and retention of second language vocabulary or lead to different strategies for handling lexical problems. The introductory chapter presents an overview of current trends in lexical research in second language learning, and assesses the contribution of each of the nine studies to knowledge in the field. The chapters are organized in three sections in accordance with the main themes of the volume. The preface to each individual article contains a brief update assessing the contribution of the research in question to the current knowledge about second language lexical acquisition. The studies address learning in diverse situations internationally, utitlize innovative research methods conducted with the highest levels of expertise, and concern acquisition in various languages: Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish. The volume is not only a valuable reference tool for researchers and scholars active in this field, but also form excellent course material for use in graduate seminars on the subject.
Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based lexical errors as proficiency increases, likewise, the direct influence of the L1 also reduces in favour of more elaborated transfer mechanisms and L2 influence. The different categories of lexical errors indicate the stage of learning. This book uses a study of young EFL learners to suggest that lexical accuracy is a crucial component of writing assessment, and that lexical errors are useful in predicting writing quality.
This book inaugurates a series of discussions on what is permanent in the original thinking of the UNL – Universal Networking Language – and the changes that have been introduced during its development. The purpose of the book is to highlight the UNL’s fundamental principles that remain as integral as they were when they were first formulated several years ago, while showing how their materialization has evolved over time, following the advances in Linguistics, Knowledge Engineering and Information Sciences. The fundamental and unchanged principles of the UNL are: The idea of an artificial language that is able to describe the universe similar to any human language; The idea of a language that, though artificial, is made up of lexical, grammatical and semantic components in the same way as any natural language; The idea of a language that can represent information and knowledge independently of natural languages; The idea that it is a language for machines, and enables human-machine interaction in an intelligent partnership. For more than a decade, eminent linguists, IT developers, NLP scholars worked together on the materialization of the “idea” of the UNL. At the start, they adopted set specifications on the formalism of the UNL that were followed by all of them. As their work progressed, they gradually realized the need for adjusting some of the initial specifications and for introducing new ones. These specifications concern three basic components of the UNL linguistic structure: the “Universal Words” (UWs) which constitute the vocabulary of the UNL; the “Relations” that describe semantic functions between two UWs; and “Attributes” that describe circumstances under which UWs and “Attributes” are used.
This comprehensive account of performance-based assessment of L2 lexical proficiency analyzes and compares two of the primary methods of evaluation used in the field and unpacks the ways in which they tap into different dimensions of one model of lexical competence and proficiency. This book builds on the latest research on performance-based assessment, which has most recently pointed to the application of more quantitative measures to L2 data, to systematically explore the qualitative method of using human raters in assessment exercises and the quantitative method of using automatic computation of statistical measures of lexis and phraseology. Supported by an up-to-date review of the existing literature, both approaches’ unique features are highlighted but also compared to one another to provide a holistic overview of performance-based assessment as it stands today at both the theoretical and empirical level. These findings are exemplified in a concluding chapter, which summarizes results from an empirical study looking at a range of lexical and phraseological features and human raters’ scores of over 150 essays written by both L2 learners of English and native speakers. Taken together, the volume challenges existing tendencies within the field which attempt to use one method to validate one another by demonstrating their capacity to indicate very different elements of lexical proficiency, thereby offering a means by which to better conceptualize performance-based assessment of L2 vocabulary in the future. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working in second language acquisition and applied linguistics research, particularly those interested in issues around assessment, vocabulary acquisition, and language proficiency.