The idea that a vocabulary is a network of words is one that has become a common theme of the second language (L2) vocabulary research literature. However, not many people have considered the wider implications of this powerful metaphor. This paper is the first in a series of workshops that examines some of these implications. In this first…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

This paper is part 3 of a series of workshops that examine the properties of some simple models vocabulary networks. This Workshop focusses on how the vocabulary network responds when words become easier to activate. The Workshop is linked to an on-line practice room where readers can explore these processes for themselves.

Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaite-Lozdiene & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word…

The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

This paper is focused on one of the most common and basic ways of processing corpus information; concordance, and how it can be used in the classroom to offer language learners useful vocabulary that they would face in genuine conversations and help them detect language patterns as this ability helps them with their learning process. In addition,…

For a QA system it's very important to have a notion of vocabulary used in questions and for building correct answers. Especially, when a word represents a concept, one can use related lexical instances to understand it and further extend the knowledge by using the associated information. In this work, we suggest a process of building a knowledge…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

With an increasing need for teaching discipline-specific language to second language (L2) learners, language instructors are tasked with a challenging objective to target the vocabulary that is necessary for students to understand and produce discipline-specific discourse. To meet this objective, language corpora and corpus software have been used…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Word cloud generating applications were originally designed to add visual attractiveness to posters, websites, slide show presentations, and the like. They can also be an effective tool in reading and writing classes in English as a second language (ESL) for all levels of English proficiency. They can reduce reading time and help to improve…

The present article deals with the issue of how to create and operate a customizable on-line concordancer from viewpoints of language teachers and with their own laptops. It aims to introduce how to use and manage this application without relying on computer engineers for various pedagogical purposes, focusing on the four beneficial dimensions of…