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Running head: VOCABULARY AS A SYSTEM OF LANGUAGE 1

Vocabulary as a system of Language according to

Paul Nation, Vivian Cook and John Read

Víctor A. González

and

Juan A. Rosales

Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción


It is common knowledge that language is essential for our society because

it allows us to communicate with each other and understand different concepts and

intentions. This interaction would not be possible if it was not due to vocabulary.

This concept is one of the systems of language and could be defined as the

amount of words that a person uses in order to express something. Thus,

vocabulary presents vital importance because it allows learners to have a better

comprehension of the language skills.

In several situations people are quite keen to say something in an

appropriate way according to a specific context. However, the lack of information in

terms of vocabulary would be an obstacle to them. This would provoke that people

will not able to say anything at all.

The purpose of this paper is to present, analyze and develop the concept

of vocabulary as a system of language according to three authors. Their

perspectives are going to be analyzed in order to provide a complete idea and

foundations about what vocabulary comprehends, what are the principles to be

considered when teaching vocabulary, and how these principles can be

implemented inside a classroom.

First of all, Nation (2007) provides the time-on–task principle which is a

justification of the four strands. It basically expresses that everybody can show

improvement on a particular skill as long as they practice constantly. He also

declares that language skills are different from other kind of skills such as critical


skills, so they have to be considered in a way that quantity of the tasks for these

skills is not confused with their quality.

Secondly, in his paper, Nation mentions four strands in the learning

process. The first strand is the meaning-focused input, which is learning through

listening and reading. This is related to the knowledge and understanding that

students acquire by using their receptive skills, which are reading and listening.

Some of the typical activities related to these skills are watching television, listen to

the radio, etc. The number of words that will be learnt is relatively low, and the

degree of learning will depend exclusively on the quality of the reading and

listening. Therefore, a lot of input is needed. Moreover, there are conditions that

need to be present in this strand in order to accomplish an effective. First, if the

reading is extensive, the learning will be highest. Second, the students must have

most of the knowledge related to the information they are receiving in order to

understand it. Third, it is required that learners really want to learn and understand

the given information. Fourth, learners must have a high percentage of knowledge

about the source. Furthermore, Nation and Wang (1999) stated that the learners

should read extensive texts at least once every two weeks in order to acquire a

significant amount vocabulary.

Furthermore, Read (2000) states some measures for this strand. He says

that is necessary to be concerned about the nature of the input. He proposes two

questions for the teachers so that they can confirm that; does the difficulty of the

input concords with the level of the learners? And does the input have

characteristics of authenticity? Moreover, according to Read, there are three


possible errors that can occur in a listening. First, perceptual error, which indicates

that the learners are not able to hear certain sounds properly; Second, lexical error,

which means that the meaning is difficult to understand; and third, the syntactic

error, where the sentence structure is misinterpreted.

Thirdly, the second strand is the meaning-focused output, which is learning

through speaking and writing. In this strand is important that learners can improve

their vocabulary when they produce language. Some of the activities he proposes

to reach that objective are; having conversations, writing letters, keeping a diary,

etc. In addition, he states that, as in the receptive learning, there are conditions

that have to be present when learning by production of language. First, what the

learners produce must be largely related to their knowledge; their focus must be to

get their message across. Second, only a small amount of words have to be

unknown to them. Third, their previous input must be used to produce language.

Fourth, there must be several opportunities for them to use the language. In

addition, he states that within a spoken activity there could be a mixture between

input and output. For example, in a conversation one person produces the output

and the other learns that as input.

Moreover, Nation cites Swain´s out hypothesis and points out that

speaking or writing is part of the process of second language learning. Also, Swain

(1995) suggests three functions for the output hypothesis. The first function is the

noticing/triggering function, which occurs when students have difficulties for

expressing a message because they do not know how to do it. He explains that

this impairment takes place because productive learning implies not only looking


for the meaning of a word, but also the production of the word. Furthermore, he

stated that according to Izumi (2002), when learners produce language they are

obliged to integrate a greater amount of items. This has to occur in a way that is

easier to be understood. He states that productive is not better than receptive.

However they are different from each other. The integration in the productive

learning is not the same as in receptive learning, so equal amount of times have to

be balanced for both productive and receptive within a lesson. In addition, he

declares that the complete effect of triggering/noticing function does not provoke

enough impact until learners have the knowledge that they did not have before.

That can happen in three ways. The first way is when learners notice a failure while

they produce language and, subsequently, they start paying attention to certain

items in the input that they had not noticed before. The second way is to

compensate the lack of knowledge through trials and error, or by using their first

language transfer. And the third way is to look for assistance from teachers or

other sources once they are aware of the gap in their production. The second

function proposed by swains is the hypothesis-testing function. Here the learners

perform trials and then they can whether maintain or modify those trials depending

on the success they achieve or the feedback they receive. The third function is the

metalinguistic (reflective) function. This implies the production of language with the

objective of solving problems by working in groups or teams. This kind of activity

combines meaning-focused output and language-focused learning because the

production makes the learners to pay attention on language features.


Fourthly, Nation (2007) provides the language-focused learning strand.

This strand is known with many other names, such as focus on form, form-focused

instruction, deliberate teaching, etc. The principal or main aim of it, is to develop

and integrate the four skills of language which are reading, speaking, listening and

writing. Many activities are proposed in order to accomplish the development of the

four skills. Nation (2007) clarifies activities like substitution tables, labeling, drills,

memorization of dialogues, intensive reading, etc. a very important issue to

considerate, is that these activities are just a part of the entire teaching process. As

you know, a teaching process has to deal with as many alternatives as the teacher

can have in order to implement them in the classroom. Thus, all the students can

learn and acquire knowledge from the most variable perspectives, obtaining an

improvement in every side of the instruction.

For implementing this focus, nation provides five conditions. The first one

is that students give special and conscious attention to language features. When

they are developing an activity that must pay attention to them in order to learn and

acquire vocabulary through the activity. Here, language features do not pass

unnoticed. Students are asked to analyze and study the features in order to

complete the aim of any of the activities prescribed above. The second condition is

about the same as the previous one. Students must study and analyze in deep the

different aspects of language. They have to think about them and provide

meaningful relation and definition, thus they can acquire them by giving important

context to each one of them. Thirdly, teachers have to apply and provide the

students enough space and situations where they can work on their own and in a


conscious way. The teacher also make special emphasis in the same features

previous analyzed, so the students can put all their attention and they do not feel

bombarded with too much information. Fourthly, Nation (2007) states that the

features, that are being object of study, must be as much simple as they can be, in

order to obtain the best attention from the students towards them. They also have

to be independent in term of cognitive developmental knowledge. With this,

features must be apart from such cognitive abilities that students may not have or

develop yet. To accomplish this condition, teachers have to be aware of the age of

the students and what cognitive abilities they have according to their age. Finally, it

is explained that the features used in this strand should be present in the other

three strands of vocabulary development. Thus it will be a development and they

will be attended from every side of its characteristics.

At the end of this strand for developing vocabulary, the author provides

four possible effects. The students can add to them implicit knowledge, they are

helped with the development of possible later learning, so it would be much more

easy for them to learn, be aware of the systematic aspects of language and it can

be useful to develop new strategies that can be used in studying and applicable for

the other three strands.

In the Fifth place, the last strand of the four named previously, is the

fluency development. The aspect of the last strand is that all the four skills are

integrated and should be attended in the same process. Here the students

suppose to use all the knowledge that have been acquiring during the process and

all what they know so far. Moreover, students have to provide and receive


messages though the different skills that hey posses. But this strand can only be

applicable and possible to implement depending on four principles. The first of

them is that all they listen, read, speak or write has to be familiar to them; it must

have meaning to them. Unfamiliar or complex features are not allowed. In second

place the focus is the production and reception of meaningful stimulus. Thirdly, the

teacher has to encourage his/her students to perform as fast as they can, or much

faster than they normally do, due to the necessity to develop fluency in their skills,

which is also the aim of the strand. Finally it must be a large amount of input and

output activities.

However, there are certain conditions where students are not developing

fluency. For example, certain activities that involves unknown vocabulary or where

there is no push to the students to do the activities faster than usual.

Now, how can we integrate the four strands? Nation (2007) expresses that

in every moment of the class or the teaching process, each one of the activities will

lead to the other one. For example, if the teacher starts the lesson with an input

activity, he can later make the students to do an output activity and so on. There

are many ways and ideas for giving enough time for each one of the strands, but it

will depend on the students need and interests, in the different teacher’s

expectations of the students, the beliefs about language learning, etc.

In the Sixth place, Nation states a way of balancing the four strands.

During a course, each of the strands should have the same amount of time

because there must be a balance between reception and production of language.


The teacher can verify whether there is a positive equilibrium by having a register

of the activities so that he can check them from time to time.

Moreover, Nation cites Ellis (2005) in order to provide a justification for the

equality of time for the four strands. Ellis states that students need to focus not only

on meaning, but also on form. He says that the four strands, except for the

language-focused learning, are meaning-focused strands. This means that three

quarters of the course are focused mainly on meaning and the other quarter is

focused on form. However, language-focused learning is more effective. This was

demonstrated by a study conducted by Waring and takaki (2003) in which students

learnt four words in fifty minutes in a meaning-focused reading, whereas other

studies indicated that learners were able to learn more than thirty words in sixty

minutes in a language-focused reading (Nation, 2001: 298; Thorndike, 1908;

webb,1962). Furthermore, Nation declares that the equal amount of time for each

strand is random and depends on the improvement and development of the

students.

In the Seventh place, Nation mentions ten principles that are intended to

give a guideline and advices to teachers about how to apply the strands correctly.

First, is essential to provide comprehensible input through listening and reading

activities such as extensive readings or spoken communication activities. Second,

it is necessary to add a deliberate element to stimulate the comprehensible input,

for example, by writing words on the board while they are being listened. Third,

encourage learners to produce output in a variety of genres in activities like role

plays or match writings. Fourth, is important for learners to have opportunities to


produce output in collaborative assignments such as split information or expressing

opinion about a particular topic. Fifth, help learners to deliberately identify patterns

and features of language such as sounds or grammar and always provide them

feedback. The sixth principle explains that teacher should train his/her student’s

different strategies in order to have a better and productive learning process. It

could be strategies like use of dictionary, internet programs, different softwares,

word part analysis, etc. the seventh principle states that fluency activities have to

be implemented for the students, in order to the develop the four skills of language.

The eighth principle proposes an equal amount of time and dedication for all the

strands that should be present in a lesson. The ninth principle pushes teachers to

develop and cover the most common and useful items. The teacher must provide

simple tasks, information and materials and give the maximum of input to the

students, covering the four skills at the same level. Finally, the tenth principle

states that teachers should analyze, monitor and assess students, in order to give

feedback and help the students to develop their communicational needs.

In the eighth place, Cook (2001) provides three more strategies to develop

vocabulary. He points out that one thing is to be able to recognize or come up with

the meaning of words; another quite different thing is to remember the words and

their meaning in order to use it later on in the future. Cook defines three main

strategies for acquiring knowledge. First, students have to do repetition and rote

learning activities. The common idea of the most well-known method for teaching

vocabulary is to repeat over and over again the same word. Thus, the word will be

learned and stored in the long term memory. Yet the author states that this type of


work might be in vain. However, the most important part in the process of acquiring

knowledge is the first encounter with that word. If it is meaningful and the students

are aware of the word and they are committed with its learning, the process will be

successful. Secondly, Cook exposes the organization process. The idea of this

strategy is to organize all the words that are being learned into groups in the

student’s mind. The foundations are that words are put into a “word map” or “sub-

groups”. It means that words are connected and organized following certain

patterns, such as words with suffixes like “-er” or prefixes such as “con-“. Another

way of organizing words is by connecting their morphology linked to their meaning.

Moreover, it is advisable to categorize general rules for certain affixes, so they can

convey the meaning by having in mind the different affixes and their corresponding

meanings. Finally, the most developed strategy by Cook is the linking to existing

knowledge. He explains that the commonest way of remembering words is by

linking them to preexisting information in our minds. Because learning a complete

new information will be probably harder. Other way of linking new information, is to

connect the word to a preestablished image or scheme that you posses. This

method will be much easier to do for our brains processes. So, students will

remember and recover the information faster than using another method. It will

also allow the students to store more than one item into a certain image, providing

the ability to convey more than one word just by remembering on scheme.

In conclusion, in this paper there were presented the four strands of

vocabulary proposed by Paul Nation, which are meaning-focused input, meaning-

focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. Also, he


mentioned some advices for teachers when teaching vocabulary. He stated that

the four strands should be considered, balanced and integrated at the same level.

Later on, Nation (2007) proposes ten principles for teachers in order to be

considered and implemented in our classrooms. Within this principles, are

techniques to asses students. Read (2000) proposes two question that teacher

must ask themselves at the time of evaluations. Finally, three main strategies were

presented following Cook’s book. These strategies aimed to have, develop and

give the students enough tools for them. Thus students obtain all the help they

need in order to have a better vocabulary acquisition process. Strategies such as

link new information to previous schemes, organization of words that share the

same or similar patterns in groups are advisable for teaching vocabulary.


REFERENCES

Cook, V. J. (1991). Second Language Learning and. Language Teaching. New

york: Cambridge University press.

Ellis, R. (2005) Principles of instructed language learning. System 33, 209-224.

Izumi, S. (2002) Output, input enhancement, and the noticing hypothesis: An

experimental study on ESL relativization. Studies in Second Language

Acquisition 24, 541-577.

Nation, P. (2007) Innovation in language and teaching. The four strands 1 (1) 1-

10.

Read, J. (Ed). (2000). Assessing vocabulary. United Kingdom: Cambridge

University Press.

Swain, M. (1995) Three functions of output in second language learning. In G.

Cook and B. Seidelhofer (eds) Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics:

Studies in Honour of H.G. Widdowson (pp. 125-144). Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Thorndike, E.L. (1908) Memory for paired associates. Psychological Review 15,

122-138.


Waring, R. and Takaki, M. (2003) At what rate do learners learn and retain new

vocabulary from reading a graded reader? Reading in a Foreign Language

15 (2) 130-163.

Webb, W.B. (1962) The effects of prolonged learning on learning. Journal of Verbal

Learning and Verbal Behavior 1, 173-182.

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