Language Learning Needs and Useful Words PDF

Chapter Work out what your needs are and learn 02 what is most useful for you To work out what your language learning needs are, first focus on what you already know, and what you plan to do with the language you are learning. What are your reasons for lea...

Chapter Work out what your needs are and learn 02 what is most useful for you To work out what your language learning needs are, first focus on what you already know, and what you plan to do with the language you are learning. What are your reasons for learning that language? Why are you learning the language? Language is used for a wide range of purposes and one way of speeding up learning is to focus on a particular purpose and the language needed for that purpose. So, it is helpful to be clear about your purpose in learning a particular language. For example, are you learning the language so that you can travel where that language is spoken? Table 2.1 looks at reasons for learning a language and how these affect what you need to learn. Table 2.1 Reasons for learning another language and what you need to learn Reasons Learning focuses I am just interested in the Spoken language should be your major focus at the beginning. language I am living in a country where Spoken language should be your major focus. You should make this language is spoken a list of your speaking needs and keep adding to it. It is worth and I want to be able to starting with some of the Survival vocabulary (Nation and communicate with others Crabbe, 1993)*. My partner or another family Spoken language should be your major focus. If the family member is a native speaker member is willing and able to help you, you should start with of that language useful repeated routines such as greetings and talking around daily repeated activities such as getting a meal ready or talking about what happened during the day. I want to travel in countries You do not need to learn a lot of the language. Learn the where that language is Survival vocabulary. Aim for a high degree of spoken fluency spoken with the items in that very limited vocabulary. Put all of the survival vocabulary on to word cards. I need to know this language You should begin working with the texts you want to read. This to read books related to my is because the technical words in the subject area make up a very work or subject area large proportion of the running words in such texts (somewhere between 20% and 30% - that is one in every three to five words will be a technical word). If you read outside your subject area you will need to learn many words that are not useful in your subject area. 12  I need to study for a degree Start working with the texts you will use in your study. Put using this language unknown words onto word cards and do the same with repeated phrases. Study these cards every day. I want to use this language Start working with conversational spoken language and then to do business with people move to business-focused conversation. who speak this language It is a university or school Get examples of the final exam and prepare for the kinds of requirement and I want to questions the exam asks. pass the final exam * Go to Paul Nation’s web site to find the survival vocabulary in a range of different languages in the Vocabulary Resource Booklet The list of reasons in Table 2.1 is roughly ordered according to the strength of motivation to learn the language. The strongest motivation is usually a strong feeling of personal interest. The weakest motivations are those where other people’s requirements are forcing you to do something. Motivation is highly likely to have an effect on how hard you work at learning the language. Note 2.1: Are all words created equal? If we do a frequency count of words in a text, no matter how long that text is we get the same pattern of results. A small number of words are very frequent, and a large number of words are very infrequent. A rather small number of words are very frequent The ten most frequent words of English typically cover 25% of the words in any text and the 100 most frequent words cover around 50%. Have a look at a page and see how often the word the occurs (It occurs in almost every line in this paragraph!). By itself, that word covers 7% of any written English text. The most frequent 1,000 words cover around 80% of the words in most texts. In some languages the coverage figures are even higher than this. When learning words, it is good to learn the high frequency words first. The effort of learning these words is well repaid by opportunities to meet and use these words. Vocabulary specialists typically see the high frequency words of English as consisting of around 2,000 to 3,000 words. Only a small number of these words are function words (words like the, a, of, because, it, one, which, that). Most are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (content words). Chapter 2 / 13  You can make a frequency ranked list of the words in the language you want to learn by going to Sketch Engine www.sketchengine.co.uk. (See the instructions near the beginning of Chapter 2 of this book). You don’t have to learn these words in exactly the same order in which they occur in the list, but you should learn them in groupings of say 100 words that roughly match the frequency list. A large number of words are very infrequent Half of the words in any text will occur only once in that text. So, if you read a novel which is 100,000 words long from beginning to end, you will meet around 5,000 different words (Captain Blood is 115,879 words long and contains 5,071 different word families). Half of the different words that you meet (well over 2,000) will occur only once. That means there will not be repeated opportunities to meet these words to help learn them, and if you look them up in a dictionary and study them, you may have to wait a long time before you meet them again. One of the skills in learning a language is to know what words are worth learning at each stage of your proficiency development. Because there are many low frequency words, it is best to read material that uses a controlled vocabulary so that your time is not spent on low frequency words that are not useful for you at your present level of proficiency. For more on this topic go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf ’s_law. How much language do you need to learn to cope with being a foreign tourist? There is good news here. With around 120 words and phrases (which would take a total of four hours of deliberate study to learn), you can deal with the most basic requirements. These basic requirements include meeting and greeting people, being polite (please, thank you), going shopping, ordering food, seeking directions, reading signs, finding somewhere to stay, talking about yourself, and controlling language input. This survival vocabulary is available in over 20 different languages. It is very similar to the word and phrase lists that you find at the back of tourist guide books, except that this one has been well researched. You can find these lists at http://www.victoria. ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx. It is a good idea very early in your language study to make sure that you have covered all the survival vocabulary because this is made up of very useful language items. 14  Finding out about useful words and phrases by using a concordancer You can find out about particular words and phrases by using a computer-based tool called a concordancer. It is worth spending an hour or so learning how to use a concordancer because a concordancer can quickly give you lots of examples of a word or phrase you are interested in. These examples can be a great help for learning for the following reasons. 1 The examples will help you see the range of senses of a word or phrase, and will help you see which are the commonest senses. 2 The examples can show you how a word or phrase is used. 3 The number of examples can help you see how frequent a word or phrase is. 4 The examples can show you what words a particular word occurs with. This information is useful for deciding whether to learn a word or phrase and can help you learn it by enriching the information you have about that word. What is a concordancer? A concordancer is a program where you type in a word or phrase or two or more words, and the program searches for examples of these in a collection of texts (a corpus). There are two kinds of concordancers. The easiest to use are online concordancers where you go to a web site and use the program and corpus that the web site provides. Here are some useful web sites. Netspeak www.netspeak.org Word and phrase www.wordandphrase.info Just the word www.just-the-word.com Compleat Lexical Tutor www.lextutor.ca Wordneighbours www.wordneighbours.ust.hk The concordancer at www.sketchengine.co.uk allows free searching for a limited time in a very wide variety of languages and corpus sizes. The other kind of concordancer is one that you download to your computer and so you do not use it online. You need to provide your own corpus to search for examples. It is not too hard to find a corpus or to make a corpus, but it is best to start learning about concordancers using an online concordancer. The best free downloadable concordancer is AntConc which can be found on Laurence Anthony’s web site http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html. Chapter 2 / 15  Here is an example of output from a concordancer, using the search word contrary. 1 The facts described are contrary to the principles enshrined in the constitution 2 come in and wing it.” Contrary to some of his statements in the past, Redford in 3 are a legitimate issue, contrary to the view that every criticism of her intellect 4 The Sierra Club to the contrary notwithstanding, the Supreme Court’s June 29 5 are wise and welcome. Contrary to what critics say, the new policy poses no 6 the literal and popular sense. On the contrary, “hope... can be situated only in 7 an experience that precedes it. On the contrary, language makes experience possible. 8 knowledge, be predicted. To the contrary, reversing human expectations, it The output can be sorted in the concordancer to make it easier to see patterns. Look at this video to see an example of a concordancer being used. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=QbwgruJ4_gA Find out how much you know already If you have already been studying a language for a year or more, then see how much you now know. To do this for English, go to www.my.vocabularysize.com and measure your vocabulary size. Knowing your vocabulary size helps you understand how far you have to go in learning the language and is also a useful guide in finding suitable reading material. Table 2.2 shows how you can use your vocabulary test results to choose reading material in English. Table 2.2 Matching vocabulary size to reading material for meaning-focused input Vocabulary size Source of reading material 1,000 words or less Choose books from the early levels of published graded readers 1,000-2,000 words Choose books from the middle levels of published graded readers 2,000-4,000 words Choose books from the later levels of published graded readers 4,000 words or more Choose books from the Mid-frequency readers Unfortunately, other languages do not have readily available vocabulary size tests, but here is a rough way of getting similar information about how much vocabulary you know. 16  1 Get a frequency ranked list of words in the language you are learning. You can do this by going to www.sketchengine.co.uk. 2 Start with the most frequent word and go through the list deciding if you could give a meaning for each word. If you already know a lot of words in that language, look at every fiftieth word (in that case multiply your known words by fifty to calculate how many words you know). Here is how you can get a frequency ranked word list for any of many different languages. 1 Go to www.sketchengine.co.uk 2 Choose the language corpus (the collection of texts) you want by choosing from the table Corpora or click Show all corpora just below the table. If the corpus is very large you may have to wait for a minute or two. A Make concordance box will appear, but don’t use that. 3 On the far left, click Word list. Don’t change any of the settings but just click the Make wordlist button near the bottom of the box. Wait while the program creates a list for you. 4 In the list at the far left, click Save. If you only want the first 1000 words (that is plenty if you are beginning to learn the language), click the Save Word List button. To measure knowledge of the first 2000 words of French, go to http://www.lextutor. ca/tests/yes_no_fr/. If you know very little of the language, the frequency-ranked list can be a useful rough guide for learning (see Note 2.1: Are all words created equal?). Most of the words at the top of the list will have grammatical functions and need to be learned in sentence contexts. In the next chapter we will look at learning through listening and reading. Chapter 2 / 17