THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK – THE VOCABULARY DIMENSION

THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK – THE VOCABULARY DIMENSION Richard West ABC Language consultants

ELEMENTS OF THE CoELANGUAGE WORK • Syllabus specifications (Threshold [1975/ 1981], Waystage [1991], Porogoviy uroveny russkiy yazik [1996], etc.) • Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (1997/2001) • European Language Portfolio (Switzerland 1998, Russian version 2001)

THE VOCABULARY PROBLEM • `vocabulary extension may well constitute the greater part of the learning load required to pass from the earlier level to the present one' (Vantage, van Ek & Trim 2001: 78).

VOCABULARY ELEMENT IN CoE (1) • Threshold: • bread • bread roll • break • breakfast • bridge • bright • bring

VOCABULARY ELEMENT (2) • CEFR & EFL six levels of language proficiency: A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2 • Approximately 60 `can-do’ scales • Vocabulary Range + Vocabulary Control

VOCABULARY STATEMENTS

VOCABULARY STATEMENTS • Quantitative but no quantities • No vocabulary examples • No vocabulary lists • No vocabulary syllabus • No vocabulary-learning strategies

AIM OF PROJECT To produce a free, online teacher’s resource • Listing a wide range of vocabulary • Vertically – all 6 CEFR levels • Horizontally – word families

WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE? • Headwords arranged alphabetically • 6 levels (A1-C2) • Use vertically (all items at any level) • Organised semantically (word families) rather than grammatically • Additional items in column D • Use horizontally (all items in a word family) • Word document, so easy to search

APPROACH & METHODOLOGY • `consensus’ approach • 18 sources: lexicons/vocabulary lists • 1980-2010 • British, American, European, German, Chinese • Small (2000) – large (20,000) • Quantitative (frequency) + qualitative (various criteria) + mixed criteria

QUANTITATIVE SOURCES • `bottom-up’ = corpus-based • All words up to a pre-determined limit • Non-selective • Large • Only one criterion – frequency • Frequency is variable: sources (UK/US), date, spoken/written, genres/field, etc • Good agreement for first 2000 • Poor for polysemy + 2-word items

QUALITATIVE SOURCES • `top-down’ = from opinion, experience, previous sources, etc • Often smaller: top 2000, defining vocabulary of 3000 words, etc • Selective – removing `sensitive’ words or removing words to keep within word limit • Many different criteria – sometimes unspecified, affected by purpose • Words omitted (face, food, read) or added (sonata)

CONSTRUCTING A DATABASE • 22,000-item database • Converting items to A1-C2 levels • A1 – 1200 • A2 – 2200 • B1 – 3250 • B2 – 4500 • C1 – 6500 • C2 – 8500 (Hindmarsh 1980)

CONSTRUCTING FINAL RESOURCE • One-off words eliminated • Frequency used as initial criterion • Each item checked against all sources • `Really useful words’: items promoted or demoted if wide agreement among sources (e.g. lazy, punctual + believer, disbelief) • Marginal words included in column D • Total?

USING THE VOCABULARY RESOURCE • Vertically – lists at each level • Horizontally – word families: items of high learnerability

VOCABULARY STRATEGIES (1) • English core vocabulary consists of base words • derivatives are constructed by prefixes and suffixes • prefixes and suffixes have semantic/grammatical functions • base words can combine to form compounds • words can change grammatical function through zero affixation • words can change meaning through figurative use

VOCABULARY STRATEGIES (2) • structural clues - part of speech • Morphological information (affixes & roots/compounding) • glosses • inference from context • ignoring throwaway words • semantic approximation (positive/negative, superordinate/ hyponym/subordinate) • efficient dictionary use

THANK YOU west46@btinternet.com

THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK – THE VOCABULARY DIMENSION