Vocabulary Archive

From March 26-28, I attended the annual Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Chicago, made possible in part by a travel grant from the Berkeley Language Center. This was my first AAS conference as president of the Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL), a position I will hold for three years. I…

On Oct. 4, I attended the Western Association of Asian Studies Conference at Arizona State University, Tempe, with a travel grant from the Berkeley Language Center. I organized and chaired a panel entitled Using Authentic Materials in the Southeast Asian Language Classroom, and I presented a paper myself on that panel, entitled My Right to…

Thanks to the BLC and its generous travel grant, I was able to attend the 2012 Chinese Language Teachers Association Conference held in Philadelphia. During the three-day conference, hundreds of Chinese language teachers shared their research results and different views of how to teach Chinese effectively. I was honored to have the opportunity to share…

L2 lexical studies have established that learners need to acquire knowledge of the first 3,000 most frequent words in order to enjoy 95% coverage of the vocabulary used in spontaneous speech (Nation 2006). However, there has been little data available that reveal how many of these most frequent words can be recognized by university language majors, with Robles-García´s (2020a, 2020b) recent study being a welcome exception. The present inquiry into L2 vocabulary gains employed the same word-recognition test developed by Robles-García (2020a) in order to characterize the vocabulary size enjoyed by upper-division Spanish majors, both non-native and bilingual native (i.e., heritage) speakers, enrolled in a California public university. The results show that non-native Spanish majors in their third and fourth year of the major are still struggling to learn the first 3,000 most frequent Spanish words. In contrast, the heritage students demonstrated strong word recognition of almost all of the words in this basic inventory. The curricular implications of these results are discussed with respect to both non-native and bilingual native Spanish majors and an argument is made for continued explicit vocabulary instruction throughout the upper-division program.

This paper contributes to the much debated yet still largely unanswered question of how second language (L2) learning is anchored and configured in and through social interaction. Using a socio-interactional approach to second language (L2) learning (e.g., Hellermann, 2008; Mondada & Pekarek Doehler, 2004; Pekarek Doehler, 2010), I examine students’ search for the meaning of a lexical item and ...

The corpus-informed pedagogical intervention described in this article was developed for an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) course designed for prospective International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and implemented ...