thomas leverett weblog

familiarity hierarchy

Vocabulary mastery is the single most important element of a language learner's competence. It is at the base of listening and reading competence; without vocabulary mastery, the other skills are meaningless. It is a good indicator of a student's overall progress with language learning for several reasons; first, it correlates with self-responsibility; second, it runs through the skills as stated above; and finally, the level of mastery determines whether a student can really move up into different levels of fluency.

But mastery of vocabulary is difficult to define. A student must first become aware of a word, remember it and have some idea of its meaning, translated into the L1. Already we must divide students into those who learn by hearing and those who learn by reading; the former group may never know how it's spelled; the latter group may never know how it sounds. But these key elements are part of the word too.

As the student becomes more aware of the word and the way it's used in the language, he/she becomes aware that its translation is generally not perfect; i.e. it is not used in quite the same way as its L1 counterpart. It has grammatical information associated with it; it's used in certain ways and at certain times, with other words. It may have forms that are associated with it- plurals, in the case of nouns, or participles in the case of verbs. It can be assumed that students are learning these together, as a group, but that may not be the case.

One of the most critical stages of the student's mastery of vocabulary is when he/she reaches the point where it is not necessary to translate the word in order to use it in a sentence. At this point the student is familiar enough with the word to just grab it right off the page, so to speak, and run with it (for the listener, of course, the analogy is different). Unfortunately there are millions of words, and it takes a bit of work to get to this point.

The principle of the heirarchy is merely that students have to enter at the lower levels, become aware of the word, become more familiar with it, and work their way up until they have mastered the crucial elements of the word. Sometimes, even for native speakers, there are gaps in their knowlege which may be insurmountable or not. Sometimes incomplete knowlege at one level prevents them from moving to the next.

I actually explain the basics of this idea to students in order to show them that just memorizing the translation of a word is not enough....an idea that they usually have no trouble with. I try to explain the job they have in front of them and organize my teaching in order to make that job easier, or at least, helping them to stay aware of the entire task in front of them.

posted by tom @ 7:24 AM