What we mean by knowing a word

Talofa lava.

Last week I went to a presentation on teaching and learning vocabulary. The presenter, Natalie Kirton, (TEAM Solutions, University of Auckland) has made a study of the subject as part of her Masters degree. She had some points which are of great interest to us as teachers and learners of languages. The first of these was on the topic of what we mean by knowing a word.

Natalie quoted Dale and Rourke (1985) who give these four levels.

• L1 I have never seen or heard the word before
• L2 I’ve seen or heard it, but I don’t know what it means
• L3 I recognise it in context, I can tell you what it is related to
• L4 I know the word well

Scott Thornbury in “How to Teach Vocabulary” (2002) explains that complete knowledge of a word includes knowing its written and spoken form, its meanings and the words it most commonly associated with, its derivation, how it is used in different situations its frequency, we usually choose not to use uncommon words with listeners who are unlikely to know them its grammatical behaviour, how it can be used as a verb, noun, adverb etc its connotations (the meanings native speakers associate with it, eg in English street walker is taken to mean something other than a person who walks on streets.

It can be seen that knowing a word is a complex concept. For learners of other languages there is a tremendous amount of work to be done in building up word knowledge to cover all these criteria. As parents and teachers we need to keep in mind that our students need on-going exposure to all these possibilities so that the knowledge is built up. Each time a word is encountered in a new way it should result in an increase of the knowledge of the word. We can help by using lots of words in lots of situations and by drawing children’s attention to the features mentioned above. We can also share the levels with them so that they can say at which level they know the word. This makes them aware of what they need to do about that word.

I believe that we can often use the term “chunk” in the place of “word” with the outcome that the learner gives attention to the word groups which make up the basic building blocks of language.

Ia manuia lou aso,

Chris