The paper is descriptive in nature.

It reviews literature in the area of

vocabulary teaching. It traces how frequency word lists were prepared during
vocabulary control movement, research in the area of word knowledge and
teaching, vocabulary learning strategies, and vocabulary tasks types that can
be developed for deeper processing of words when the research is carried out
by the scholars. The paper covers the research that had been carried out
before the explosion of ICT tools. The review would be of great help to the
scholars doing research in the area of vocabulary teaching.

Vocabulary Control Movement and Preparation of Word Lists

Most work in the area of vocabulary has been concerned not with lexical
learning as such, but with the management of vocabulary learning: how to
reduce the vocabulary load, as reflected in the frequency count movement
from the time of Ogden in 1930. In the 1990s, much larger corpora have been
created. The British National Corpus and the Cambridge International Corpus
both totaled 100 million words in July 1998. In 1995, editions of the Collins
COBUILD and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English coding
systems were used to identify high frequency words. Nation's University
Word List (1990) had been replaced by Academic Word List (Coxhead,
1998). The demand for high frequency word lists is due to teachers and
research scholars' interest in testing the word level knowledge of the second
language learners. Nation and Robert in "Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage and
Word Lists" discuss the criteria used for vocabulary selection and teaching
(Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997). Schmitt and McCarthy (1997) suggest that
the word selection should be based on representativeness to wide range users
of language, frequency and range. They suggest the inclusion of word
families and idioms and set expressions that could provide a wide range of
information like the form and parts of speech in a word family, frequency,
underlying meaning, etc. The major problem of choosing words based on
frequency is solved by computational corpus. White (1999) suggests that
words that are relevant to the needs of the learners and which are easy and
likely to interest the learners should be presented early in the course. The
criteria would be mostly applicable in the early stages, and at more advanced
levels, the guiding criterion would be personal interest as at the later stages,
words required for specific purposes that should meet the needs of the
learners.

For teaching the elementary level students, Meara (1997) suggests a

vocabulary of 2,000 words that would allow learners to operate in an
unpredictable world outside the classroom. Meara feels that it might be
possible for beginners to learn through intensive methods and on partial basis
the recommended 2,000 words in as little as 40 hours. To achieve this, he
suggests key word method, asking learners to underline the words they
recognize in texts in order to practice recognizing word form accurately and
using word games.

Aspects of Word Teaching and Learning

It is generally agreed that a knowledge of the word form (pronunciation and

spelling), word structure, the common derivations of the word in a phrase and
sentence, word meaning (multiplicity of meaning and metaphorical
extensions of meaning), lexical relations of the word with other words, such
as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and common collocations (Bhatia, 1997),
are essential for an educated native speaker. The L2 learner's knowledge of
the word may be partial. Some areas might be difficult for a second language
learner. A very influential view of vocabulary acquisition claims that most of
the words are acquired by exposure to language input, particularly written
input, rather than by deliberately committing words to the memory
(Sternberg, 1987; and Nagy, 1997).

ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLE IUP Journal of English Studies

Towards Better Vocabulary Proficiency: Research

Trends in the Area of Vocabulary Teaching
By Sripada, Pushpa Nagini

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3726641141/towards-better-
vocabulary-proficiency-research-trends