Introducing Knowledge‐based Vocabulary Lists (KVL)
Norbert Schmitt, Karen Dunn, Barry O’Sullivan, Laurence Anthony, Benjamin Kremmel · TESOL Journal · 2021
Vocabulary is probably the key type of knowledge necessary for any language use, because if words to express concepts are not known, all syntactic and discourse knowledge is of little use.This is true for both first languages (L1) and second languages (L2).First language vocabulary (at least in its spoken form) is mainly learned incidentally from the massive exposure which children receive, and much second language vocabulary can be learned this way as well (see the other articles in this TESOL Journal special issue).But in classrooms and materials, second language vocabulary is largely taught in an explicit manner.This means that second language pedagogy must have a way of prioritizing which words to teach from among the multitude available.(English is estimated to have about 10 million different individual words (Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, & Keuleers, 2016).For the past hundred years or so, word lists have been used to inform this prioritization.These lists have largely been based on word frequency, that is, how often various words appear in (typically L1) discourse.These word lists have been used to identify the words that learners are likely to encounter, thus likely to need, and likely to know.However, frequency has its limitations when predicting which words might be known by L2 learners, particularly at the level of being able to produce those words (i.e., being able to recall and spell them accurately) (see Schmitt, Dunn, O'Sullivan, Anthony, & Kremmel, in press, for evidence of this).It is true that learners typically know more words in high-frequency bands than lower frequency bands; for example, learners will typically know more words in the first thousand