Language in India

This monograph on VOCABULARY EDUCATION grew out of my research, teaching, and materials production in the field of teaching Indian languages as first, second, and foreign language, for a number of years.

I believe that this book will be found highly useful for the teacher training courses in India and South Asia.

My grateful thanks are due to my colleagues at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, and the staff and faculty of various State Insitutes of Education in India, particularly the Karnataka State Council of Educational Research and Training, who gave me several opportunities to teach and share on the aspects of vocabulary education presented here.

I am immensely grateful to my wife Dr. Sharada for help in finalizing this work and to have it ready for publication in the current format.

B. Mallikarjun

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

This book discusses various linguistic, psychological and educational aspects of acquisition, use, and teaching of vocabulary.

The second chapter discusses the criteria that are used to identify word, the concept of word according to some Indian grammarians, and the number and length of words in a language along with a universal definition of word.

The third chapter seeks to classify the vocabulary stock of an individual or of a language according to certain criteria on the basis of the shared characteristics of vocabulary. It further discusses the classification of the vocabulary items in the language of children and adults.

The fourth chapter discusses the acquisition of vocabulary that is completed by the age of 7 to 9 years by a child. It emphasizes that acquisition of vocabulary continues till the end of an adult's life. Not all the vocabulary items are acquired at the same rate but all the items enter at their own pace and have their own place in the vocabulary stock of the speakers of a language.

Similarly total vocabulary of a living language also keeps on changing either by addition of new words or new meanings to the existing words, or by deletion of certain words or meanings of the words. This aspect of vocabulary is discussed in the fifth chapter.

The vocabulary composition of one language varies from that of another language. Similarly, vocabulary availability in an individual speaker depends upon his experience and exposure to the language, his education, socio-economic group to which he belongs, the dialect to which he is akin, and his IQ and sex. These aspects of vocabulary acquisition and use are discussed in the sixth chapter.

The seventh chapter discusses how vocabulary items are generated in a language. Whenever there is a need for vocabulary item in a language it has to produce the needed vocabulary by some means or the other. These processes of vocabulary production form the focus of this chapter. In order to prepare the instructional materials, and in order to understand the vocabulary of the speakers of a language, various types of vocabulary studies are conducted in India and abroad. Some of these vocabulary studies are discussed in the eighth chapter.

Better understanding of vocabulary leads to better teaching of vocabulary both in the context of first language teaching and in teaching the same language as a second language. So, in the ninth chapter, methods of teaching vocabulary and the various aspects of vocabulary are discussed.

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 2
WORD AND VOCABULARY

The concept of word is definable only in terms of specific structural characteristics of individual languages. That is, "word" is unique and specific to individual languages. It is also true that speakers across languages have certain intuitive notions about the universal characteristics of the concept of word. Through such intuitive notions they are able to distinguish what a word is, even in a language not known to them very well.

An unambiguous and universal definition of word is not available or possible for many reasons. Each language has its own unique structural arrangements of its units that are not exactly similar to the structural patterns of any other language. Every word is a complex organization of different aspects, linguistic and extra-linguistic. Because of this, researchers have difficulty in capturing all the intricacies of language organization and word organization to arrive at a universal definition of word. However, attempts have been made both to define word in the context of a particular language and to define it universally.

In all the scholarly attempts to define word, the general features that are identified and included in the definition remained the same, but the weight given to each of these features and the componential organization of these features in the definition of word differed.

Identification of Word

There are six important criteria used to define word. These are spatial representation of word, meaning, the intonation with which a word is pronounced, its vowel harmony, its non-amenability to have other items inserted, and its indivisibility.

The first criterion is about the distribution of words in printed space. In the written representation of the language, a linguistic form between spaces is identified as word because of the convention of leaving space between two words in writing or in printing. But this criterion cannot be applied to identify and isolate words in the spoken language. Moreover, not all the languages are represented in writing. Also in the case of compound words and in the case of inflected forms, this criterion will lead to the identification of the inflected forms as words, although these inflected forms may be more than words in some sense.

The second criterion that is used to identify a word is meaning. This criterion is based on the belief that each word has a meaning, and that, in a language, each unit of meaning or segment of meaning could be identified and separated from other units of meaning. Each item thus separated is called a word. This cannot be used as an independent criterion to define word because the meaning factor used here poses a problem in distinguishing morpheme and word. When this criterion alone is applied to identify a word, it is not possible to distinguish between a word, a phrase and an idiom; even groups of words that combine to give a single meaning will come under this category. Another problem with this criterion is that of word boundary and meaning boundary; if they coincide it is all right; if they do not coincide, this criterion will not work.

In some languages, the feature of stress is used as a criterion to identify the word, because, in these languages, stress falls on a particular syllable in each word. In other words, the position of stress in a word is fixed. Using this criterion it is easy to identify in speech these stressed syllables and, in turn, the words.

It can be said that the criterion of isolation and insertion come into operation normally after the identification of a word in order to check and confirm whether a particular item is a word or not. If it is not possible to insert any other linguistic feature into the identified unit, it is taken as a word. If insertion is possible, it may not be a word. If the identified word can occur in isolation in the natural language usage context, it is confirmed that it is a word. If it cannot occur in isolation, it is not a word. So, word is taken as an indivisible entity.

In conclusion, it may be said that it may not be possible to apply a single criterion to identify a word, but recognition of a unit as a word is generally possible with the application of all these criteria.

Indian Grammarians' Concept of Word

Panini and Word

In most traditional Indian grammars, there are certain elements of grammar like pratyaya, priiti-padika, and prakruti that are used as tools to characterize a word or pada. In Asthadyaayi, Panini identifies word as the one that ends with sup the case suffix or the tin the tense affix (1.4.14).

Kesiraja and Word

The Kannada grammar Shabdamani Darpana is the oldest grammar available in Kannada. In this grammar, believed to have been written in the 13th century, Keshiraja identifies word as a combination of prakruti and pratyaya. And in places where there is no pratyaya, it is stated that it should be considered as absent or covert. The translation of the sutra that identifies the word is as follows: "Vibhakti is so called because it divides the meaning of the word. It is also known as pratyaya (suffix), The base (prakrti) takes its position before the suffix. These two join into a word" (Kulli: 1976). This definition clearly indicates the process that guides the identification of the word in Kannada. The criterion of affixation used by him resembles exactly that of Panini. The only difference is that Panini's definition includes both case and tense suffixes but Kesiraja's definition includes only case suffixes.

This definition of Kesiraja is unambiguous enough to identify a word in Kannada, because in stating the options he says that avyaya-s (indeclinable) to which the case suffixes are not added also should be considered as pada 'word', because they have covert case suffixes which have been deleted.

Tolkappiyam and Word

Tolkappiyam, the ancient Tamil Grammar, rather than defining word, identifies certain characteristics of word. These characteristics are

"155. All the words indicate objects.
156. The scholars say that a word can denote the nature of its object and its form.
157. They say that the knowing of the object is of two ways - directly and by suggestion.
158. The linguists say that the words are said to be of two kinds, noun and verb.
159. They say that the morpheme (iDiccol) and semontemes (uriccol) may appear depending upon them" (Ilakkuvanar: 1963).
If the three definitions of word offered by Panini, Kesiraja, and Tolkappiyar (the author of Tolkappiyam) are compared, it can be said that Panini and Kesiraja used affixation as the process to identify word, and that Tolkappiyar used the semantic criterion to locate the word and referred both nouns and verbs. It appears, then, that the Indian grammarians generally looked at word as a composite form of free and bound forms and defined it on the basis of the criterion of grammatical category.

A Universal Definition of Word

After discussing many definitions of word and their drawbacks, Kramsky (1969) attempts a definition that is applicable to words in most of the languages of the world. However, because of the limitation of the definition, he does not call it a universal definition. He states, "The word is the smallest independent unit of language referring to a certain linguistic reality or to a relation of such realities and characterized by certain formal features (acoustic, morphemic) either actually (as an independent component of the context) or potentially (as a unit of the lexical plan)".

At this juncture one may recall Graff (1929) who identified the errors that are made in defining word. According to him, in defining the words:

Inadequate importance is ascribed to a phonetic or semantic feature at the expense of complex, semantic-phonetic combination.

The relation of the word to the sentence and vice versa is wrongly appreciated.

The character of the word is often identified with its quantitative extension, or at least, the character and the quality of the word are not strictly separated.

Facts relating to the evolution of language are strictly separated from those relating to the state system.

Alternative Notions of Word

Because of the difficulties one faces in defining word in languages, attempts were made to identify certain concepts that might solve the problem of identification of the word. One such attempt is that of Harold Palmer, and his concept of monolog, miolog, and phiolog, where monologs are 'words in conventional sense, represented graphically by a group of letters beginning and ending with a space functionally independent unit; miologs as being components of monologs, and recognizable linguistically as derivational and inflexional affixes and are made up of two or more monologs; and phiologs as being units containing monologs but representing in some way a semantic entity. In this classification, says Bunkin (1968) 'the miolog involves us in morphology, the phiolog in syntax'.

Length and Number of Words in a Language

An observation of the data from various languages indicates the fact that neither the length of the word nor the total vocabulary of any two languages coincides with each other.

Komlev (1976) attributes the reason for this disparity to the dependence of these factors on the 'number of phonemes in the language' and says that 'the length is inversely proportional to the number of phonemes in the phonological system of the language.' And according to him the size of the vocabulary of the language depends upon 'the imminent structures of the language and the extra-linguistic causes'.

Word and Vocabulary

Word and vocabulary are the two terms that are used often as synonyms. Broadly speaking, one may not make any distinction between these two, but when it comes to the precise and technical way of handling these, the difference is evident as these are two different concepts.

We have seen above that the term word refers to an individual entity. The term vocabulary, however, is a term referring to a collective concept; it refers to a collection of many entities that are called words. Vocabulary refers to the total or partial stock of words that an individual or a language has. The term word is widely spoken about in linguistics and the term vocabulary in the field of education, one at the theoretical level of understanding and the other at the practical level of application.

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 3
TYPES OF VOCABULARY

Vocabulary occupies a central place in language. In every language, vocabulary of that language can be distinguished from other non-vocabulary entities of that language.

The vocabulary items of a language can also be classified under various groups on the basis of the features shared by the vocabulary items of individual groups.

Each vocabulary item may have its own characteristics in terms of meaning and grammatical function.

Though vocabulary acquisition in children begins roughly by the end of the 12th month, it continues and ends only with the death of an adult. The characteristics of children's vocabulary differ from those of adult vocabulary. For example, a vocabulary item belonging to the noun category or the verb category may not function as a noun or a verb in the child's language.

Because of these functional differences we classify the vocabulary of a language into two major groups: children's vocabulary and adult's vocabulary.

Children's Vocabulary

For the classification of vocabulary of children, various criteria have been used. These criteria include position and manner of occurrence of vocabulary in child speech, store of the vocabulary items, the productive or receptive abilities of the child, retention or loss of vocabulary items learned by the child, and the domains in which the vocabulary items are used.

One can classify the children's vocabulary into four types as follows:

Pivot and open

Receptive and use

Cumulative and non-cumulative

General and special.

i. Pivot and open

The pivot class words are also called close-class words. The important characteristics of pivot and open class vocabulary are as follows:

Pivot class words are small in number.

Pivot class words cannot occur alone as an independent sentence in one word utterance.

Pivot class words are more frequent than the words of open class.

Pivot class words can occur in only one position in an utterance and they have a fixed position.

Pivot class words can join with any word in the other class to form an utterance but not with another word of the same class.

Pivot class words are acquired slowly.

Pivot class words are restricted mainly to the two-word stage in child's language acquisition. Pivot class words are rare once the child reaches the multi-word stage.

Open class words are also called free-class words. The important characteristics of open class words are as follows:

Open class words are more in number.

Open class words can occur alone as an independent sentence in one word utterances.

Open class words are less frequent in the initial stages of language acquisition.

Open class words can occur in both the initial and final positions in an utterance.

Open class words can join with a word of its own class or with the word of the other class to form an utterance.

Open class words are added regularly and frequently to the child's vocabulary.

Pivot class words and Open class words are generally complementary to one another as regards their position of occurrence in a construction.

Liles (1975) says that this pivot and open distinction is between nouns and non-nouns. And it is also argued that the generalizations said above are very general in nature and are not applicable to all the children belonging to all the languages.

ii. Receptive and Use Vocabulary

The child responds positively to a certain amount of vocabulary items that he listens to, but is able only to use a few of them. Accordingly one classifies the children's vocabulary into receptive and use vocabularies. In the case of receptive vocabulary:

The child will know the meaning.

He will respond appropriately to it when it is spoken to him.

He does not use it on his own. The use vocabulary consists of all the words that a child actually uses in his utterances.

Cumulative and Non-Cumulative Vocabulary

Language acquisition by a child is a cumulative process. Every moment of his exposure to language adds some grammatical item or the other into the language arena of the child. So is the case with the acquisition of vocabulary also. The child goes on accumulating vocabulary items as he gets exposed to the vocabulary items. But not all the vocabulary items to which the child is exposed would enter his active arena.

While need-filling motive ensures addition of certain vocabulary items, certain vocabulary items may be lost for other reasons. This function of addition and deletion of vocabulary items in the child language compels one to classify the vocabulary items into cumulative and non-cumulative groups. The vocabulary that continues to be in use after its acquisition, either at the receptive or at the use levels in the language of a child, is cumulative vocabulary. The vocabulary items that drop out, after their use on a few occasions are non-cumulative vocabulary.

iv. General and Special Vocabulary

This particular type of vocabulary classification perhaps falls with in the category of adult's vocabulary classification. The general vocabulary consists of such words as man, nice, and go which can be used in a variety of situations. The special vocabulary, on the other hand, consists of words with specific meanings that can be used only in certain situations (Hurlock 1972). Some of the special vocabulary groups are:

Colour vocabulary.

Number vocabulary.

Time vocabulary.

Money vocabulary.

Slang vocabulary.

Swearing vocabulary.

Adult's Vocabulary

The classification of vocabulary as adult's vocabulary has great pedagogical implications. n fact this classification is motivated and guided by pedagogical needs which in turn have led to a finer classification of adult's, vocabulary. The important types of adult's vocabulary are:

Active and passive

Recognition and reproduction

Writing, reading, speaking and potential or , marginal vocabulary

Academic and non-academic.

Form and content.

Concrete and abstract.

Basic.

Graded.

Recall.

Common.

Cognate.

Dialect.

Archaic, and

Technical

i. Active and Passive Vocabulary

This is a most convenient and popular, but at the same time, a vague way, to classify vocabulary. The criterion that is used to differentiate active vocabulary from passive vocabulary is the kind of repertory of use to which the vocabu1ary item belongs.

Child (1973) considers the 'number of words we actually use' as active vocabulary and the 'larger number we are able to understand' as passive vocabulary.

According to Finocchiaro (1958), the active vocabulary is the one that is learned very intensively with respect to form, meaning, and use in such a way that the learner will be able to use it in all the listening, speaking, reading, and writing activity. In contrast, the passive vocabulary is the one that is understood by the students in a spoken or written context, but the student cannot reproduce the same on his own.

This definition of Finocchiaro provides a pedagogic dimension to active and passive vocabulary. But this type of vocabulary classification does not help much to solve the pedagogic problems. The same vocabulary item which is in active use today may become a passive vocabulary item tomorrow; the vice versa of this is also true. That is, passive vocabulary item of today may become an active one tomorrow.

It is important to note that the quantum of passive vocabulary in the stock of vocabulary of an individual is very high, compared to that of active vocabulary of an individual. This is so because passive vocabulary could include also the active vocabulary. The active vocabulary items of an individual may be more frequency used in the language when compared to the frequency of the passive vocabulary items that an individual has. This need not, however, be true for all vocabulary items and for all individuals and the contexts.

ii. Recognition and Reproduction Vocabulary

Recognition vocabulary is defined as that which is recognized or identified in listening or reading responses. The reproduction vocabulary is identified either in spoken or written responses. The recognition vocabulary of an individual is much larger than his reproduction vocabulary.

iii. Writing, Reading, Speaking, and Potential or Marginal Vocabulary

The terminology itself reveals the criterion used to classify the vocabulary. Here, language skills are used as a criterion to classify the vocabulary items. As per Seegers (1944), writing vocabulary includes all the words one uses or should be able to use in writing. Reading vocabulary is that which comprises the words one uses or should be able to use in reading. Speaking vocabulary is that which is usually quite different from the reading vocabulary. It is typically more informal. It includes many words that are not frequently written or found in reading materials.

Potential or the marginal vocabulary is that which has to do with words which one has not met, but which he could interpret because of their form or through context. Manning (1969) suggests that the listening or speaking vocabulary is learned somewhat naturally, but reading and writing vocabulary is the one which is learnt through more formal means. However, it is difficult to agree with Manning because even the vocabulary items that are in the spoken form of the language may have been learned through formal means many a time. At the same time all the reading and writing vocabulary items need not be learned through formal means only. .

iv. Academic and N on-Academic Vocabulary

The vocabulary items that are acquired informally and that do not cause any difficulty in learning are called non-academic vocabulary. Vocabulary items that are formal, used more in writing than in speaking, and are associated with sciences, humanities, and other areas of formal learning are called academic vocabulary.

v. Form and Content Vocabulary

Leaving aside all the extra-language criteria for the classification of vocabulary, Michael West takes language structure as the major criterion to classify vocabulary. He classifies the words broadly into two major categories, with some sub-categories under each major category.

A. Form words

(a) Essential words
(b) General words

B. Content words

(a) Common environmental words
(b) Specific words

Form words are words that we speak with, and are liable to be used in any discourse on any subject. They make up the structure of the language. According to West, the essential words are nearly 150 in number and these are pronouns, conjunctions, etc. The general words are also structural in function but they are more refined, more limited in meaning and usage; and the less frequent general words are more stylistic.

Content words are the words that speakers use to talk about objects, events, etc. They constitute the substance of their talk, whereas common environmental words are words connected with things that are a part of the environment of all men.

Specific words are words that are peculiar to one group of men. The important characteristics of content words that are identified by West are as follows:

1. Most of the content words are simple in structure. They have only one or a few related meanings.
2. They are innumerable.
3. Secret language. They are unpredictable.

Nisbet (1960) agrees with West, and follows the same vocabulary classification. He suggests 300 words as essential words. Words like say, which is a general word for reply, ask, declare, but food and eat as common environmental words. Chalk, pencil, etc., are specific words.

Some other characteristics of form words are as follows:
1. They can be comparatively more easily omitted in telegrams.
2. They are not an open set because easy addition to this group is not possible and also it is difficult to replace them by another alternative form by creation.

The characteristics of content words are as follows:
1. They cannot be easily omitted in telegrams.
2. They are an open set because easy addition to this group is possible and also it is possible to replace them by another alternative form by coinage or borrowing.

vi. Concrete and Abstract Vocabulary

The concrete vocabulary represents the concrete entity, the entity that can be physically perceived through the sense either in the form of objects or in the form of events. In turn, vocabulary items representing the entities like love, soul, and fear can be called abstract vocabulary because the entities represented by these vocabulary items cannot be easily and physically perceived but need to be imagined mentally. They are only psychological realities and not the physical entities.

Note also the difference between the concrete and abstract vocabulary items in terms of their realization in the language. For example, book has a uniform realization in the speakers, whereas the mental image that the words soul, beauty, etc. conjure up is different in different speakers of the same language.

vii. Basic Vocabulary

Basic vocabulary is more widely talked about than any other type of vocabulary. Basic vocabulary is assumed to be the core of the total vocabulary of a language. That is, it consists of all the vocabulary items that are found in daily use in listening, speaking, reading, and writing contexts of the speakers of that language. It excludes all other vocabulary items that are not found in their every day language activity. Thus, the most frequent words that occur in the daily language activities are the basic vocabulary of the language. Further, it is assumed that the basic vocabulary consists only of the root words and not the derivatives.

The underlying assumption is that if one is taught the basic vocabulary and the rules of manipulation of these vocabulary items in appropriate contexts, both linguistic and social, a learner would be capable of operating with a much wider vocabulary range than covered by the basic vocabulary. The question of the utility of basic vocabulary arises in the context of teaching a language as a second language, and also in the context of teaching a language as first language in the adult education programs, because in these cases much has to be achieved within the shortest duration.

In the case of basic vocabulary research also, while one scholar considers a particular vocabulary item as an item of basic vocabulary, another scholar may consider the same item as a non-basic vocabulary item. This is due to differences in their approach to the study of the vocabulary of languages. The reasons are given in Chapter Seven.

There is another criterion for identifying certain vocabulary as basic vocabulary of a language. This is based on the assumption that all languages have vocabulary items for certain concepts representing certain things and situations irrespective of the culture and the environment they represent. Here the concept of basic vocabulary has been defined in terms of meaning. The basic vocabulary list prepared on this model, consists of 200 words like and, all, at, etc.

viii. Graded Vocabulary

The graded vocabularies are those that are graded in accordance with age or school grade of the pupil. Wherever possible, the lists of graded vocabularies try to accommodate both these variables, merge them, and form a single criterion to classify the vocabulary items of the language.

Though there is not any gradation inherent in the vocabulary of the language, it is possible to classify the vocabulary using these criteria.

This type of vocabulary classification has great pedagogical implications and benefits. It is expected that the vocabulary items used by the children of a particular school grade should find place in the teaching, learning, and reading material that is meant for that particular age and grade. These vocabulary items can also be used in the construction of aptitude tests, and other vocabulary tests intended to measure verbal intelligence. It is also true that differences in gradation may be found even when two researchers have employed the same set of criteria variables.

ix. Recall Vocabulary

The concept of recall vocabulary serves pedagogical purposes well, when recall and the content to recall are decided and defined on the basis of the contexts in which recall vocabulary are used. However, the items that constitute a recall vocabulary set may differ from one individual to another.

Let us take a situation in which a language is to be taught to an individual or to a group of people as second language. Our objective here is to train these persons to handle situations 'a, b, c...' with the help of the second language. We ask the mother tongue speakers of that language, who are actually attuned to the situations 'a, b, c...' to recall all the vocabulary items they prefer to make use of in the situations 'a, b, c�' The vocabulary items collected in this way form the recall vocabulary of the language 'x' for 'a, b, c�' situations. Such vocabulary can be used in the construction of instructional material intended for specific groups of people to handle specific situations. Also the same vocabulary may be used in the construction of tests to measure the language competence of the mother tongue speakers in the 'a, b, c....' situations.

There is another way of recalling vocabulary items also. One can list as many semantic categories (like animals, vegetables, etc.,) as possible and ask the relevant speakers of that language to recall the vocabulary items under each of the semantic categories given to them.

x. Common Vocabulary

When we consider the vocabulary of two or more languages that are genetically related, we speak of cognate vocabulary. Languages, even when not genetically related, may have vocabulary items common to them for several reasons. In such conditions we talk of common vocabulary.

When languages have contact with each other, they tend to share vocabulary items. Languages A and B may not have contact with each other directly, but due to their contact with a third language C, they may share vocabulary items.

The criteria used to determine the commonness of vocabulary between two or more languages include the similarity and the dissimilarity in terms of shape and meaning of the vocabulary items in both the languages. While studying the common vocabulary of two or more languages it is customary to classify them into a few groups on the basis of the similarity and differences in terms of shape and meaning.

They are

1. vocabulary items that have similar shape in both the languages with similar meaning in the both languages,
2. vocabulary items that have dissimilar shape in both the languages with similar meanings in both the languages,
3. vocabulary items that have similar shape in both the languages with different meanings in both the languages, and
4. vocabulary items that have similar shape in both the languages but with deleted or added meanings in both the languages.

The commonness in the vocabulary of the two or more language can be exploited to the maximum in teaching those languages, and in the production of instructional materials.

xi. Cognate Vocabulary

When we speak of the vocabulary of genetically related languages, we speak of cognate vocabulary. It is quite natural for the genetically related languages to have vocabulary items common to them, with wide range of similarity and dissimilarity in shape and meaning. While using these cognate vocabularies for the teaching and preparation of instructional materials, another type of vocabulary is also considered. This is the category of the vocabulary items that are common to two or more genetically related languages, not because of genetic relationship, but because of borrowing from the same source.

These vocabulary items taken into two or more genetically related languages from a third source are also very useful for the teaching and learning process.

xii. Dialect Vocabulary

Vocabulary items that are identified with a particular socio-economic group of speakers of a language, or identified with the speakers in a particular geographic region, are called dialect vocabulary and these vocabulary items are normally absent in the standard language. These can be found in the regional literature produced by writers belonging to a particular class or region. The place and use of the dialect vocabulary in the teaching and learning of a particular language as mother tongue or as a second language is not yet clear.

xiii. Archaic Vocabulary

Due to linguistic and non-linguistic reasons, vocabulary items may fall out of use from the current spoken and written language. Such vocabulary items that fall into disuse are called archaic vocabulary. These vocabu1ary items are naturally found in old written literature and also in folk literature. There are a1so the possibilities that a lesser-known dialect of the same language may have more archaic items in currency. When a language has to be used in newer circumstances, that language may borrow the archaic vocabulary from that dialect, or from the old literature of the same language.

xiv. Technical Vocabulary

Technical vocabulary is a special vocabulary, generally within the group of learned vocabulary. Here is an intimate relation between the concept that is being expressed by the word and the word itself.

Technical vocabulary forms a major constituent of a topic or subject. A technical vocabulary item belonging to a particular technical subject or technical context indicates specific meanings, the same item with the same physical features. But, in the context of another technical subject or technical context, it may indicate different specific meanings.

At times, a vocabulary item used as a technical term may indicate one meaning in the technical content and another different meaning in the language of daily life. For example, sound in physics is different from sound in physical education, and sound in the language of day-to-day life. This is an important characteristic of the technical vocabulary.

In most of the languages, the technical vocabulary is 'created' along with technical inventions either by borrowing, or by translating the concept into the native language. Except in a very few rare cases, it is generally acquired through formal learning. It is used by specific groups of peop1e for specific purposes and not learned in isolation. This category of vocabulary remains a part of the professional domains of the native speakers of a language.

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CHAPTER 4
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGE OF AN INDIVIDUAL

The research conducted on the vocabulary development of the speakers of a language reflects also the research on child language development. The development of a language in an individual is an all embracing and cohesive phenomenon and it cannot be completely compartmentalized into various aspects of language, such as vocabulary, grammar, and meaning. It is not also possible to treat vocabulary development as identical to language development. The various aspects of a language develop in its speakers at different rates, but they are related to each other because the development of one aspect of a language depends on and influence the development of another aspect.

The child's first utterance of a meaningful voca1bulary item is the basic step in his acquisition of language. Before he utters his first vocabulary item, a lot of language maneuvering would have taken place in and around his environment. Throughout this non-verbal as well as language communication maneuvering period, the child listens to the abbreviated and regular speech spoken to him and around him, from which he picks up the raw data to build his own language, and he communicates with gestures and vocalizations.

The following may be given as the stages of child'sacquisition of vocabulary.

Stage I Cooing
Stage II Babbling or lalling
Stage III dada mama words
Stage IV Label words
Stage V One word stage, or holophrastic stage

These five stages in the acquisition of vocabulary are a continuum, and hence it is not possible to specify as to when a particular stage of acquisition ends and when the next stage of acquisition begins. Only approximations are possible, and only approximations are attempted here.

A few child language researchers are of the opinion that the birth cry of the child is the beginning of language acquisition. The researches have shown that the child will be able to utter, and will be uttering, almost all the vowels and half of the consonants of the adult's language by the age of 3 months. This is the cooing stage. In this stage, the child would not utter these sounds with a purpose. The Cooing sounds are said to be of an exploring nature.

There is a controversy as to whether the sounds that a child utters can be called consonants or vowels depending upon their resemblance to the adult speech sound. The main objection that is raised is that these sounds do not have any functional value similar to the consonants and vowels of the adult language in an utterance. They, however, have functions in the communicative act.

By the age of 8-9 months, the child is capable of uttering all the vowels and almost all the consonants of the adult language. Once the child becomes capable of uttering both the vowels and consonants, he starts combining them. By nesting these vowels and consonants, he forms syllables. This stage of formation of syllables could also be the babbling stage. This babbling stage is the continuation of the cooing stage. This stage normally continues till the end of the 12th month. It may continue for some more months beyond the 12th month.

Researchers recognize the babbling stage as an important stage in the normal development of a child. There are divergent views about the nature and function of babbling. A few relate babbling to the language development and a few do not.

Whether babbling has direct or indirect relation with the development of various aspects of language in the child or not, it is possible to say that the babbling stage in the development of a child gives way to, and facilitates, better articulation. It may help language acquisition in the latter stages also. As babbling is found in the deaf children, one should conclude that it does not depend upon the auditory and acoustic input to the child.

After attaining a capacity to nest the consonants and vowels to form syllables, the child starts clustering the syllables of the babbling stage to form the so-called mama, dada, tata, nana sounds. These are named as mama-dada words. These forms of speech sounds are invariably the ingredients of continued listening by the child. By this time the child would be 12-15 months old. These mama-dada words sometimes refer to some subjects and persons; and sometimes these may not refer to any person or object in the child's language.

The first word of the child is a word only in form. It has the function of a sentence. The child limits himself to one-word utterances in the initial stages.

There are two dimensions one should take into account for the identification of the first word. The first one is what actually would be the first word or what sort of utterance of child should be considered the first word. The second one is when does the first word occur in the language development of the child. The answer for the second question is mostly dependent on the answer to the first question.

Darley (1961), who studied 26 cases, suggests several criteria to identify the first word:

1. "To use a word intelligently, i.e., associate an idea with the object;
2. To use at least three words intelligently;
3. First use of word with meaning; word other than mama or dada not necessarily comprehensible but sound repeatedly and consistently used with a particular meaning;
4. Any word other than mama or dada used to designate definite object or situation;
5. One clear word used appropriately and consistently for the same object;
6. Words first used with meaning."

Darley concludes that the average child begins to say his first word by approximately one year. Delay of appearance of first word beyond 18 months may indicate a serious physical, mental, or hearing involvement.

Ricks (1972), considering the properties of these types of words, calls the words that refer to object or person as 'label words' and those that do not refer to any object or person as mama and dada words. Once the child reaches the stage of producing 'label words' the vocabulary growth of the child gains momentum. It would be at a slow pace in the initial stages and will become faster later. The speed of vocabulary acquisition in this stage is more dependent upon the linguistic opportunities that a child is provided with, his potential to understand the speech provided by these opportunities, and his capacity to generalize and reproduce the words. As the various aspects of language develop at different rates and the development of one-aspect influences the development of another aspect, the various aspects of vocabulary also develop at different rates and the development of one aspect of vocabulary influences the development of another aspect of vocabulary.

The various aspects of vocabulary that could be identified for studying the vocabulary development in children are

Physical properties i. Acceptable pronunciation.
ii. Acceptable written representation.

Specific properties i. Relation on one vocabulary item to another.
ii. Relation of one vocabulary item to other vocabulary items in a grammatical sentence.

From the stage at which the child utters a meaningful vocabulary item that makes reference to an object, or person, the vocabulary acquisition is studied with two points in view. They are the quantitative approach and the qualitative approach.

The quantitative approach towards the acquisition of vocabulary by children tries to estimate the total vocabulary of the child at a particular age, whereas the qualitative approach aims at identifying the components of his vocabulary at certain age in terms of parts of speech, concepts, etc., that are expressed by those vocabulary items.

The Quantitative Approach

The quantitative approaches to estimate the total vocabulary of children at a certain age have made both longitudinal as well as cross-sectional attempts. The researcher adopting the longitudinal attempt tries to keep the record of daily progress of the child in language acquisition. The researcher adopting the cross-sectional attempt tries to adopt some method of testing to estimate the total vocabulary. As early acquisition of vocabulary depends upon the constraint of linguistic opportunities of the child, the early enrichment of the vocabulary also depends upon the constraints like the parents' availability to the child and the child's exposure to varying experiences.

The table given below is the most famous and often quoted study by Smith (1926) that indicates the estimates of total vocabulary at different ages starting from the age of the emergence of the first word. I According to this study the first word appears at the age of 8 months and the total vocabulary at 12 months is 3 words. Vocabulary gain at the age of 3 years is proportionately very high compared to the other ages , in this study. Again there is a gradual decrease in the vocabulary gain from the age 5 years to 6th year.

Age

Years Months No. of Words Gain

0 8 0

0 10 1 1

1 0 3 2

1 3 19 16

1 6 22 3

1 9 118 96

2 0 272 154

2 6 446 174

3 0 896 450

3 6 1222 326

4 0 1540 318

4 6 1870 330

5 0 2072 202

5 6 2289 219

6 0 2562 273

Child (1973) indicates that the child's average vocabulary would be 3-4 words at 12 months, 20 words at 18 months, and about 200 words at 24 months, whereas at 5 years in the range of 4000-7000 words. Lenneberg (1966) estimates the child's vocabulary at 18 months 20 words, at 21 months 200 words, and at 24-27 months ranging between 300-400 words. Smart (1972) reports that the tota1 vocabulary of chi1d at 18 months is around somewhere between 3 words and 50 words, at 24 months above 50 words, and at 36 months nearly 1000 words.

All these studies indicate that there cannot be a regular and stereotype increase or similarity in the total vocabulary of the children at any age. But almost all the estimates made suggestions somewhat closer to the estimate of Smith. It should be remembered that general comprehension of a word precedes its utterance and that this holds good for the utterance of first word also. This is because of the language maneuvering of the child. By this time he would have learned to associate the vocabulary item with an object or person. But, sometimes, due to the lack of knowledge of vocabu1ar, the child will over-generalize by using the same word to refer to two or three objects or persons, related or unrelated.

As the child grows older, on the one hand, the quantum of vocabulary increases, and, on the other hand, the existing vocabulary is made more precise in many aspects. In the initial stages, the child may learn by associating a word with an object or person, but in the next stages, as his capacities to acquire vocabulary grow, he may try to extract the meaning of the vocabulary item from the context in which it is found, and may use it correctly and wherever necessary.

The first stage of vocabulary hike will be when the child starts to combine two or more words to form two or three-word utterances. Especially till the child undergoes schooling, most of his vocabulary will be limited to the objects and persons existing around the child's environment.

The second stage of vocabulary hike will be during the early schooling period. When the child enters the school, he begins to talk about a wide range of new topics, along with the old topics in the new environment amidst different objects around him and among persons whom he has not known earlier. Along with the speaking skill, there would be a steady increase in the total vocabulary as he gets proficiency in the skills of reading and writing.

The third stage of vocabulary hike would be when the child masters all the grammatical structures and when it becomes possible for him to concentrate on more vocabulary acquisition, without being conscious of the acquisition process. The third stage, in fact, is a stage which runs through the other two.

Now, for the causes of such vocabulary increase:

1. The first cause is child's naming behavior. The child tries to name the things that arouse his curiosity.
2. The second cause is his growing need to communicate with his surrounding to get things done for him, and to express himself.
3. Thirdly, the child's capacity to organize the language material in order to convey the message more precisely develops further. Especially when the child starts to put words together to make two-word and three-word utterances, the child's vocabulary increases proportionately and substantially.
4. Fourthly, the child develops a potential to comprehend vocabulary items from his linguistic environment and use what he comprehends. So, there is a visible hike in the total vocabulary of the child as he passes from one stage to another.

The vocabulary acquired by a child does not remain in store for all the time. Some of these will be dropped. Leopold (1948) suggests seven reasons why words in use are dropped from the active vocabulary of children. They are:

1. The phonetic form may be a reason. If a particular word is phonetically difficult for the child to utter, it will be dropped.
2. Homonymy may be a reason. If the child has a word for two referents, one of these is dropped.
3. Acquisition of more specific terms may be a reason. When a more precise term is acquired, the terms so far employed with imprecise generalizations will be dropped.
4. Change in the child's interest may be a reason. If the child loses her interest in certain fields of activity, words concerning that activity will be dropped.
5. Rejection of the non-standard terms may be a reason.
6. The child's struggle with the synonyms encountered may be a reason. If a synonym is acquired, the child may drop the previously acquired term.
7. Lack of stability of the words acquired may be a reason: Some words may enter the arena of' child's vocabulary and simply drop out; no reasons can be attributed to the loss in these cases.

The Qualitative Approach

The qualitative approach to the study of children's vocabulary provides the picture of the composition of their vocabulary. The qualitative studies give information about the parts of speech in the children's speech, concepts that are expressed by children and the "vocabulary attitudes" of children. A child acquires the vocabulary spoken around him in his own way. The child's earliest words are emotional and only 20% are expositional. The four major semantic domains that are expressed by children are concerned with their mother, father, siblings and home (Shirly, 1938).

A small group of words referring to food, people, animals and other things that are acquired in the early ages of the child indicates that the objects and events are perceived in dynamic relationships (Nelson, 1974). In children's vocabulary, the noun's character of 'thingness' and the verb's character of 'action' are better demonstrated than in adult's vocabulary (Brown, 1957).

Because of the naming process, a child would acquire nouns first. Because of his limitations, he will use them as verbs also. So, in the early stages of acquisition, it is very difficult to identify as to which grammatical category a vocabulary item belongs to without the help of the context in which it is used. Even when the context is provided, it may be difficult to say to what category it belongs. Weir (1962) has made an attempt to classify the 30-month old child's vocabulary into parts of speech as per the strategy adopted for the study.

Content Words

1. Nouns 37.9%
2. Verbs 26.7%
3. Adverbs 15.3%
4. Adjectives 7.9%
5. Pronouns 9.2%
6. Numerals 3.0%

Function Words

1. Articles 48.5%
2. Prepositions 25.3%
3. Conjunctions 11.4%
4. Interjection 14.8%

Though a child is using her early words arbitrarily to designate the things and actions, she is aware of the semantic correlates of count nouns, mass nouns, and verbs by the age of 3 years (Brown, 1957).

The Order of Acquisition

The order of acquisition of vocabulary is said to be the following:

1. Proper names (because in their acquisition there is one to one correspondence).
2. Common nouns.
3. Relational words, dimensional adjectives like big, tall.
4. The complex relational words like tomorrow, now, etc.

Marked Generational Increases in Children's Vocabulary

The researches conducted in 1950s indicated that the vocabulary of children at that time were larger than the vocabulary of children 30 years ago. The introduction of radio and TV increased the educational opportunities for the children, and the better economic conditions of the parents permitted them to provided good education to the children in the early age. These changes that took place in the society were suggested as the causes for the larger vocabulary. At the same it is possible to say that the improved methods of estimation of vocabulary also might have been an important factor.

In a language like English, with flexible attitude towards the acceptance of the vocabulary items from other languages to satisfy the needs of expression, one could identify a marked increase in the total number of words used. If a comparison of the lexical expansion in the language with the proportion of vocabulary acquired by the children from that linguistic community is done, we may get an idea as to what vocabulary are really new in the total vocabulary acquired by children in that linguistic community. It will throw light also on the real reasons for the improved vocabulary acquisition of the children in terms of the number and kinds of words used.

Can We Suggest a Definitive Quantum of Vocabulary Across Language Communities?

One cannot, indeed, suggest, or arrive at a definite number of vocabulary items for a particular age group that is applicable to all languages and in all linguistic communities. This is so for two reasons: firstly, the results of studies conducted so far can be further improved; secondly, the stage of development of each language on various counts may also have an impact. The distinctions in the meanings of words may be another factor. In the last case, it is also quite necessary to consider the vocabulary potential of the language under study.

Assume that a language has a total vocabulary of one lakh words, and another language has a total vocabulary of a few thousand words. The language belonging to the first category has a potential to make finer and finest distinctions of expressions, and the language of the second category may not have the same facility to make finer distinctions in expression with different shades of meaning as the first one. It is not convincing when we put the condition in this manner. However, if you have worked with a monolingual pre-literate community any where in India, you will see the validity of my point. This factor also may be considered when comparing the total vocabulary of children at certain age. It may be possible to state the concepts that are expressed in the early ages of the learner but it may not be possible to estimate the total vocabulary at a particular age of the speaker. So, a study of vocabulary networks at a certain age of the speaker rather than a study of the vocabulary of the speaker may help in understanding the vocabulary development in children.

Acquisition of Content and Function Vocabulary

All the vocabulary items of the language will not be acquired with the same speed and pace. Various types of vocabulary items have different speeds with which they enter the vocabulary of the children. It is identified that content words with a few exceptions enter the children's vocabulary as the first set of vocabulary items acquired. Function words or grammatical words are acquired a bit late.

It is generally seen that the second year of the child is the average age at which the acquisition of function words may begin. Content words are acquired through an encounter a child has with his or her environment, and also through a perception of their recurrence in sentences. Function words are useful only in conjunction with other words. Hence, they are acquired individually and precisely.

Bloom (1973) finds the function words dominating when compared to other words because they link a child's various experiences. Once the child acquires the function words, they would remain intact in his vocabulary because of their frequent use and, may be, because they are also less in number. Since the content words are more in number and since all of them cannot be put into frequent use they would get deleted if not used by the child for long.

Acquisition of Dialect Vocabulary Especially in the early childhood, that too before entering into the formal learning teaching situation in the classroom, the child normally listens to the peer group and parents. Through this he acquires the dialect vocabulary. Even in the later stages of child- hood, after the formal education of four to five years the child would stick on to the dialect vocabulary rather than switching over to the standard vocabulary. This may be so because he, perhaps, finds it inconvenient to switch over to the standard vocabulary both in formal and informal situations. This may also be because of his inability to recall the standard vocabulary items; which may be caused by lack of reinforcement to its use in the informal as well as in formal situations. Only when the child becomes aware of the prestige attached to the use of standard vocabulary items, he makes conscious efforts to avoid dialect vocabulary and use the standard vocabulary. The actual age at which the child begins to use the standard vocabulary items, instead those of the dialect vocabulary, both consciously and unconsciously, is not identifiable because it depends upon the language situation in which he is living and the situation in which formal learning and teaching takes place.

Acquisition of Concrete and Abstract Vocabulary

There are two angles from which the terms concrete and abstract vocabulary acquisition have been conceived. The first one is with reference to the acquisition of the concrete and abstract vocabulary that represents the concepts that are concrete and abstract respectively. For example, the items beautiful and ugly would represent the abstract vocabulary, and boy and girl would represent concrete vocabulary.

In the second angle the concrete and abstract vocabulary may not represent the concrete and abstract concepts. But, here, an abstract vocabulary is conceived as a term to represent a class of objects or ideas, and the members of this class would be referred to as concrete vocabulary item. For example, when flower represents a class of objects and jasmine and rose represent the 'members of the class of flowers, flower becomes an abstract vocabulary item, and rose, and jasmine concrete vocabulary items. Flower is called a super-ordinate term and rose and jasmine are called sub-ordinate terms.

The most often quoted example in this context is that of a child's acquisition of vocabulary items dog and daddy. When he first acquires these items, he is able to associate dog with the object dog, and daddy with the object daddy. But, in addition, he generalizes these to identify any 'four-legged' animal as dog, and any man as daddy. Note, however, that this could be an example of overgeneralization in the acquisition of vocabulary, rather than an example for the acquisition of concrete and abstract vocabulary.

Before going into the details of acquisition of concrete and abstract vocabulary, we have to accept the fact that abstract vocabulary items in a language are comparatively and considerably less in number than the concrete vocabulary in both the senses described above.

Firstly, let us consider the acquisition of the first type of concrete and abstract vocabulary. Since the terms beautiful and ugly represent the two abstract concepts that are not easily conceivable by children in their early ages and which need for their conception certain maturity on the part of the children, acquisition of these items generally needs formal teaching, without which the acquisition of these would be delayed, compared to the acquisition of the concrete vocabulary. Thus, items like boy and girl would be acquired before ugly and beautiful. It seems that this feature is applicable universally in all languages.

Three Views About the Second Angle Regarding the Acquisition of Concrete and Abstract Words

There are three views regarding the second type of concrete and abstract vocabulary acquisition.

1. The first view argues that the concrete vocabulary is acquired first and that the acquisition of the abstract vocabulary follows.
2. The second view proposes that the abstract vocabulary is learned early, and that only later on the concrete vocabulary is acquired.
3. The third view presents that the vocabulary items, which represent the objects with the dynamic properties, that is, the vocabulary items that represent the objects, which have manipulability or movable properties, are acquired before the vocabulary items that represent the objects with non-dynamic properties with a few exceptions.

For the time being, instead of arriving at the generalizations like these, it would be better to indicate that, irrespective of concrete, abstract and dynamic properties, a child in his early age acquires the vocabulary items representing the objects, actions, and persons that are more easily accessible.

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CHAPTER 5
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGES OF A LANGUAGE

When we look at the acquisition and use of vocabulary in a time perspective, we have two levels: vocabulary through the ages of an individual speaker of a language, and vocabulary through the historical periods of the language itself.

Like human beings, language may also be considered a living organism, which is subjected to both decay and development. Total vocabulary of an individual is not constant at any age and time in his life span. It is constantly subjected to change. The new experiences may bring subtle changes in the individual's vocabulary by adding some items to his vocabulary. The words that are in his total vocabulary may get deleted because of lack of opportunities for him to use those items, or because of the circumstances, which demand and maintain the use of such items, do not exist any more, or some of the words of the total stock may acquire new meanings. This we have seen in the previous chapter.

Similarly contact with new cultures, new knowledge, and other languages do cause an advent of new concepts into a language, and these concepts are made available to the users of that language through new words or new conventions in the use of existing words. When this contact generally necessitates the mutual flow of ideas and concepts, naturally there will be need for vocabulary that captures these concepts adequately in both the languages.

Vocabulary composition of a language is a more loosely knit structure than its phonological and syntactic composition. So, vocabulary is one of the aspects of language that is subjected constantly to change. In human world, no new concept originates without it being given a name in one language or the other. An original concept travels across language barriers to reach people, and while crossing from one language over to another language, a concept may retain its original name with modifications or without modifications, or it may get another new name in another language. It all depends upon the acceptability of these vocabulary items by the speakers of the language and the acceptability of these new items by the structure of the language.

All these processes can be broadly brought under three headings. They are Accretion, Deletion, and Meaning change.

Accretion

Accretion is a process which adds vocabulary items to the language. There are many ways to add vocabulary items to a language spoken today, but the main ways are as follows.

1. A word that is no longer in circulation in a language can be brought back into active use in the same language:
i. Either with the same form and same meaning,
ii. With the same form and different meaning, or
iii. With a little different form and the same meaning, or
iv. With a little different form and a little different meaning.

2. A new word can be created with the help of existing words of the same language in order to express:

i. A different meaninrg,
ii. A collective meaning, that is, two or more words may be combined to give a collective meaning, as in the following Kannada words: laghu kathe 'short story', siime eNNe 'kerosene', jalaantargaami 'submarine', hallupuDi 'tooth powder'.
iii. A collective different meaning, that is, two or more words may be combined to give a meaning other than the meanings of the joined words, or
iv. A little modified form with different meaning.

3. The new word can be borrowed from some other language with:

i. The same form and the same meaning. raatri 'night', diipa 'light', mukha 'face', dharma 'religion', yuddha 'war', and manca 'cot' are borrowed from Sanskrit into Kannada. Similarly sarkaara 'government', kaanuunu 'rule', and manjuuru 'sanction' are borrowed from Hindustani into Kannada.
ii. The same form and different meaning.
iii. A little modified form with the same meaning: 'office' in English into Kannada aafiissu, 'receipt' in English into rasiidi in Kannada, and 'college' in English into Kannada as kaaleej.
iv. A little modified form with different meaning.

The reasons for such a process of accretion are found in the needs of the language to express the new concepts it encounters in the process of growth.

The next question is as to whether these vocabulary items that enter into a language due to the process of accretion enter also the vocabulary repository of the speakers of these languages? This is an important question because, until and unless the word enters the repository of the speaker in one mode or the other, the process of accretion will not be complete. If the life of a vocabulary item becomes unsustainable, it may vanish without due recognition. The words taken into the language may lead to new rules of word derivation. The borrowing of vocabulary thus may lead to changes in the phonological and syntactic structure of the recipient language also.

Deletion

Deletion is a process due to which the vocabulary items used in a language go out of use. First the item, which is in the process of deletion, enters the marginal vocabulary repertory and then vanishes from use but not from the language. This is so because once a vocabulary item enters a language it never gets deleted completely. It may fall out of use but it remains in the documents. The newly created word, or an old word used in the new sense but yet in the need of acceptance by the users of the language, is called a neologism. The neologisms that enter the written documents in a language will remain, whereas the neologisms that do not enter the written documents will slowly fall out of use.

The possible reasons for the vocabulary deletion are as follows:

i. The concepts may not be in use.
ii. The difficulty of use due to pronunciation and other linguistic variables such as the length of a word.
iii. Arrival of a new popular word (through borrowing or creation) in place of the existing word.
iv. Motivated coinages: For example the attempt of the women's liberation movement to create the word herstory in place of history may be under the impression that history's his has masculine or male touch. But actually the word history has a different history of origin and development.
v. Non-acceptability of the vocabulary item by the speakers of that language.

Meaning Change

Vocabulary items that acquire new meanings delete some of their old meanings, depending upon the users. Though not all the vocabulary items of a language undergo these processes of meaning change, at least, a few of the vocabulary items in almost all the living languages undergo these processes of meaning change. This can be a gradual change, or a sudden change, or both.

The meaning change takes place in two situations. They are:

i. Meaning change in the situation of the same language, and
ii. Meaning change that takes place when a vocabulary item is borrowed from one language into another language.

The meaning change in the first situation cited above can take the following possibilities:

i. Complete change in the original meaning of a vocabulary item. sire in old Kannada had the meaning cloth. Now it is used to mean only a saree
ii. Addition of new meanings,
iii. Deletion of some of the meanings, and
iv. Addition of new meanings and deletion of old meanings. koori 'cloth' in Old Kannada, kuuLu 'rice' 'food' in Old Kannada mean 'torn cloth' and 'the food given to unwanted people' respectively in Modern Kannada.

Meaning Change Possibilities in Borrowing

The meaning change due to borrowing of one vocabulary item from one language into another language has four possibilities. These have bee elucidated in the accretion process.

Some of the above said types of meaning change are classified into several groups depending upon the type of change that takes place.

1. Generalization is a process in which a particular vocabulary item used with a particular meaning gets the generalized meaning. Pen is such a word. This had the meaning of 'feather used for writing'. It is now used to refer to all kinds of instruments used for writing purposes.
2. Specialization is in a way an opposite process of the generalization process. That is, if a word has a general meaning, the meaning will get restricted or specialized. Wife is such a word. This was earlier used to refer to all women. Now it refers only 'wife', that is, spouse.
3. Elevation or amelioration is the process in which a particular word used to refer to people or objects of lesser status gets an elevated position and is used to refer to people or objects of higher status. Minister is one of the words in this category. This word was earlier used to refer to servant. Now it is used to refer to people who govern. The word symposium was similarly used to refer to a drinking party but, now, it is used for a gathering in which discussions of a higher order are pursued.
4. Opposite to the above said process is the process of degeneration or pejoratives. The words referring to things of a higher status begin to refer to things of lower status. Hypocrite is such a word. This was earlier used to refer to an actor on the stage. Now it refers to a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue. Similarly the word clown that was used to refer to a peasant now refers to a joker.
5. Expansion is another process of meaning change in which the meaning of the word gets expanded. Engineering and manufacture are such words. Engineering earlier meant the art of managing the engines and manufacture meant 'to make by hand,' but today they have expanded the arena to mean a profession and anything produced in small scale and large scale industry respectively.

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CHAPTER 6
THE VARIABLES THAT IMPACT VOCABULARY CHANGES

There are certain specific features of vocabulary that may be in contrast with the other aspects of a language, such as phonology and syntax. For example, the vocabulary component of language is an open-ended system, that is, additions and deletions to this stock is easily possible, whereas such additions, deletions, and other types of changes are not that easy to make in the phonological and syntactic systems of a language. Even in child's language acquisition, the acquisition of the phonological and syntactic aspects of the language ceases within 7 to 10 years of age. But the process of vocabulary acquisition continues through out the lifetime of the individual.

So, it is necessary to deal with the variables, which make the vocabulary of a person or a group of persons or a language vary in time. Such variables are: experience and exposure of an individual or a group of speakers, education, socioeconomic grouping, age, IQ, dialect, and gender. Language.

First, let us consider language as a variable. Vocabulary of a language never corresponds exactly to the vocabulary of another language either in quality or in quantity. A language like Eskimo has many words to distinguish between kinds of snow, whereas Kannada has only one counterpart. Similarly, the Arabic language consists of many vocabulary items to represent the several types of 'horses'. Hopi language does not have a straightforward counterpart word for the English word water. Instead, it has two words to refer to water. One word refers to water in the free state, that is, for water in a lake or fountain, and the other word refers to water in a contained state, that is, water in a glass or bottle. In this context, words that refer to colors in English and Navaho also may be compared. The English word/concept black has two categories in Navaho, whereas Navaho has only one category for the English words blue and green.

The physical and cultural set up that is inherent in the speakers of a language gets more widely expressed in the vocabulary composition of the language than in any other aspect of the language. The differences in cultures get more reflected in the vocabulary composition of a language rather than in the phonological and syntactic aspects of the same language.

The vocabulary of a language, in addition to reflecting the socio-geographic, cultural, and political environments, reflects also the attitude of the speakers of that language towards other languages and cultures. This attitudinal aspect is reflected in the acceptance or non-acceptance, or the unavoidable acceptance of vocabulary items from other languages. In many cases, there are possibilities in which the history also gets reflected in the vocabulary of the language. Presence of vocabulary items from many languages in English is a result of direct and indirect contacts of that language with many other languages. Similarly presence of Sanskrit, Portuguese, Persian, and English words in Kannada exhibits the contact of Kannada with these languages and cultures. In contrast to Kannada, Tamil, with its purist attitude, exhibits a lesser tendency to accept direct vocabulary borrowings from other languages. It tends to create its own vocabulary for the new concepts on the basis of local stock or indigenous material.

Experience and Exposure

Vocabulary composition of a language may reflect several non-linguistic aspects of that language. The vocabulary composition of an individual speaker or a group of speakers of a language may reflect the non-linguistic aspects of his life also. So, when a person speaks in a language, his speech normally carries some linguistically related information, in addition to the verbatim message or literal message it carries or it is expected to convey.

The experience and exposure, which a child or an adult speaker goes through, determine the quality and quantity of vocabu1ary a person has. For example, take two persons belonging to the same profession. One person has wide experience and is exposed to many environments. The other person has only a limited experience and limited exposure. The first person automatically has a wider and deeper knowledge of vocabulary than the other person. This is true even in the case of illiterates. Education

It is an accepted fact that the total vocabulary of an educated speaker of a language may be more than that of an uneducated person. The quantum of education and the type of education one gets is also reflected in the total number and quality of vocabulary a person has, as well as the area of specialization. It is possible for one to argue that the total vocabulary in the speech of educated and uneducated individuals cannot be compared because their activity spheres are different. However, the education variable has an enormous effect on the vocabulary of the people because it isolates the knowledge and helps increase its usage. A television technologist improves his vocabulary in that particular field, and a civil engineer in his occupation. The vocabulary a professional has increases often in one direction. Schooling certainly increases one's vocabulary.

Literacy opens new avenues to the learner to seek more information, and, thus, causes an increase in a person's vocabulary. Such an opening is not easily available to an illiterate person.

Socio-Economic Grouping

The next variable is the socio-economic grouping of the speakers of a language. Persons belonging to different socio-economic classes get exposed to different linguistic and conceptual situations. Culturally deprived sections of society will have adequate vocabulary to conduct their business. However, those belonging to socially higher and economically more affluent sections are known to have a variety of words that go beyond the immediate necessity. The words used by these classes of people are known to their elaboration in terms of usage and semantic nuances. There is a greater variety of concepts used by these people. Thus there are vocabulary differences among the speakers of a language depending upon their socio-economic backgrounds.

Dialect

The region or the dialect of a speaker is also an important variable, especially at the level of non-standard dialect speakers. The vocabulary composition of the speakers of non-standard dialects contains dialect features and the dialect vocabulary, different from the standard dialect vocabulary. The non-standard dialect speakers also differ from each other in the quantum of vocabulary. For example, if we observe four farmers in Karnataka belonging to the four corners of the state, and elicit their vocabulary concerning their spheres of activity, the empirical differences in the quantum and quality of vocabulary come to light. For the same concept each one may have a different vocabulary item. It cannot be said, however, that these differences in vocabulary indicate the deficiency of vocabulary in one of these two groups, but these differences indicate the diverse and different communicational domains of these groups.

Age

In the previous chapter on vocabulary, which dealt with the acquisition of words through the ages of an individual, we have seen how the vocabulary of a child goes on increasing as his age increases. But the increase in the quantum, the speed of acquisition, and the frequency of use will not be the same throughout the life of an individual. If the rate of acquisition of vocabulary had remained the same throughout life, it would have exceeded the total vocabulary of the language used by the individual. At some point or the other, the rate of acquisition of vocabulary diminishes, and settles for a steady speed. This depends upon many circumstantial variables and facilities like experience, exposure, and schooling.

I. Q.

All the IQ tests have vocabulary tests as one of their components. These tests are based generally on the assumption that a person having more breadth and depth of vocabulary has wider competence to communicate and to understand a communication, and is to be considered intelligent. So, one automatically concludes that a person having a high IQ has more breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge than the person with less IQ. The basic criticism against the IQ tests is that these assume a uniform experience and exposure of the test, which is impossibility in reality. These tests are given generally in accordance with the dominant culture.

Gender

Though not in many languages but certainly in English, research has been carried out on the vocabulary ratio of male and female speakers. The research findings in this area have brought out certain interesting information, such as that the territory of daily operation of men and women have an influence on their vocabulary. A man operates in more wider and universal circles than a woman. A woman operates more in restricted and individualized circles of human communication and interaction in many societies.

The vocabulary of males and females is looked from many angles:

1. The type of vocabulary that males and females use.

2. The total vocabulary of males and females.

3. The reflection of male-female differences in the vocabulary learning.

4. The causes for such differences.

It is said that there are 95 women for 100 men in the real world and that in the formal educational system the school going females are in a minority. It was observed that woman were liable to speak and answer more quickly than men because of their limited, central, and less extensive vocabulary, whereas men are characterized by the individuality in the choice of words (Jesperson 1922). Special feminine vocabulary status has been attributed by Pei (1969) which men may not, dare not, and will not use. When women feel that they should be taken seriously while speaking, they will adopt the male (neutral) vocabulary by leaving the female vocabulary (Lakoff 1973).

Women are said to use a higher percentage of fillers (for example, you know) than males, and there is no difference in the proportion of the use of quantifiers (for example, may be, probably) (Hirschman: 1973). Also females are said to use more often the inclusive pronoun. According to Lakoff, women are able to do more precise discrimination of colors than men. Cey (1972) observes that the females use intensifiers like such, etc., more often than men.

The textbook analysts have found out that the ratio of he-she, him-her is 4: 1 and the ratio of male characters to female characters is 7: 1. Even then, the word mother occurs more frequently than the word father and the word wife occurs three times more than the word husband (Graham 1975) Even from the point of view vocabulary perception, one can find variations in the perceiving capacity of people in accordance with the variables described so far.

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CHAPTER 7
VOCABULARY PRODUCTION

When a new concept enters or is coined by a society, a gap in the language may be created. There are two broad ways of filling in this gap. Firstly, processes like accretion and meaning change, etc., of the already available vocabulary items, may fill in the gap. These processes were discussed in the fifth chapter. As we observed there, in these cases, no new from is created.

The new vocabulary items are created either with the help of existing stock of vocabulary in the language or through the borrowed vocabulary, or both. When one says that English is a productive language, he means it in terms of the facilities that exist in that language for manufacturing new vocabulary items. Productivity in this sense is a relative quality.

A language may look less productive or non-productive because of many reasons, linguistic and societal. The linguistic reason is that the language may lack certain linguistic devices. The societal reasons may include the condition in which the users may not be in a position to equip, or are not interested in equipping their language with new vocabulary for the inventories. This is societal resistance towards proliferation of words. Direct borrowing from other languages to meet every need that the speakers have would make the language look non-productive. Languages may also look less productive due to lack of utilization of the productive potential of the language by its users.

The production of vocabulary is not done at random. There are certain conventionally fixed procedures, in accordance with which the production of vocabulary in any language takes place. The most prevalent processes of vocabulary production are four in number. They are affixation, composition, trans-creation, and creation. These processes differ from each other qualitatively and quantitatively.

Affixation

Affixation as a process of vocabulary production consists of three types of productive elements. These are prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. They are distinguished from each other with the help of positional criterion. The three positions that an affix can occupy (in relation to a free morpheme in the morphemes or words that have independent existence) are: before the basic form, after the basic form, or within the basic form respectively. Accordingly, all the bound morphemes, that is, the morphemes that do not have any independent existence in the speech are classified into three groups. When compared to other two types of affixes, infixes are rare.

The affixes characterized above are involved in the two types of processes of vocabulary production, namely, inflection and derivation. No one definition can comprehensively define as to what an inflection is and what a derivation is. Inflection, compared -with derivation, is an unimportant process for vocabulary production. Inflection per se is mainly a grammatical process. These processes can only characterized. The important characteristics of inflectional and derivational processes are as follows.

Occurrence

In most of the languages, the affixes involved in the process of inflection are suffixes. They positionally occur at the end of the base form or any derived form. For example, plural marker -s of English occurs after word: book - books. The Kannada plural marker -gaLu also occurs at the end: pustaka - pustakagaLu, 'book - books'. The affixes that are involved in the processes of derivation are not positionally bound. They can either occur in the beginning or the end or in the middle of the base form. So, in many languages, inflectional affixes are suffixes and derivational affixes are any of the three types of affixes.

Quantum

Normally the total number of inflectional affixes in a language will be less than that of derivational affixes. It is also possible to count more easily all the inflectional affixes in a language than derivational affixes.

Frequency

The frequency of occurrence of each inflectional affix is more than the frequency of the occurrence of derivational affixes, although the derivational affixes are more in number.

Originality

The inflectional affixes in a particular language normally belong to the same language in their origin. Very rarely a borrowed inflectional affix can be seen used in a language. If there is any borrowed affix in a language used for vocabulary production, it will be generally the derivational affix.

Stability

The two basic functions of inflectional and derivational affixes are:

1. They are involved in vocabulary production.

2. The meaning that they express in isolation and in combination with the base forms.

In terms of both these functions only inflectional affixes are said to be more stable than the derivational affixes. Inflectional affixes normally have one function and one meaning only. Dependency

When an inflectional form is added to the base, the change that occurred due to this process forces a change or changes in other parts of a sentence. Also formation of paradigmatic sets is possible here. But it is not so with the derivational affixes.

Functionality

The process of inflection does not change the parts of speech of the basic form to which an inflectional affix is added. The parts of speech of the primary form get changed in derivational process; a verb may change into a noun, or a noun may get changed into an adjective. Thus, the function of the derived form may be different in derivation after affixation, and the function will remain intact in case of inflection.

Predictability

The description of the resultant form of the inflectional process is easy to describe and easy to predict. But it is generally not easy to describe, or predict the meaning of the resultant form.

Typology

Both the inflectional and derivational elements do not belong to the lexical store of the language. But they belong to the grammatical core of the language. These are not independent entities and these do not function so in the language.

Open and Close

If an English plural affix like -s or Kannada plural affix -gaLu is added to the base form as an inflectional process, the resultant construction ceases to be productive. The construction closes itself and further extension in the same direction stops. If a derivational affix is added to a primary form to derive a vocabulary item, the resultant form need not close its avenues for further derivation.

Compounds

The compounds are also called as compositions, but one may make a distinction between the two. The basic quality of the composition is that two elements that have joined and formed a single composition are two lexical items and have their own independent existence in the language unlike the components of the derivational product. Another difference between derivation and composition is that, in derivation due to affixation, the meaning of the primary form deviates from that of the primary form after derivation only, and very rarely it gets completely changed. In compositions, there are all the possibilities that the resultant form may express an entirely different meaning or the deviant meaning. So, in case of derivatives, the meaning of the derived form is predictable, and, in case of compositions, the meaning of the compound is unpredictable. Though compositions and compound words look alike, the compositions differ from compound words. The composition invariably consists of two free forms but a compound word need not contain two free forms.

Creations

In addition to the two broad processes of vocabulary production discussed, there are certain other processes of vocabulary production that need to be mentioned. Normally these processes lead to the creation of an additional form of expression rather than actually creating a new form, which has no equivalent expression in the language. They are blending, clipping, and back formation.

In case of blending, two independent words are taken and certain portion of both the forms, or one of the forms is deleted to form the new word. For example linotype is such a creation.

Similarly the process of backformation also creates a short word from the existing longer form of the word. For example, creation of the word edit from editor.

Thus the two processes listed above have led in a way to the addition of a new word. But the process of clipping never leads to such a creation, but only to the shortening of the existing words for use in more familiar contexts in the place of a longer word. This is viewed as an economic way of using words. For example, usage of ad, in case of advertisement, Rs. in place of rupees, fab in place of fabric, lab in place of laboratory, steno in place of stenographer.

Acronyms also come under this category. These are created and used for convenience and economy by users. Taking the initial letter of the words in the composite normally forms these. For example, taking the initial letters from World Health Organization forms the word WHO. Similarly AIR is formed from All India Radio. Two important characteristics of the acronyms are that they are nouns and that these forms are normally used in more than one language. In a way, they become international.

Creation of trade names also comes under word production. The trade names have a limited circulation.

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CHAPTER 8
VOCABULARY STUDIES

There are three underlying principles on which various types of vocabulary studies are based.

1. The first principle is that the frequency of a vocabulary item in a language gives the quantum of use to which the speakers of the language put the vocabulary.

2. The second principle is that only nearly 3000 words make up 95% of the total vocabulary of the individual speaker, and that words like I, the, and, to, a, you, of, in, we, and for constitute 25% of the writing vocabulary, and that only 100 words form 60% of the words of an individual speaker.

3. The third principle is that in the teaching and learning context, most frequent words should be utilized.

In general, eight types of vocabulary studies have been listed by McCarthy (1968). They are:

i. Estimates of total vocabulary at specified ages (usually of single children).

ii. Analysis of total vocabulary according to parts of speech.

iii. Analysis of total vocabulary for subject matter.

iv. Analysis of the occurrence of the various parts of speech in samples of conversations.

v. Analysis of the various parts of speech in compositions.

vi. Estimates of the total vocabulary of groups by the use of the free association technique.

vii. Estimates of the total vocabulary by the use of tests

viii. Word frequency counts.

Strickland and Ruth (1957) classify the vocabulary studies into the three groups. These are:

i. Studies of the vocabulary of pre-school children.

ii. Studies of the vocabulary of school children.

iii. Word lists useful to schoolteachers.

The vocabulary studies that are studied in this chapter come mainly under two groups. They are:

1. The vocabulary studies pertaining to the basic, general, core, common, vocabulary studies, etc.

2. The vocabulary studies pertaining to the total vocabulary of an individual or a group of speakers of the language at a particular point of time, i.e., graded vocabulary studies.

Individual investigators have adopted various methodologies to study vocabulary, depending upon their objective. As this chapter is intended to be a brief study of vocabulary studies, the methods adopted in the listed studies are not presented in a detailed fashion.

Basic Vocabulary Studies

Attempts in this category of vocabulary studies have been made to collect the core vocabulary so that these may be used as source through which other non-core vocabulary can be taught/learned.

Basically with an intention to collect words that should be of use to the American children learning to read English, Thorndike (1921) collected 10,000 most frequent English words. These 10,000 words were found to be frequent in 41 sources used for the study. Nearly 625,000 running words of the children's literature, nearly 3,00,0000 running words of the Bible and English classics, nearly 300,000 running words of the Elementary school text-books, nearly 50,000 running words of books about cooking, farming, sewing, trade, etc., nearly 90,000 running words of daily news papers, and the rest 500,000 running words from correspondences were used as source running words for this 10,000 words word count.

In 1931, Thorndike, by making use of the word counts from 238 more sources with nearly 500,000 running words, revised the 1921 list and expanded II to 20,000 words. Again in 1944, Thorndike, in collaboration with Large, revised and expanded the list to 30,000 most frequent words.

Thorndike made an interesting and an important distinction between the 'range' of a word and the 'frequency of a word. The 'range' is the occurrence of the word in different sources, and 'frequency' is the occurrence of the word in total number of running words. Thorndike considered the word with 'wide range' as more important than the word with 'wide frequency'.

Horn (1926) arrived at 25,000 words as basic writing vocabulary. He collected these words from personal and business letters through word count. This list was used to bring to the attention of the prospective users the problem words, prone to spelling errors.

Ogden (1930) collected 850 basic words needed for expressing one's ideas and desires. These he obtained after eliminating all synonyms and non-essential verbs. Out of these 850 basic words, 6 are nouns, 150 are adjectives, 18 are verbs and others are prepositions, pronouns, adverbs and conjunctions. According to Ogden, it is possible for one to express himself adequately by deriving different words from these basic words, and by using the same word in different parts of speech with different meanings. And it is said that these 850 words do all the work of 20,000 words.

On the basis of Thorndike's and Horn's list, Faucett and Maki (1932) prepared a vocabulary list. They grouped the vocabulary into four categories:

i. Indispensable words (about 360) for four-fold mastery; i.e., for understanding, reading, speaking and writing, oral mastery being important.

ii. Essential words (about 1,198) for three-fold mastery; i.e., for understanding, reading and speaking them, oral mastery being attempted only if time permits.

iii. Useful words for two-fold mastery, i.e., reading and understanding only.

iv. Special words for reading mastery only.

Palmer (1930) developed a system called 'Head-word' system. He devised this as a help to arrive at the core vocabulary with the help of which one could earn a language. One learns a finite set of words with which an infinite number of words can be derived and used. By this headword system, Nisbet (1960) placed various forms of words together with short phrases and classified these under the single head of the basic form.

This headword system, along with certain important procedures followed by experts to prepare valid vocabulary lists, provided the guiding principle for the Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection. Hornby (1953) lists these important procedures as follows:

1. The selected vocabulary should be drawn up in the form of a General Word List together with a corresponding list of collocations.

2. The effective unit of the word list should be a given word together with a selection of its commonest derivatives and compounds. The given word should be called the headword.

3. Members of homonyms should be counted as separate units.

4. Each word should include its inflected forms, if any.

5. Each word should include all the main semantic varieties.

6. When a word has two or more semantic varieties that differ so widely without any obvious connection, each variety should be listed as a separate unit. This should be done even though the words may have some common etymological connection.

7. The principle of 'range' should be considered when deciding whether to include or exclude word listed by the word counters. A word is said to have a wide range if it is found to occur once in each of fifty different texts and to have a narrow range if it occurs perhaps fifty times in one particular text, and not at all in the other forty-nine.

8. Additional credit should be given to a word if it has a large number of regularly formed derivatives if it enters into a large number of compounds or if it occurs in common collocations.

The Carnegie Report or the Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection (1936) presents a list of 2000 'General Service' words that are found suitable for learning English as a foreign language. These words are 'basic' for the purpose of learning and using English. The criteria that are followed for the vocabulary selection are word frequency, structural value, universality in respect of geographic area, subject range, value for purpose of definition of other words, value word for building, and stylistic function.

This list is considered as a valuable contribution by Hornby because of its insistence upon the importance of the structural words and of the indication of semantic varieties. This work is a departure from the earlier studies in the sense that this study has not stopped just by giving the frequency count but it gives also the semantic value. The inadequacy of this study, according to Hornby (1953), is found in its inadequate recommendations regarding the priority of the semantic variety. In order to find out the adequate vocabulary for maximum utility without the use of collocations, Palmer and Hornby (1937) have taken the Interim Report on Vocabulary Studies and Thorndike's first 1000 words and then put them into actual use and arrived at one thousand words as basic for English.

Bongers (1947) criticized the heterogeneity of the source materials used by Thorndike for word count. He suggested a remedy: "It is a mistake to think that if one mixes a sufficient number of texts of the most widely different varieties, an average taken will give figures applicable to everyday language. Mixtures of either small or large proportions of widely different material are not representative of general language; they are representative of nothing. The only way in which counts on material outside the range of normal everyday language can be turned to account is to take such a large quantities of each kind that every department represents. A word counting itself produces lists valid for that kind of material only. Then a secondary list may be complied of words that are common to all the primary lists. The number of primary lists in which a word figures may furnish a valuable range rating."

West's (1953) 'General Service List' consists of 2000 headwords. This book includes the vocabulary of Interim Report and semantic frequencies. The relative frequency of different meanings of each word is given in this list. Source material for this word count was taken from nearly 5 million running words of encyclopedias, magazines, textbooks, novels, essays, biographies, etc. The semantic count is based on the differentiation of meanings in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Scientific and technical vocabulary list is added as a supplement to this study.

While Thorndike does not make any distinction between different meanings of the same word, West (1953) makes a distinction not only between different meanings of the word but also he has counted the relative frequencies of each meaning of the word to help teaching English as a second language to adults.

Schonell, et al. (1956) studied the vocabulary of adults. They recorded nearly half a million words from 300 persons in inspired and spontaneous conversations of unskilled and semiskilled Australian workers. In total, 512,647 running words were recorded, and out of these only 6,616 words were different words. 4539 were headwords and the rest were related to the headwords. The first thousand words catered to 94 per cent of the total running words. In this study an attempt was made to collect idiomatic usages. Nearly 7000 idiomatic usages were collected, and nearly 200 frequent idioms along with examples of their usages were e given in this book.

In order to extract the 'core' of the natural language to teach French in the territories where French is not spoken, to make learning French easy to the people of these territories, and to enable them to have working competence, Le Francais Fundamental Investigations (1959) were carried out. This served as a guide to teachers and helped the learners to get more help. To get data for this investigation, 163 conversations with a total of 312,000 running words were analyzed and a list of 3000 words with 152 grammatical usages was produced.

In addition to frequency, a study of the structures was made to identify the easy and difficult structures, so that the easy grammatical structures would precede the difficult ones in teaching French. Another supplementary study was done of the words used by French students in the schools, which resulted in 'availability vocabulary' and supplemented the 'frequency vocabulary' collected from conversations. This investigation for the 'availability vocabulary' is done because the 'frequency vocabulary' is dependent much upon the 'topics' on which source data is based.

Hindi

Koeing (1933) made an attempt at collecting 4000 important words in Hindi. He collected nearly one million running words from 153 sources, which included children's literature, textbooks, magazines, and the books read by the children from 1 to 4th standard. Out of one million running words, 12,500 were the different words with the frequency ranging nearly from 40,000 to 1. He compared the words of Hindi Primary School Reader with those of American School Readers, and contended that, in the American reader, every 16th to 19th word is found to be new, where as in Hindi Readers every second word is found to be new.

Kannada

In another investigation, it was argued that simple language might be used in textbooks for neo-literates. Simple language is the one in which common words are used. Common words are more frequent, and if a word is more frequent, then that word is the easy word, and if the word is less frequent, that less frequent word is the difficult word. This is the notion with which Kuppuswamy (1947) prepared Kannada Pada PaTTi in order to find out the most frequent words for neo-literates. 26 books written for adult literacy program, 3 adult literacy text books, 4 primary school textbooks (1 to 4th grade), two children's books, 8 other books like short story collections, newspaper editorials, and a few Basaveswara Vachanas sung by people were taken as sources for word counts. These sources gave rise to nearly 2 lakh running words.

While counting the frequency, cases, plural markers, etc., were added to the root counted. 4,800 different words in 2 lakh running words were found to have the maximum frequency of 3084 to a minimum of 1. These 4800 words were arranged into 3 lists after deleting the proper nouns and borrowings from Urdu and English. In the first list, the words were arranged in the alphabetical order. The side of each word also marked its frequency range. In the second list, the first five hundred were arranged in a series of five categories: the first hundred, the second hundred, the third hundred, the fourth hundred, and the fifth hundred. The words were arranged alphabetically, and the next five hundred were given as a single group and were also arranged alphabetically. The third list had the first five hundred words arranged in accordance with their descending order of frequency.

Kuppuswamy recognized that there were differences between spoken and written Kannada, and felt that this was a reason why people were unable to understand the written language. His study, however, took only the written material as the source to arrive at frequency counts. Here lies the paradox. He contended that his list was useful not only in selecting vocabulary for books meant for neo-literates but also to evaluate the books as 'easy' or 'difficult'. His work relied heavily on Thorndike's work for methodology. It had a limited scope and depth. However, it should be ranked high among the pioneering efforts of vocabulary studies in Indian languages.

When a comparison of two lists of the same language prepared by different scholars is made, we get different results many a time. This is due to, subjective choice of the source material, and divergent aims.

Graded Vocabulary Studies

All the vocabulary studies mentioned above aimed at arriving at the core vocabulary of the language. This 'core' was to be used as the ground on which the further knowledge of language was to be developed. This 'core' vocabulary pertained to the vocabulary of the language as a whole. Hence, the source materials for these studies should have been from the various domains of language use. However, out of the two facets of instruction, learning and teaching, only teaching part was taken care of by 'core vocabulary' studies. Their learning processes and 'the learners' potential were not taken into consideration adequately. These were taken for granted, assuming that a learner could easily learn the word if it was part of the core of the language.

The source material for such 'core vocabulary' was not a conglomeration of language materials intended for use by children, adults, and professional groups, etc. The 'core vocabulary' failed to provide a clear picture of what vocabulary type should be given to pupils belonging to different age groups and grade. High frequency of a word in 'core vocabulary' need not be an indication that it should find a place in all the language learning materials, because the use of a particular item of vocabulary is governed by the pupils' age, grade, purpose of learning, content materials, etc., and not solely by frequency. Vocabulary studies, aiming to provide vocabulary for certain grade, age, etc., are being reported these days. These aim at the vocabulary potential of the pupil the certain grade and age. Here the aim of vocabulary studies is to give a 'graded vocabulary list' rather than 'core vocabulary' list.

We referred earlier to the impossibility of arriving at the 'total core vocabulary' of a language. It is also impossible to arrive at the total graded vocabulary for any grade, or any age, in any language. Only approximations are possible and only approximations are attempted.

It can be said that the graded vocabulary studies have added another dimension to the vocabulary studies of the first category (core vocabulary studies) reported in the previous pages and that added dimension is the 'grade and age of the pupil'. At the same time, these studies do not deviate from the 'core vocabulary' studies by deleting the "governing concepts" of these studies. Like core vocabulary studies, these graded vocabulary studies also include 'frequency' as an important factor in the preparation of 'graded vocabulary' lists.

Rinsland (1945) stated that the objective of his study was 'to present the actual frequency of the use of words, grade by grade, of many children from all sections of the country and to give these data in such a way that they may be helpful to the teacher, the writer of textbooks, and the student for learning. Keeping in view the collection of actually needed words for the 'average children and the need for the 'accurate grade placement' of the words, 'wide' as well as 'wise' sampling was done.

Rinsland asked the schools in rural communities, in cities of various sizes, coastal, inland, agricultural, mining, lumbering, and manufacturing regions, including public, private, parochial schools, and training schools in Universities to send a) personal notes, b) stories, c) poems, d) compositions in many school subjects, e) examination papers in non-technical topics, f) articles for school papers uncorrected by the teachers, g) reports on projects, and h) trips and observations written by children. The procedures followed in tabulating the material collected by him were as follows:

1. Count all words - roots, derived forms, and contractions just as they occur.

2. Tally separately run-together words.

3. Delete baby talk unless terms are found to be good English words.

4. Delete illegible ones.

5. Count the correct forms intended when words are spelled unusually or wrongly.

6. Delete slang, provincialisms, and colloquial expressions as determined by the dictionary, as well as trade names and proper names of persons and places, except very well known terms.

7. Do not tally separately words that may be written in two ways. Consider them same for purposes of tabulation. Examples are to-day, and today.

8. Tabulate the correct forms intended where errors occur ill the use of homonyms. Two, too and to are to be tabulated separately.

9. Tabulate separately words that are compounded, if the compounding is incorrect or is used for running composition. Out of 6,012,35 running words, 25,632 different words were found, in all the grades. The words occurring three or more times in any grade are given in the alphabetical order. 11,061 occur only once or twice in all the grades. In grades I to VIII, the number of words found are 5099, 5821, 8976, 9976, 11419, 11304, 14,820, and 17930 respectively.

Rinsland contended that this list would be useful not only to teachers and text-book writers but also to other writers writing for the elementary school children because the latter would not be aware of actual vocabulary of pupils of these grades. According to Rinsland, his vocabulary list provided 90% of words for VIII grade children and more than 98% of vocabulary for I grade children; for other grades, the limits would range between 90% and 98%.

Major Indian Studies

English

In order to find out the recognition vocabulary in English among the Pre- University Students and Secondary School Final Year students, Bernard (1966) constructed a vocabulary test and administered the test on students in Chotanagpur, India. For the purpose of construction of the test, he has drawn 1500 words from the General Service List of Michael West (1953) and one hundred words from the Pre-University Vocabulary prepared by the Central Institute of English. The 1600 vocabulary list was divided into four sections, and each section was divided into four parts. Each part was administered in one sitting of two and a half hours. Students were given simple sentences containing these words and were expected to translate the underlined part of the sentence into Hindi. The major findings of this study indicated a) the average recognition vocabulary of the students in the area, b) the familiarity status of each word, c) the strength and weakness of the students in grammatical categories such as verbs, nouns, etc.

Gujarati

In Gujarati, Vakil (1955), Raval (1959) and Lakdawala (1960) have attempted to find out the reproduction and recognition vocabulary of Gujarati children of the age 11 plus, 12 plus and 13 plus respectively.

Vakil used different sources and several methodologies to investigate the recognition and reproduction vocabulary of all 11 plus group. For recognition vocabulary, he collected 95,076 running words with 14,290 different words from four fifth grade textbooks, which were commonly used. He made lists of 1000 words each category (recognition and reproduction) after finding out the frequency of different collected words.

In the first phase of testing, Vakil administered a sample of three words on three groups of five students each, advanced, mediocre, and poor students, after deleting the high frequency vocabulary. In the second phase of testing, he selected 437 words from the first 5000 words taking into account the difficulty of the words. He administered four different time-bound tests on 461 students of 10 schools. For the investigation of reproduction vocabulary, 996 students belonging to 12 schools of rural and urban areas wrote one out of the 33 topics of narrative, descriptive, and reflective types of composition. 4025 different words were found in 1,03,113 running words. He classified these words according to tasarna, tadbhava, frequency, and grammatical category, etc. As a result of this study, Vakil identified 7,932 words in the recognition vocabulary category, and 4,025 words in the reproduction vocabulary category of 11 plus years old children.

Raval (1959) differed from Vakil (1955) in collecting the vocabulary for the recognition vocabulary category. That is, in addition to collecting recognition vocabulary from 6 approved textbooks, Raval made use of other related materials and the earlier researches in the field of vocabulary studies. He found 23,536 different words in 1,54,586 running words. He administered the tests with items that focused on similarities, opposites, matching, fill-in the blanks in sentences, paragraphs, etc., on selected school children. For the reproduction vocabulary, he first collected 129 topics from 20 question papers and reduced the topics ultimately to 35. Each child was asked to write one essay and one letter on anyone of the 35 topics. 240 children from Bombay and 1060 children from Gujarat wrote letters on one of the 5 topics, and one essay on one of the 27 topics. He came to the conclusion that 69.28% of content words are reproduction vocabulary and 95.73% of content words are recognition vocabulary. In addition, he compared the frequency of each word in the recognition and reproduction categories, if the word was found in both these categories.

Lakdawala (1960), in his attempt to find the recognition and reproduction vocabulary of children from the age group of 13 plus, listed all the words available in the approved textbooks of VII Standard. Words that were recurring in 3 books were considered. If a word did not occur in a minimum number of 3 books it was compared with words in Vakil's list. Out of 10112 words, 34 were found to be common to both, the teacher subjected the remaining 6707 words to scrutiny. The teachers selected 3949 words. For all these words, multiple choice, identification, and opposite test items were constructed and administered.

If a word is recognized by more than 50% of the children it was accepted. 4506 words from 3 textbooks, 3405 words of Vakil's list, 3949 selected words were subjected to the recognition test. In order to collect reproductive vocabulary, 281 children from rural, 360 from urban and 286 from city schools were asked to write on anyone of the topics selected from the previous 10 years secondary school examination papers. A total of 8570 separate words were identified.

The result was as follows: a) Recognition vocabulary: 12,167 words, b) reproduction vocabulary: 8570 words, and c) Common to both groups: 5140 words. In the age group of 13 years, 328 English words were in recognition vocabulary and 501 words in the reproduction vocabulary list.

It can be said that in the available Gujarati vocabulary studies, identifying the recognition and reproduction vocabulary was the main trend for each age group. For identifying the recognition vocabulary, the textbooks were used as the major source for the age groups under consideration, whereas for the identification of reproduction vocabulary, students with different socio-economic and geographical background were made to write compositions on given topics and the total of different words used by children were then taken as reproduction vocabulary of that age group.

Marathi

In Marathi, Tamhane (1965) made an attempt to find out the recognition and reproduction vocabulary of primary school children. According to Tamhane, this vocabulary could be considered Formation Vocabulary of the age groups 6-8, and 8-10. But the methodology Tamhane used was slightly different. Vocabulary was identified by the observation of the controlled and free play situations, supplemented by oral and written worksheets. For final consideration, only words with above 70% frequency were retained. For the purpose of observation, 8000 children, 3000 of 6 to 8 years, and 5000 of 8 to 10 years from 8 districts of Vidarbha were used. The results were: Total General Vocabulary for the 6 to 10 years age was 4550 words. Reproduction vocabulary for the 6 to 8 years was 1705 words, and for 8 to 10 years it was 1057 words, whereas the recognition vocabulary for 6 to 8 years was 755 words and for 8 to 10 years it was 2090 words.

Hindi

Pasricha and Das (1959) have made an analysis of written vocabulary of sixth grade children in Delhi schools. After collecting one composition each from 527 students belonging to 12 schools representing various socio-economic groups, the compositions were analyzed for basic vocabulary. In this study, the girls scored better than boys both belonging to same socio-economic group; students of low socio-economic group were found inferior to students belonging to high socio-economic group in language, but the proportion of different words for different groups was same.

By taking only spoken language into consideration, Rukmini (1960) studied the Hindi vocabulary of children from the age group of 7+ years. She compared the vocabulary of the children of 7 + years with that of the textbook used by that age group. For her study, she used normative survey and observational methods for collecting data. She collected the spoken vocabulary from the children of 8 to l0 years studying in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades in 5 schools with the help of picture cues of school, house, etc., and story, narration, and conversation. The performance of each child was observed for hours in 5 intervals.

Shankar (1971) aimed at preparing a graded vocabulary list in Hindi for the children of the sixth grade by taking stock of the vocabulary that would help them to read. He also wanted that the word lists to be of help in the preparation of textbook materials. For this purpose, Shankar considered the 'comprehension vocabulary' of the children as the 'basic vocabulary'.

Firstly, Shankar collected 520 words from grade IV textbooks approved by the Punjab State Government. These words were divided into four lists. For each word, five multiple-choice meanings were given and the test was administered on 400 children. Out of 520 words, more than 70% students knew 330 words. The rest 217 were understood by less than 70% of the students.

Secondly, Shankar collected 2418 content words from the textbooks and supplementary books for VI grade, prescribed by Haryana and Punjab Education Department and National Council of Educational Research and Training. To these 2418 words, 217 words of the first test were added. These 2635 words were divided into groups of 150 to 180 words. Check lists were administered on 2% of VI grade school children in the state. For each word 5 multiple-choice items were given as meanings; only one was correct and the student was to identify it. Care was taken to eliminate the guessing factor. As a result, two list of glossary were prepared. The one list of glossary contained words from Grades IV and V known to 70% of each student. The second glossary contained words from VI grade textbooks, children's writing and speech of students and also words known to less than 70% of students of the lower class.

In another study 'basic vocabulary' was taken to be synonymous with 'comprehension vocabulary or recognition vocabulary. Children answered 12 tests, and each test sheet had 136 to 156 words. For each word 5 choices were given. Only one was the correct response for the stimulus. This correct answer was to be underlined by the student. While calculating the percentage of each word, calculation of proportion, corrected proportion to eliminate the guessing factor and confidential interval to make the corrected proportion accurate were found out for each word. A list of words ranging from 31% to 70% frequency was presented alphabetically. The original 1627 words had the range of 16% to 88% frequency rate.

According to Sharma, this list of vocabulary can be used to write textbooks for this grade, to prepare diagnostic and attainment tests, and to prepare verbal intelligence tests.

From all these studies it is evident that in Hindi the trend of research was mainly towards identifying the recognition vocabulary. The underlying assumption seems to be that the recognition vocabulary would include the reproduction vocabulary and that, as a result, no separate treatment/investigation of the reproduction vocabulary was essential.

Tamil

Studying the functional vocabulary of the Tamil children of the age group of 4 to 7 years to develop the reading and writing abilities in children was the aim of the study undertaken by Arunjate and Srinivasachari (1968). Vocabulary relating to the children's most vital experiences and activities were listed from 700 children by 30 observers and 4 supervisors. This material was supplemented by 74 tape recorded speeches of children and 70 study sheets selected random. This study identified the total function vocabulary of these pre-school children as ranging from 1500 words to 2000 words. School going children were found to have more vocabulary than the children not going to school. Girls within the age of 48 + to 60 months were found to have more vocabulary than the boys. The vocabulary average of children belonging to low socio-economic group was higher than those belonging to high socioeconomic group except in the first stages of age.

Kannada

Here is another study, which adopted an entirely different methodology, though not different in aims from the studies reported above. This study is by Chandrashekharaiah (1964) in Kannada. The aim of this study was to investigate comprehensively the Basic Vocabulary in Kannada of the school children from I to VII grades in Karnataka state. A preliminary list of 5757 words was prepared from different sources like school readers from I to V grades, Kuppuswamy's Pada Patti, V. K. Javali's list, and the word list prepared by Sahitya Vachanaalaya Trainees. This study did not ask the students to judge as to whether the particular word was possible in their vocabulary repertory or not. Instead, the school teachers were asked to judge as to whether a particular word should be related to a particular grade or not. So, 200 teachers of primary schools, male, female, and from urban, rural, and slum areas were chosen to judge the selection and the grade placement of preliminary vocabulary list. These 200 teachers comprised 10 teachers each from the 20 districts of the State. The final graded vocabulary list had for I, II and III grades, 700 words each, for grade IV, 750 words each, grade V, 800 words, and grade VII 650 words.

Tripuri
When a language for which no published grammar books and other allied materials are available, the material producer faces the problem of selection and collection of vocabulary and grammatical structure. Such is the problem faced and tackled by Jayapal and Puspa Pai (Karapurkar) (1974) while producing instructional materials for Tripuri children. In order to collect the 'active vocabulary' of Tripuri children from the age groups of 4 +, 6 +, 8+, and 10 + speaking the Debbarma dialect of Tripuri language. The Government accepts this dialect as the standard dialect. They tried to collect the words by recording live conversations of the children in natural settings. Since they found that method could not be adopted in the context of investigation, they pursued an alternative question and answer method with the help of children speaking that dialect. Nearly 56 questions of various types were asked. Nearly 25 children represented each age group from different Debbarma-speaking villages. The scholars reported that the children had an active vocabulary of 260 words in 4 + age group, 430 words in the 6 + group, 544 words in the 8+ group, and 732 words in the 10+ group. According to this study, vocabulary of the children reflects the social domains to which they belong.

A list of structures in Tripuri was also given in this study. The number of active vocabulary items seems to be less than the average reported in similar studies in other Indian languages. An important point is that the subjects of the study had a bilingual background. Did the separation/ division of domains of uses for each of the languages of the bilingual children lead to a reduction in the active vocabulary? Or did the investigators eliminate all the non-Tripuri vocabulary produced by the children from the purview of their investigation. Or did the investigation not cover all aspects language use?

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CONTENTS PAGE

CHAPTER 9
VOCABULARY TEACHING

Let us consider a few differences in the teaching of vocabulary of the first and the second languages. This would enable us to discuss vocabulary teaching in a proper perspective.

FIRST LANGUAGE TEACHING

1. Generally involves teaching written representation for the spoken vocabulary.

2. In some languages teaching the terms in written language corresponding to the items in the spoken language.

3. Involves the extension of the vocabulary knowledge that a learner has.

4. Involves teaching those items with the help of which a learner can acquire additional items.

5. The learner knows the derivational processes of word formation.

6. The learner has to acquire the mastery of vocabulary usage for effective communication, stylistic purpose, etc.

7. More of synonyms, idioms, and set phrases.

SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING

1. Generally involves teaching the spoken as well as written forms of the vocabulary.

2. This teaching is done usually at a later level of learning.

3. Involves teaching the vocabulary items appropriate for the concepts for which the learner already has vocabulary items in his mother tongue.

4. Involves teaching the items with the help of which the learner can acquire additional items.

5. The learners do not know the derivational processes of word formation.

6. He has to acquire vocabulary for general and basic communication purposes.

First Language Teaching and Vocabulary Teaching

There are certain strategies adopted by the teachers to teach vocabulary to these groups of learners. These strategies include both formal strategies of having a vocabulary item before the teacher and attempting to teach it directly to them, and informal strategies of asking the learner to learn the vocabulary item when he comes across it while listening or reading something or the other in that language. These two strategies are not mutually exclusive; rather they complement each other.

We cannot suggest specific steps that could be strictly followed in teaching vocabulary items. At the application level, strategies vary not only from teacher to teacher, and context to context, but also from language to language. The structure of the vocabulary item including its derivational history from other items, its connotation and denotation, and the function it performs in a lesson are some other variables.

In a formal approach to teaching vocabulary,

1. We concentrate only on the vocabulary skill, not on any other related skills.

2. The learner is conscious of the learning that is taking place because of teaching.

3. The teacher performs the act of teaching.

4. The activities are pre-planned and programmed. Results are specified in advanced.

5. Teaching emphasizes direct learning.

In case of informal strategies,

1. The focus is not only on the vocabulary skill but also on other related skills.

2. The learner is not conscious of the learning that is taking place because of teaching.

3. The learner is not conscious about the vocabulary that he is learning.

4. The teacher may not perform the act of teaching, and there may not be any formal role for teacher here. The learning process is unplanned and accidental.

5. The teaching emphasizes contextual learning.

Aspects of Vocabulary in Relation to Teaching

Pronunciation

When we teach vocabulary we should know what aspects of vocabulary need to be taught in order to make the learner learn the vocabulary better and faster. The first and foremost aspect is the teaching of pronunciation of the vocabulary. The teacher may have to teach the pronunciation of the vocabulary since the spelling system in some languages such as English may not correlate with the pronunciation. Even if there is correlation, in many cases it will be essential to teach the accurate and standard pronunciation of the vocabulary item to the learner. In Indian languages, aspiration requires a special effort. In some Indian languages, for example, in Tamil, the laterals require some special effort.

Spelling

The second aspect that needs to be taught is spelling. When a new word is taught it has to be taught along with its spelling and its variations, if any. It is possible that the same vocabulary item is written with several different spellings, e.g., organize, organize, color, colour. The learner should know, or at least be aware of the possibility for such variations. Indian languages abound in such problems.

Grammatical Category

The third aspect is the teaching of the grammatical category .Words in a language belong to one or the other grammatical category. The learner needs to understand the function that a word performs in a sentence and in a language, i.e., he should know the grammatical category to which the word belongs. At times he will have to use the same word in more than one category. He may come across a situation in which a particular word is used in a grammatical category different from its earlier use.

Derivation

The fourth aspect of vocabulary teaching is the teaching of vocabulary derivation. In a language, not all the vocabulary items are productive and items that are productive are also not equally productive. The learning will be greater and teaching effort will be minimized if all or many of the possible derivatives of a particular vocabulary item are brought to the notice of the learners.

Etymology

Etymology is an important aspect of vocabulary but teaching it is only an optional item. Not all the learners need to know the etymology of the word that they are learning. If the teaching of the etymology can help the learner in understanding other aspects of vocabulary, it may be taught. Etymological history of a vocabulary item can often be used as a motivation for its learning and retention by an imaginative teacher, because behind every word lies interesting information. But in the hands of an unimaginative teacher, etymological information becomes a burden for the learners.

Meaning

It has been wrongly assumed by language teachers that vocabulary teaching is only the teaching of meaning; that too, only one meaning which the vocabulary item has got in the context of the sentence or phrase in which it is used. But meaning is a multidimensional feature, namely, aspects of similar meaning, different shades of meaning, and the opposite meanings.

Usage

Usage of a vocabulary item does not end at the level of using it in a sentence in the learning context. The learner should be taught to use it also in an automatized manner. Also the term usage has to be viewed in its literal and functional sense. The learner should be taught to use a vocabulary item in its normal meaning that makes the usage effective and natural.

There are some important variables that govern vocabulary teaching. Teachers should be aware of these variables. These are:

1. Teach those items that one does not know.

2. Teach new meanings for the vocabulary that one already knows. Teach new ways of using a word that is already known to the learner. (One may ask as to whether teaching the meanings of a word that is already known to the learner is vocabulary teaching. The answer is 'yes', because it involves teaching something about a vocabulary item, which was not known so far to the learners.)

3. Teach other aspects of vocabulary not mentioned under 2.

4. Intensive teaching of vocabulary in which the teacher teaches less vocabulary in more contexts, aiming at the qualitative control of vocabulary by the learner.

5. Extensive teaching of vocabulary in which the teacher teaches more vocabulary items, aiming at enriching the total vocabulary of the learner.

Formal Strategies

The formal strategies of vocabulary teaching may appear to be artificial. These strategies utilize word lists of the types discussed in the earlier chapter on vocabulary studies. The learner is provided with the desired or fixed quantum of vocabulary to learn at the rate fixed by the teacher. The stages of vocabulary teaching through vocabulary lists are as follows:

1. The teacher reads the word with the accurate pronunciation until the learners grasp the pronunciation. The teacher may ask the students also to repeat it along with him.

2. The teacher spells the word in accordance with the syllabification followed in the target language.

3. The teacher writes the same on the board.

4. The teacher gives the (frequent) meaning that he anticipates the students to learn, or he may ask the learner to look into the dictionary and search and tell the meaning in the form of definition.

5. The teacher uses the word in one or more sentences depending on the meaning or meanings that he is teaching.

6. The teacher asks the learners to use those words in their own sentences.

7. The teacher may also try to elicit from the children as many correct sentences as possible using these words. This is said to be a boring and an ineffective method, because the learner will be learning without any experience with words, and it remains only as an exercise.

Synonyms and Antonyms

This is also one of the popular ways of vocabulary teaching. Here the teacher provides one word in a pair of synonym/antonym to the student and asks him to give the word that means the same, or that means exactly the opposite to the key word. He provides the key word and also gives the alternative words, and asks the learners to memorize them. In most of the cases, he may ask them to use these in their own sentences. The teachers also use sketches, pictures, and exercises to impart understanding and practice in using root words, prefixes, and suffixes. This is a passive mode of vocabulary teaching because the learning takes place without language experience. Another important pedagogical handicap is that the fine distinctions of meaning that exist among words may not come to the notice of the learner, and he may tend to use them in contrast, and lose the effective style of writing and conversing. The third constraint is that all languages may not have the same quantum of synonyms and antonyms.

Derivation

Vocabulary teaching is done here with the help of the process of derivation. This method analyzes the structure of derived vocabulary item and teaches the learner to make analogical creations on the model of the key. The teachers take one particular derived word and break it into as many derivational components as possible and explain the meaning expressed by each component and the derived content. Then they give some words that undergo similar type of derivational process. Later the teacher may ask the student to use the analogically derived words in their own sentences. Here the teacher adopts the inductive method. This process increases the word power of the learners because it develops their insight into the way that words are formed and used. Here not only words derived with the help of affixes are taken into consideration but also compound words are taught. This is an interesting process by which the learner can increase his word power and understand word structure.

Word Games

This is not an independent way of teaching vocabulary. But it is an interesting exercise where the learner is expected to use his knowledge of vocabulary and to learn new words in context. Many types of word games that suit the vocabulary structure of the particular language are formed and administered.

Vocabulary Records

The teachers may advise the language learners to keep a record of the vocabulary that they are taught in the classroom, or the vocabulary that they come across in informal contexts in an alphabetical order or any other order which the learner feels convenient for him. Another procedure that these formal strategies follow in vocabulary teaching is the dictionary study where the student is advised to keep a dictionary with him and study one page or two pages at a given time. All these are called artificial because none of these modes reflect the actual usage situations.

Informal Strategies

The individual speaker bases informal strategies of vocabulary teaching on an important assumption that rich experience is the tool for the acquisition of a rich vocabulary. It is also based on the assumption that retention is more when learned with experience. So this approach aims at creating wide opportunities for experiences and does not bother about the formality of teaching. Here the learning depends on the creative attitude of the teacher in providing more and more opportunities to learn. He has to take into account the learner's learning capacity and interest because the learner is expected to involve himself completely in the process of learning. Some of the things that characterize this approach are that learning here is natural and direct. From the point of view of teaching, however, it is not planned well and is not orderly. A proper blend of the two types of strategies is required in Indian classrooms. Some of the experiences that the teacher arranges for teaching vocabulary through the informal strategies are as follows:

1. Conversations on known and unknown topics.

2. Debates of wider interests.

3. Field trips to different places.

4. Writing compositions on a variety of topics in which the learner is expected to make use of all the vocabulary that he has learned.

5. Learning with the help of audio-visual aids like slides, films, and T. V.

6. Learning by predicting the meaning with the help of context clues, structural clues, phonetic clues, and word formation clues.

Vocabulary teaching will be effective when it is made a concrete learning activity. For this vocabulary teaching should not only be integrated with other language skills but also with the learning of other parts of the school curriculum.

Second language Teaching and Vocabulary Teaching

There are three independent aspects of the process of second language teaching. They are approach, method, and technique. Broadly speaking 'approach' includes a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language and nature of language teaching and learning; method includes 'an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material,' and 'technique' is implementation that actually takes place in the classroom (Anthony 1972). All the three are inter-related because whatever the method, it employs certain language teaching material with certain assumptions about language, and is implemented in the classroom on the basis of the assumptions about language teaching and language learning. So, here, while dealing with vocabulary teaching, all the three aspects of vocabulary teaching mentioned above are taken into account.

Grammar Translation Method

The grammar translation method adopts the teaching of grammar of L2 (Second language) using the Ll (First language), and translation of texts from L2 to Ll and rarely from L1 to L2 as the mode to teach L2. This is said to be the earliest method in the history of language teaching. This method has been in use for a long time and had several names to it. As the name of the method itself suggests, the teaching material following this mode of teaching would normally consist of chapters depicting various grammatical categories, and translation texts. The vocabulary of L1 would be used in these lessons of grammar to explain the particular grammar rule, and also to explain the application of the rule with some more vocabulary items to elucidate the grammatical point mentioned. At the same time, in appropriate cases, vocabulary items are listed in the teaching material presented to the learner in the class as exceptions to the rule described. Here the vocabulary gradation and vocabulary presentation for the teaching material and in the practical teaching and learning in the classroom context are mainly based on the affiliation of the vocabulary item to the particular grammatical category. Apart from this, vocabulary is taught out of context and in isolation. Normally a bulk of vocabulary items belonging to a particular grammatical category would be presented en bloc to the student. The future enrichment of the learner's vocabulary would depend upon his interest and the follow-up measure he undertakes.

The translation exercise that is being conducted in this method would consist of sentences or passages based on the grammatical category taught in that stage of learning. It may also be an arbitrarily selected passage. In the first case, the vocabulary that is used to elucidate the grammar would find place and sometimes other vocabulary may also creep in. In the second case, the vocabulary would depend on the arbitrarily selected passage, whether it is familiar or not to the learner. The vocabulary is taught by associating it with the meaning in the mother tongue of the learner. Normally exact semantic equivalents or partially semantic equivalents are given. A formal or informal bilingual dictionary is a common aid in this method to teach the vocabulary.

In some cases, the vocabulary used would be given at the end of the chapter along with the meaning with a supplementary list of vocabulary items that can be memorized in the context of that lesson. Many times the vocabulary learned would be confined to literary domain and some would be obsolete even. Here vocabulary learning is equated almost to learning a list of vocabulary items.

Direct Method

The direct method, which is in practice in many countries with variations locally designed, is based on certain teaching techniques developed by a French scholar M. Gouin in 1860. This method is based on the principle that a second language can be learned easily if it is learned like the child's learning of his mother tongue, where the child is assumed to learn the words and grammatical forms of his mother tongue through the constant repetition and by linking them directly to the life's real objects and actions. So, the learner, learning a target language by this method should learn the vocabulary of the target language by associating them directly with the objects or actions without any media like translation. The process thus started by associating a word with the thing would be extended for associating the thing with the context and the context would be associated with an expression in the target language.

This method gives prime importance to the selection, gradation, and presentation of vocabulary of the target language. The vocabulary selection for the course material is made (a) on the basis of the frequency of vocabulary items in the language, i.e., with the help of frequency counts of vocabulary items, (b) from the day to day conversations and experiences, (c) potentiality of vocabulary item for easy visualization, picturization with an aid for action in the classroom, and (d) selecting the words that have only one meaning and by avoiding multi meaning vocabulary items. These are the general criteria that are borne in mind while selecting the vocabulary for course materials.

The vocabulary so selected is graded in a way that the easily visualizable item would be presented first. The vocabulary items that (a) need an explanation in the target language, and (b) are to be acquired by deducing the meaning in the linguistic or social context, i.e., vocabulary that cannot be acquired and taught in the way said above, would be taken in the later stages of learning only, when the learner has sufficient competence for the purpose.

The vocabulary item thus selected and graded are presented in the classroom with the help of visual aids and objects present in the classroom because the words presented refer to the immediate experience of the learner. The process of associating the vocabulary to meaning is achieved through gestures and actions, so to say through dramatization. While the concrete meaning is acquired through the association of the vocabulary with object and action, the abstract meaning is taught through th6 association of vocabulary to idea. Translation of words of any sort is completely abandoned. When the students have mastered the target language adequately, the target language so far learned will be used to explain the new items and meanings of new items. This is in the initial stage of learning. In the later stages still more abstract vocabulary also would be presented and in this case the learner would be explained to such vocabulary either in the linguistic or social context so that the learner could be made to deduce the meaning on his own with the help of the context. Whatever the new vocabulary is presented it would be presented in such a way that it is an integral ingredient of the real life 's context and not an obsolete or of literal value. The consecutive repetition and reinforcement of the vocabulary thus presented makes the learner retain them in their use for sufficiently long time and helps in easy recall also. Since this method gives more importance to the spoken form of the vocabulary items than to their written representations, the presentation of written forms would be delayed for sufficient time. Even when the written form of word is presented the learner would be made to concur the meaning directly from the written form without the help of translation. In this method vocabulary learning is not equated with learning a list of words but the vocabulary learning takes place in the context in which the items being learnt would be used.

Audio-lingual Method

The audio-lingual method assumes that (a) language is primarily aural-oral and the reading and writing are secondary, (b) language is a set of patterns and so patterns can be acquired easily by constant repetition and reinforce, and also through analogy, and that (c) the native language interferes where there is difference in the patterI1s of source language and target language. Superficial similarities will also be a hindrance. So while teaching' vocabulary the focus is more upon the aural-oral form of vocabulary than upon the written form.

The criteria that are followed by this method to select vocabulary resemble in a way the direct method because this method also relies upon the frequency counts. The basic vocabulary of the language would get prime importance in preparing the learning material. Some other vocabulary items though not basic but are essential for the efficient teaching and effective communication and for purpose for which the learning is done will be included.

Many courses of this method in the initial stage would contain a near total of 750 to 1500 vocabulary items as basic for learning. This method exercises a strict vocabulary control. In initial stages the vocabulary learning is limited to essential vocabulary items that are quite necessary and just enough to present the language pattern. The vocabulary input would be slowly increased only when the learner has acquired sufficient number of structures and sufficient training to manipulate the language structures. Language learning emphasizes acquisition of structures more than the acquisition of vocabulary; both are parallel activities, with the former occupying a more important role.

This method adopts almost all the procedures followed in the direct method. There is a reluctance to use the source language but this method does not abandon the use of source language in explaining the meaning of target language words, if necessary, and if the learner fails to deduce the meaning from the structural and social contexts. But all the attempts would be made to elicit the meaning from the learner in the context. Normally total number of vocabulary items introduced in one lesson does not exceed 30 at a time. The new items may not find place in the drills or exercises of these lessons because these are meant only to practice the pattern and the new item may hinder the progress.

The substantial amount of graded as well as un graded reading material provided after the learning of basic vocabulary in the basic structures will enrich the vocabulary of the learner both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Cognate Method

The cognate method is used to teach languages in cases where both the source and target languages are genetically related. This method is adopted sometime even to teach the languages where the source and target languages belong to different genetic roots but share certain language features due to linguistic and non-linguistic reasons. This method, while doing so, tries to exploit the cognateness in terms of phonology. morphology, syntax and lexicon of both the languages.

The vocabulary selection, gradation and presentation in the method are completely governed by the cognate relationship existing between the chosen words. While selecting the cognates certain items (pseudo-cognates) would be completely eliminated because these homophonous forms with distinct meaning in the languages create problems in learning rather than facilitating learning. The rules are identified for phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of both the source language and the target language and these rules are graded from known to unknown. So, theoretically speaking, the vocabulary items with the identical shape and meaning in both source and target language would come first and others follow later. Since this method does not keep each of the language skills apart, all the four language skills proceed hand in hand, so, there is no question of introducing the spoken form of the word first and then introducing the written form. Note, however, that such a separation and sequential organization is possible.

Practically speaking, it is evident from the guiding principle of that method that meaning learning does not pose great problem because in selection and in gradation of vocabulary items similarity in form and function is given importance. When vocabulary items are cognate, not because of genetic relation but because of borrowing by the source and target languages from a third source are presented in the material, these would be preceded or followed by the conversion rules. When it becomes difficult for the learner to learn the meaning, the meaning will be explained to him in either the target or the source language. First the cognate vocabulary is presented to the learner in the structures that are governed by the identical rules in source and target languages and then in the structures that are governed by the rules that are specific to the target language. The vocabulary used in the lessons would be listed at the end of each lesson under different grammatical categories.

Bilingual Method

Bilingual method of language teaching aims at making the learner fluent and accurate: (a) in spoken word, (b) in written word, and (c) in making him a true bilingual (Dodson 1974). Dodson makes a distinction between the spoken word and the written word, while stating the objectives of the method. While the direct method intends to teach only spoken word by abandoning the written word, the bilingual method gives appropriated and due weight to both forms of the word. This method tries to achieve the fluency through the eight consecutive steps: They are:

1. Imitation.

2. Interpretation.

3. Substitution and extension.

4. Independent speaking of sentences.

5. Reverse interpretations.

6. Consolidr1tion of question patterns.

7. Questions and answers.

8. Normal foreign language conversation.

According to Dodson, the teaching material need not be specifically prepared for this method, but the material that easily facilitates the adoption of this method can be selected from the material that would be available for teaching a language as second language. However, he suggested that vocabulary graded according to the frequency should be made use of in cases where graded vocabulary lists are available. In the situations in which such graded vocabulary lists are not available the teacher is advised to select from the vocabulary lists intended for other languages and with the help of his 'commonsense' he can make a list of the items that he finds and feels more frequent and 'sprung' naturally from the situation.

In the first stage, thus, selected vocabulary would be presented in the classroom in the situation-bound and visual-presented series of sequential pictures in the context of structures for imitation. This method prefers less number of structures at a time and to present a few vocabulary items at a time because the learning of a large number of words does hamper the learning of the language and slow down the fluency. Since there is constant revision of the elements of the language taught, it is enough to concentrate on a few new vocabulary items and a few structures for mastery at a time. First, the vocabulary that have one to one correspondence in both the languages would be taken for teaching, but this principle does not abandon the teaching of vocabulary items that can be easily demonstrated to the learner with the help of visuals in the initial stages of teaching itself. Teaching of vocabulary that are integrated with certain foreign cultural aspect and that are not known to the learner should be withheld. Especially teaching of words with different shades of meaning in both languages also will be withheld.

The presentation of the new vocabulary along with the old vocabulary to the learner will be done in a wide range of contexts so as to provide a wide range of contexts of usage. By presenting the vocabulary in that way in classroom and in the teaching material, the teacher would be preparing the student to use them in innumerable sentences and in various situations along with capability for manipulation in the needed manner.

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CONTENTS PAGE

REFERENCES

Arujatai and Srinivasachari. (1968) Functional Vocabulary of Pre-school Children. Madras, The SITU Council of Educational Research.

Bernard. (1966) A text of Pre-university Students Vocabulary in Chotanagpur. Hyderabad, CIEFL.

Bloom, L. (1973) One Word at a Time: The Use of Single Word Utterances before Syntax. The Hague, Mouton.

Bongers (1947) The History and Principles of Vocabulary Control. Holland. WOCOPI, Woorden.

Brown, R. (1973) A First Language: The Early Stages. London, George Allen and Unwin.

Child, D. (1973) Psychology and the Teacher. London, Holt Rinehart & Winston.

Chandrashekharaiah, B.K. (1966) An Investigation into the Basic Vocabulary (in Kannada) of Elementary School Children of Standards I to VII of Mysore State. Bangalore, Educational Research Bureau.

Cornegie Report or the Interim Report on vocabulary Selection. King & Co.,1936

Dodson. (1974) Language Teaching and the Biligual Method. New York, Pitman.

Dunkin, et al. (1968) Language in Education. London, Oxford,University Press.

Faucett and Maki. (1932) A Study of English Word Values.l Tokyo, Matsumura Sanshodo.

Finocchiaro, Mary. (1958) Teaching English as a Second~ Language in Elementary and Secondary Schools. NewYork, Harper and Row.

Graham, Alma. (1975) "The Marking of a Non sixist Dictionary" in Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, edited by Barrie, Thorne, and Nancy Henley. Massachusets. Newbury House.

Hirschman, Lynette. (1973) "Female-male differences in Converstational Interaction". Paper presented at the meeting of Linguistic Society of America.

Horn. (1926) Basic Writing Vocabulary. Iowa, University of Iowa [Monographey in Education No.4].

Hornby A. S: (1953)"Vocabulary Control History and Principles English Language Teaching," 8, p. 15-21.

Hurlock, Elizabeth B. (1972) Child Development. Tokyo, McGrahill kogakusha Ltd.
Jeyapaul V. Y., and Pushpa Pai. (1974) A Report of the Survey of the Active Vocabulary and Structure of Tripuri, Children. Mysore, Central Insitute of Indian Languages. [Mss].
Ilakkuvanar, C. (1963) Tholkappiyam. Madurai, Kural Neri Publishing House.

Jesperson, O. (1922) Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. London. Allen & Unwin.

Key. (1972) "Linguistie Behavior of Male and Female" Linguistics, 88, 1972, p. 15-31.

Koeing J. C. (1933) Teachers and Authors List of Four-housand Important Hindi Words.

Komlev N.G. (1976) Components of the Contant Structure of Word. The Hague, Mouton.

Kramsky, Jiri (1969) The Word as a Linguistic Unit. The Hague, Mouton.
Kulli, J. S. (1976) Kesiraja's Shabdamani Darpana. Dharwar, Karnataka University.

Kuppuswamy, B. (1947) KannaDa Pada PaTTi. Mysore, Rajya Vayaskara Shikshana Samithi.

Lakdawala W. T. (1960) The Basic Vocabulary of Gujarati Children at the age of 13 plus. Ph. D.dissertation, Bombay University.

Lakoff, Robin. (1973) "Language and Woman's Place." Language in Society, 2 (1). 1973. p. 45-80.

Lakoff, Robin. (1975) Language and Woman's Place, New York, Harper & Row.

Lenneberg, Eric H. (1968) "The Natural History of Language," in The Genesis of Language, ed. by Frank Smith and George A. Miller. Cambridge, M I T Press, p.219-252.

Liles B. I. (1975) An Introduction to Linguistics, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.

McCarthy D: "Language Development in Childern," in Manual of Child Psychology, ed. by Carmichael. New Delhi, Wiley Eastern Private Ltd. 1968. p. 492-630.

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Thorndike, E. L. (1931) The Teachers' Word Book of 20000 Words. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University

Thorndike, E. L., and Large (1944) The Teachers' Word book of 30,000 Words. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Vakil, K. S. (1955) Basic Vocabulary of Gujarati Children of the Age II plus. Ph.D. dissertation, Bombay University.

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West, Michael. (1953) "Vocabulary Selection and Minimum Adequate Vocabulary," ELT. 1953.

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CONTENTS PAGE

HOME PAGE | BACK ISSUES | Vocabulary Education | Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Issues
Pertinent to Speech and Language Pathology | Learning Indian Languages - A French View | Language, Religion, and Society in Indian Neighborhood: Nepal
| Syntax and Semantics of Verbs of Transfer in Tamil | CONTACT EDITOR

B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Mysore 570006
India
E-mail: mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net.

LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 2 : 8 November 2002

Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Associate Editor: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.

VOCABULARY EDUCATION

An Introduction to the Selection, Gradation, and Presentation of Words
in First, Second, and Foreign Language Teaching

B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2
WORD AND VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 3
TYPES OF VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 4
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGE OF AN INDIVIDUAL

CHAPTER 5
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGES OF A LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 6
THE VARIABLES THAT IMPACT VOCABULARY CHANGES

CHAPTER 7
VOCABULARY PRODUCTION

CHAPTER 8
VOCABULARY STUDIES

CHAPTER 9
VOCABULARY TEACHING

REFERENCES

LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 2 : 8 November 2002

Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D. Associate Editor: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D. Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D. B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.

VOCABULARY EDUCATION

An Introduction to the Selection, Gradation, and Presentation of Words in First, Second, and Foreign Language Teaching

B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2WORD AND VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 3 TYPES OF VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 4VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGE OF AN INDIVIDUAL

CHAPTER 5VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGES OF A LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 6THE VARIABLES THAT IMPACT VOCABULARY CHANGES

CHAPTER 7VOCABULARY PRODUCTION

CHAPTER 8VOCABULARY STUDIES

CHAPTER 9VOCABULARY TEACHING

REFERENCES

Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Associate Editor: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.

An Introduction to the Selection, Gradation, and Presentation of Words
in First, Second, and Foreign Language Teaching

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2
WORD AND VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 3
TYPES OF VOCABULARY

CHAPTER 4
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGE OF AN INDIVIDUAL

CHAPTER 5
VOCABULARY THROUGH THE AGES OF A LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 6
THE VARIABLES THAT IMPACT VOCABULARY CHANGES

CHAPTER 7
VOCABULARY PRODUCTION

CHAPTER 8
VOCABULARY STUDIES

CHAPTER 9
VOCABULARY TEACHING