LANGUAGE IN INDIA

LEARNING ENGLISH VOCABULARY AT THE PRIMARY LEVEL - A FREQUENCY COUNT OF THE VOCABULARY OF THE TEXTBOOKS
USED IN ANDHRA PRADESH
M. Udaya, Ph.D. Candidate

INTRODUCTION

Learning of a language at the most basic level involves three aspects: grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. In other words, importance is placed on the mastery of some grammatical rules and vocabulary items. One cannot learn a language without learning vocabulary. Therefore vocabulary learning is of great importance. It has been reported that learning of new words requires a tremendous effort (Miller and Gildea 1987, Nation 1990). In fact, language learners generally agree that many of their difficulties in both receptive and productive use of vocabulary arise from their inadequate acquisition of lexical knowledge. (Meara 1980, Nation 1990)

A lot of attention has been given to English vocabulary teaching in the recent years because of the dismal performance of learners even after years of learning English as a Second / Foreign language. Thus, the study of vocabulary has occupied the central place in all language teaching / learning activities, and grammar has been pushed to a secondary place.

THE DATA

This paper aims to scrutinize the use of vocabulary in the Primary School level textbooks where English is taught as a second language. So, I have chosen the English textbooks 'English Reader', published by the Government of Andhra Pradesh and prescribed for Classes IV, V and VI in the schools of this state.

METHODOLOGY

Lessons from the English textbooks of Classes IV, V and VI (14 prose pieces and 7 poems in total) were fed into a computer and a vocabulary list was made taking each word's frequency of occurrence for the purpose of analysis. Separate word lists were made for each textbook by classifying the words into various categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and indeclinables. Tagging of these words was done by using the Link Grammar Parser developed by Sleater et al. (1994). Then the data was subjected to an analysis in order to determine the persistent problems in vocabulary learning. Total number of words contained in each of these three books is as follows:

One of the most useful pieces of information one can get from computational corpora is the frequency of vocabulary items in running texts. Frequency counts help in finding out the relative frequency of words in a text. The following lists are based on the corpus created by feeding the English textbooks prescribed for classes IV, V and VI published by the Govt. of Andhra Pradesh in the year 1989. These lists are arranged from the most frequent to the least frequent and these reveal interesting differences among of the first fifty most frequently used function words.

Table - 1

First Fifty Most Frequent Function Word List

Table - 2
First Hundred Most Frequent Content Word List

Table-1 and Table-2 above show the distribution of basic function words and content words. Function words in Table-1 include determiners, pronouns, prepositions, modal verbs, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, etc. Table-2 contains content words, which include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

High frequencies of function words are indeed one of their defining criteria. On closer examination, it is noticed that some of the content words particularly the first 10 (Table-2) show high frequencies when compared with the last 10 (Table-1) function words. The number of words and their percentage coverage in the whole text is presented in the following Table 3.

Table 3
Words and their coverage

3. 3. OBSERVATIONS

1. The frequency analysis informs us that the crucial part of the vocabulary of the learner lies in the first 1000 words, which have a coverage of 90% in the whole text.
2. The fifty most frequent function words in these 1000 words list contribute coverage of 45% of the whole text.
3. Afterwards (i.e., next 1000 words) there is an increase of 1% in coverage for every 200 words. In other words the rest of the vocabulary (roughly 1000) in the text contribute only 10% or less than 10%.
4. The distribution of function words and content words across the three textbooks roughly maintain the same range (i.e., in terms of coverage and contribution).

Some important observations that emerged from the corpus analysis of Class IV, V and VI textbooks are:

1. The ranks of most of the words used in our corpus conform closely to those obtained in the Brown corpus (Kucera &.Francis 1967), the relative frequency of words, ranging from the most frequent (always the word 'the') through the least frequent 'been' are the same, while some words have changed their order that can be ascribed to the differences in the size of corpus.
2. From the frequency lists it was easy to find out which word among the synonyms is the most frequent. For example, if we take start (23), begin (10) and commence (1), start is more frequent than begin, and commence is the least frequent having just one citation as against 23 times for start.
3. Percentage coverage can be the main criterion for selecting what has to be taught to the students of primary level. Frequency information allows teachers to focus appropriately on the most common words, ensuring that learners know and can actively use them. The less frequent words are topic specific and are acquired when needed, e.g. paradise, expedition, or judgment. The common words need less learning effort as frequency of exposure helps in easy understanding.
4. The words which commonly go together are not included in the text books, such as knife, fork, spoon, but loan-words such as kitchen, train, stove, etc. are given which learners are familiar with and which occur in their mother tongue.
5. Many new words are introduced at the primary level such as astronaut and hijack which occur as less frequently occurring content words, where the learners need not spend more time in learning.
6. Idioms are also introduced such as get up, inside out, by the way where the complete meaning cannot be deduced from the sum of its parts. Some of these words include inflected forms of nouns such as plural and possessive. E.g. Boy-boys, teacher- teachers, light-lights, child-children.
7. Word lists/vocabulary extracted from these texts do not include all the inflected forms of the relevant categories. The following examples are taken from Class IV textbook :
   > large - larger - largest
   quick - quicker - quickest
   brave - braver - bravest
   clever - cleverer - cleverest
   young - younger - youngest
   great - greater - greatest
   The words in Italics do not occur in the word lists, however included here for comparison.
8. A large number of irregular verb forms, especially the past tense forms occur, but the present tense forms do not occur, e.g. took, cut, went.
9. The comparative inflections - er and - est (sooner, soonest; quicker, quickest) have been found.
10. The content word list involves many derived words belonging to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. It has been found that only certain derivational vocabulary are frequent and hence important in learning and teaching.
11. Derived words here mainly consist of words derived by adding derivational prefixes and suffixes to the stem. These affixes often change part of speech of the existing word. Some of the derivational affixes listed below are very productive when some are not (see table 4 & 5).

The most commonly occurring prefixes in these textbooks are in-, dis-, de-, un-, over-, under-, fore-, re- and ir-.

Table 4
Word list for commonly occurring prefixes un-, il-, ir-, in-, dis-.

The second language learner has to learn the most productive affixes and also their patterns of distribution, which is not an easy task. E.g. teach - teacher - teaching. This particular affix -ing does not change the part of speech as both are nouns, rather the grammatical meaning of the word is changed. A teacher is one who teaches, teaching is a classroom activity of a teacher.

The most commonly used inflectional suffixes are -est, -ies, -ed, -ing, and derivational suffixes are -tion, -ly, -ness, -ful.

Table 5 Word list for frequently occurring suffixes -ness, -ity, -ise, -en, -al, -ly.

1. It has been observed that when more than one affix is involved in derivation, the resulting words are more complex and hence present difficulties in the acquisition of the word. Often these words have different meanings and different restrictions for word collocations from those of their bases. This makes language learning very difficult. In such a case, each word has to be acquired as a separate one. However, if frequencies of words are correlated with their usage patterns, it seems prefixation in derivation is less frequent hence present difficulties in acquisition when compared to suffixation (refer Table 4 & 5).
2. Some of the contracted forms are acquired later than the full forms. These examples suggest that learners begin lexical development by using features that vary along perceptual dimensions. The forms in the left most column are spelling variants (abbreviated) of the corresponding forms in the right of the table. However, they occur in less frequencies. In formal learning or teaching one may avoid use of such variants.