While most vocabulary lists (AWL, GSL, etc.) include only headwords, I believe it would be appropriate to include certain multi-word items. Reasons for their inclusion may be high frequency of occurrence (e.g., phrasal verbs in general English), denoting a specific concept (e.g., supreme court in a list of law words), or evidence that multi-word items are not easily acquired by learners. (I have Japanese learners of English in mind, but any second language learning studies would be useful. Thank you.)
The most influential and important work on this is by Mchael Lewis (1993) The Lexical Approach and Implementing the Lexical approach( 1997 ). if you Google the lexical approach a full range of material will come up for you. Lewis' work includes semantic and syntactic collocations or lexical chunks that usually go together. T Iin my opinion hese chunks have replace single word approaches in vocabulary frequency and pedagogical thinking as they are much more useful to the learner . Lewis of course argues that this lexical chunking approach is much more pedagogically useful than a sentence level grammar in learning languages . In my programmes with teachers they almost universally report the same findings Best Wishes John McCaffery
Indubitably, learners do not store vocabulary as individual words, rather they learn words as chunks of language, Consequently, I agree with John who suggests that chunks as lexical phrases and collocations are preferred ways of scaffolding lexical knowledge. Alternatively, the work by Nattinger& DeCarrico ( 1992 ) can also be helpful .
Best regards,
Reza Biria
We should probably include Alison Wray's work showing the utility of multi-word items for both comprehension and production too.
Additionally, Nation has a whole chapter in "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" (2001). Cambridge U.P. (Eds. Long & Richards) on chunking and collocation with plenty of studies noted on benefits.
Dear John
these publications can offer some findings:
https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/95580/UBC_1988_A8
http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/40430/1/FullText.pdf?accept=1
please take a look at my articles relevant to your study as well.
good luck with your research
a.
John, have you read this paper associated with the publication of Schmitt's phrase list? http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/04/13/applin.ams010.short
That's the Phrasal Ezpressions List (PHRASE List), developed between 2008-2010 as part of Ron Martinez's doctoral thesis at the University of Nottingham, and published by Ron Martinez and Norbert Schmitt (the thesis supervisor) in the journal Applied Linguistics in 2012. The paper talks about the justification of integrating multi word expressions into GSL-like lists, with special emphasis on those items which learners are lmore ikely to have difficulty with on a receptive level because of their relative semantic opacity (I.e. Individual meanings of words do not match the meaning of the whole expressions which they comprise). As mentioned in an earlier comment, the article in full can be found online at the journal Applied Linguistics, and also here on my page, I believe. But pease note that it is not the "Schmitt Phrase List" but the Martinez and Schmitt Phrase List.
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