Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
A vocabulary is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulum, meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary and passive vocabulary. An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction, independent reading, and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting, trauma, or disease. Furthermore, vocabulary is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics, education, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations, idioms, and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language.
Rod Ellis is a Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winning British linguist. He is currently a research professor in the School of Education, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a professor at Anaheim University, where he serves as the Vice president of academic affairs. Ellis is a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University as part of China’s Chang Jiang Scholars Program and an emeritus professor of the University of Auckland. He has also been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.
Ahmar Mahboob is a Pakistani linguist. Currently he is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He has worked in the fields of language policy development, pidgin and creole languages, NNEST studies, English language acquisition, English language teaching and teacher education, World Englishes, pragmatics, and minority languages in South Asia. Ahmar earned his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in 2003, and has published extensively. He was the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly, alongside Brian Paltridge, for several years. He was also the Associate Editor of Linguistics and the Human Sciences and serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals. Ahmar has organised a number of regional, national, and international conferences and is the convenor and the co-creator of the Free Linguistics Conference.
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a word list of 570 English words which appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The target readership is English as a second or foreign language students intending to enter English-medium higher education, and teachers of such students. The AWL was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and divided into ten sublists in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the General Service List ; however, many words in the AWL are general vocabulary rather than restricted to an academic domain, such as area, approach, create, similar, and occur in Sublist One.
The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In the original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included.
The input hypothesis, also known as the monitor model, is a group of five hypotheses of second-language acquisition developed by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1970s and 1980s. Krashen originally formulated the input hypothesis as just one of the five hypotheses, but over time the term has come to refer to the five hypotheses as a group. The hypotheses are the input hypothesis, the acquisition–learning hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis. The input hypothesis was first published in 1977.
Vivian James Cook was a British linguist who was Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. He was known for his work on second-language acquisition and second-language teaching, and for writing textbooks and popular books about linguistics. He worked on a number of topics such as bilingualism, EFL, first-language acquisition, second-language teaching, linguistics, and the English writing system. He published more than 20 books and 100 papers. He was founder and first President of the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA), and co-founder of the Oxford University Press journal Writing Systems Research. He died in December 2021, at the age of 81.
A word list is a list of a language's lexicon within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. A lexicon sorted by frequency "provides a rational basis for making sure that learners get the best return for their vocabulary learning effort", but is mainly intended for course writers, not directly for learners. Frequency lists are also made for lexicographical purposes, serving as a sort of checklist to ensure that common words are not left out. Some major pitfalls are the corpus content, the corpus register, and the definition of "word". While word counting is a thousand years old, with still gigantic analysis done by hand in the mid-20th century, natural language electronic processing of large corpora such as movie subtitles has accelerated the research field.
Ian Stephen Paul Nation is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of linguistics and teaching methodology.
Norbert Schmitt is an American applied linguist and Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He is known for his work on second-language vocabulary acquisition and second-language vocabulary teaching. He has published numerous books and papers on vocabulary acquisition.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to second-language acquisition:
The New General Service List (NGSL) is a list of 2,809 words (lemmas) claimed to be a list of words that second language learners of the English language are most likely to meet in their daily lives. It was published by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in March 2013 and updated in 2016 and 2023.
Vocabulary learning is the process acquiring building blocks in second language acquisition Restrepo Ramos (2015). The impact of vocabulary on proficiency in second language performance "has become […] an object of considerable interest among researchers, teachers, and materials developers". From being a "neglected aspect of language learning" vocabulary gained recognition in the literature and reclaimed its position in teaching. Educators shifted their attention from accuracy to fluency by moving from the Grammar translation method to communicative approaches to teaching. As a result, incidental vocabulary teaching and learning became one of the two major types of teaching programs along with the deliberate approach.
Cornelis Kees de Bot is a Dutch linguist. He is currently the chair of applied linguistics at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and at the University of Pannonia. He is known for his work on second language development and the use of dynamical systems theory to study second language development.
Laurence James Bauer is a British linguist and Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. He is known for his expertise on morphology and word formation. Bauer was an editor of the journal Word Structure. In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Humanities medal.
Scott Andrew Crossley is an American linguist. He is a professor of applied linguistics at Vanderbilt University, United States. His research focuses on natural language processing and the application of computational tools and machine learning algorithms in learning analytics including second language acquisition, second language writing, and readability. His main interest area is the development and use of natural language processing tools in assessing writing quality and text difficulty.
An English language institute (ELIs) or English language centre (ELCs) is a department within a college or university in English-speaking countries that aims to develop students' English language skills for a variety of purposes. In countries like New Zealand, ELCs accounted for one-fifth of the $1.1 billion (NZ) in revenue (2001).
Meredith Helena Marra is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in sociolinguistics and workplace discourse.
