Connected Words: Word associations and second language vocabulary acquisition (Language Learning & Language Teaching)

193 Pages·2009·9.3 MB·English

by  Prof. Paul Meara

Connected Words
Language Learning & Language Teaching (LL&LT)
The LL&LT monograph series publishes monographs, edited volumes and
text books on applied and methodological issues in the field of language
pedagogy. The focus of the series is on subjects such as classroom discourse
and interaction; language diversity in educational settings; bilingual
education; language testing and language assessment; teaching methods and
teaching performance; learning trajectories in second language acquisition;
and written language learning in educational settings.
Editors
Nina Spada Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Center for Language Study
University of Toronto Yale University

Volume 24
Connected Words. Word associations and second language vocabulary acquisition
by Paul Meara
Connected Words
Word associations and second language
vocabulary acquisition
Paul Meara
Swansea University

John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meara, P. M. (Paul M.)

  Connected words : word associations and second language vocabulary acquisition /
Paul Meara.
       p. cm. (Language Learning & Language Teaching, issn 1569-9471 ; v. 24)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.  Second language acquisition--Study and teaching. 2.  Vocabulary--Study and teaching.
3.  Language and languages--Study and teaching  I. Title.
P118.2.M423 2009
418.0071--dc22 2009019814
isbn 978 90 272 1986 2 (hb; alk. paper) / isbn 978 90 272 1987 9 (pb; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8907 0 (eb)
© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Connecting words ix
section 1. Early work 1
chapter 1
Learners’ word associations in French 5
chapter 2
Word associations in a foreign language 21
section 2. Associations as productive vocabulary 29
chapter 3
Lex30: An improved method of assessing
productive vocabulary in an L2 33
chapter 4
Exploring the validity of a test of productive vocabulary 45

section 3. Word association networks 59
chapter 5
Network structures and vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language 65
chapter 6
V_Links: Beyond vocabulary depth 73
chapter 7
A further note on simulating word association behaviour in an L2 85
section 4. Bibliograhical resources for word associations in an L2 97
chapter 8
Word associations in a second language: An annotated bibliography 101
vi Connected Words
section 5. Software applications 129
chapter 9
Lex 30 v3.00: The manual 131
chapter 10
V_Six v1.00: The manual 147
chapter 11
WA_Sorter: The manual 159
References 165
Index 171
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 first appeared in Interlanguage Studies Bulletin – Utrecht 3(2): 192–211,
1978. Chapter 2 first appeared in Nottingham Linguistics Circular 11: 28–38, 1983.
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 were co-authored with Tess Fitzpatrick, and appeared
respectively in System 28(1): 19–30, 2000 and in Vigo International Journal of Applied
Linguistics 1: 55–74 (2004). Chapter 5 first appeared in: P.J.L. Arnaud & H. Béjoint
(Eds). 1992. Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics. London: Macmillan. Chapter 6 was
co-authored by Brent Wolter, and appeared in Angles on the English Speaking World
4: 85–97, 2005. Chapter 8 was co-authored with Brent Wolter and Clarissa Wilks
and first appeared in Second Language Research 21(4): 359–372, 2005.

Introduction
Connecting words
Applied linguistics is a curious discipline, one that seems particularly badly
inflicted with band-wagon research. Every now and then someone produces an
especially insightful paper, and within a couple of years almost everyone else has
abandoned the research they were previously working on to follow up these new
ideas. The problem then is that once the original band-wagon stalls, and another
band-wagon appears, people are only too ready to move on to the new topic.
One consequence of this is that there is a huge quantity of “research” which does
very little to move the field forward in any real sense. Hardly anyone looks at the
fundamental assumptions underlying the current band-wagon, hardly anyone asks
critical questions about the methodologies that the current band-wagon depends
on, and few people are willing to invest much time and effort into developing
better methodologies that support these critical questions.
This volume contains a set of papers that deal with word associations in a
foreign language. I first started working in this area back in the 1970s when the
psycholinguistics of foreign language speakers was a severely under-researched
field. At the time, most applied linguists still looked towards theoretical linguistics
as their source discipline, and most of the interesting ideas that were being dis-
cussed still relied very heavily on exciting theories about the nature of language
that were being developed by linguists. This meant that there was a strong empha-

sis on formal aspects of second language production, but only a handful of people
were interested in the processes which underpinned these productions. This empha-
sis can be seen very clearly in the 1984 volume edited by Davies, Criper & Howatt,
which marked Pit Corder’s retirement as head of the Department of Applied Lin-
guistics in Edinburgh. Selinker’s summary paper in that volume (Selinker 1984)
identified nine issues which had emerged in the conference, and which he felt were
central to the enterprise of interlanguage studies: methodology (by which he meant
the use of intuitions and judgements about grammaticality), language transfer (the
influence of L1 structural features on L2 output), fossilization (the way some L2
structures persist even when they are grammatically incorrect by Native Speaker
standards), the Universal hypothesis, Universal Grammar (the assumption that
learners have a grammar in their heads), Interlanguage Strategies (specifically the
distinction between communication strategies and learning strategies), Interlan-
guage Discourse (specifically the impact of classroom discourse on interlanguage
x Connected Words
development), and Context in Interlanguage Studies (by which he seems to mean
the impact of special purposes environments on language acquisition).
My own contribution to that volume was unusual in that it was the only piece
that identified second language vocabulary as an area of importance – and it got
some criticism for doing so. At the time, this didn’t surprise me – after all, it was
not long since the whole question of L2 lexical competence had been dismissed
as uninteresting by the major figures in the field. Hockett’s assertion that “there is
no point in learning large numbers of (words) until one knows what to do with
them ... The acquisition of new vocabulary hardly requires formal instruction” was
widely accepted as a non-negotiable premise (Hockett 1958:266). More recently,
Canale and Swain’s seminal paper on communicative competence, which was to
define the dominant paradigm in SLA for many years, had reduced vocabulary
knowledge to a very minor role in grammar competence (Canale & Swain 1980).
With hindsight, however, it is perhaps more of a surprise that so few people were
taking vocabulary acquisition seriously. This, after all, was the heyday of Verbal
Learning – a vast area of psychological research, which dealt entirely with words,
how we learn them and how we use them, and what we can learn about memory
and cognition by studying the way people handle words. I suppose that verbal
learning had a bad press with linguists because it was linked in many people’s
minds to behaviourism. Everyone knew that behaviourism had been definitively
rubbished by Chomsky in his review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Chomsky
1959) – a review which was often quoted but rarely read. A few die-hard psycholo-
gists still clung stubbornly to behaviorist views, but most linguists believed that
these ideas had little to offer to linguistics.
This view of the verbal behaviour movement was, of course, a travesty of what
the work really involved. True, a lot of it did involve people learning lists of words,

and a lot of it even involved people learning long lists of nonsense words. But this
work was actually a lot more interesting than linguists made it out to be. Some of
it was extremely sophisticated, making use of complex mathematical models that
were rarely used by linguists. Some of it was not so sophisticated, but the sheer vol-
ume of work that was carried out, the large number of variables that were studied,
and the huge range of problems that the results were applied to meant that verbal
learning and verbal behaviour formed a compulsory core element in the training of
academic psychologists in a way that it never did for linguists. A good example of
this divergence can be found in Crothers & Suppes (1967) book, which presented
a coherent and mathematically sophisticated model of the way L2 learners might
acquire vocabulary from word lists. As far as I know, this work was not reviewed in
any of the major journals in Applied Linguistics at the time of its publication, and
even today, it is only rarely mentioned by the main researchers in vocabulary acqui-
sition. Nation (2001), for example, summarises this text in three short sentences,
while Singleton (1999) and Schmitt (2000) do not mention it at all.