Words, Words and Knowledge of Words: An interview with Norbert Schmitt

Words, Words and
Knowledge of Words

An interview with
Norbert Schmitt

Bryan Robinson

American-born Norbert Schmitt teaches at the University of Nottingham in
the UK. In recent years he has published a number of research articles and books on topics
in the field of vocabulary learning and teaching. These include Vocabulary: Description,
Acquisition, and Pedagogy (1999) co-edited with Michael McCarthy, and Vocabulary in
Language Teaching (2000) both from Cambridge University Press. His partner, Diane Schmitt,
is a leading member of IATEFL and coordinates the Research SIG. Norbert and Diane
presented sessions at the XVI Jornadas in September 2000, and after the conference was
over, Norbert kindly spent some time talking to Greta about his EFL career, his work on
vocabulary, and applications of this in the classroom.

Greta: How did you get involved in the area of vocabulary?

Norbert Schmitt: I don’t know why I got into vocabulary
– who knows why people specialize in what they do? But at some point during my MA in ELT,
I found myself thinking more and more about lexical issues.

My PhD was about vocabulary acquisition. I was trying to look at
how individual words are learned. There’s been a lot of research on vocabulary size
in terms of how many words are learned in a classroom, or how many are learned in a year,
or how many words you know: for example, native speakers add around 1000-2000 words a year
to their lexicon when they are growing up. But there hasn’t been very much research
on tracking individual words, and how words go from not being known at all, all the way
through partial knowledge ‘I can use/understand the word receptively’, to full
control where ‘I can use it in any situation I want’ and ‘I can use it
appropriately’.

Greta: So that’s where the different types of word
knowledge come in?

N.S.: Yes, that was the particular perspective I used in
this research. I drew on Paul Nation’s 1990 taxonomy of eight different types of word
knowledge: the written form, spoken form, collocation knowledge, grammatical knowledge,
meaning knowledge, association knowledge, frequency and appropriateness.

I tracked three advanced learners who were PhD students at the
University of Nottingham. I gave them eleven words: some of the words were totally new to
them; some were words they’d seen before and maybe used a little bit; and other words
were relatively common and they knew them pretty well. In that way I could track words at
different degrees of knowledge, and see how the learners’ knowledge of these words
changed over time. They usually learned a little bit about the unknown words by the end of
one year, but from the words that were partially known, I could measure which of the
different types of word knowledge they actually improved on.

I looked at meaning, collocations, associations, spelling,
grammatical parts of speech, and the derivations within the word family. For example, one
thing I explored was whether the learners could use a target word such as
‘stimulate’ as a noun ‘stimulation’, could they use it in the verb
form ‘stimulate’, could they use it as an adjective ‘stimulative’?
This was one area they didn’t really improve on much at all.

Greta: Is that because they were using them in oral
contexts?

N.S.: Well, the research was designed to track the changes
in word knowledge, so I can’t say much

about the underlying causes. But one could speculate that maybe
their written control was better than their oral control. I do know that the learning was
more or less incidental: only one of the three people said that they actually looked up
the words in a dictionary; the others said that they just read books and that they thought
about the words only when we met every six months.

In any case, learning the full word knowledge specification for a
word takes a long time, and for most words, learners only possess partial knowledge.
I’ve just finished a project with a colleague in California, Cheryl Zimmerman, and
what we found was that even advanced students in English-medium higher education have gaps
in their knowledge of the derivative forms of a word family. They know one or two word
forms – usually the verb and the noun forms – but the adverb and the adjective forms
are harder and it’s actually rare for a learner even at that level of proficiency to
know all of the four forms. What does that mean in a practical sense? Well, learners
usually have a partial knowledge of words, which means that they have a limited range that
they can use them in, so maybe they know a word like ‘stimulate’, and maybe they
can use it as a verb, maybe as a noun, but if they need to use it in an adjective sense
they might not be able to; so they’ll either use a wrong word form, or they’ll
avoid using it altogether, or maybe the word is not even an option in their minds.

Greta: From the point of view of the classroom teacher,
what is the way in which those gaps can be filled? Is it just a question of exposure to
word forms in different contexts? Is it a matter of using manipulative exercises?

N.S.: That’s a good question! It seems to me that the
word knowledge framework can be useful in developing reasonable answers to questions like
these. First, you ask what learners know about a word, and what you want them to know. Can
they spell the word? Do they know the appropriate register? Do they know the grammatical
constraints? Then you match the knowledge gaps with an appropriate pedagogical technique.
For example, some of the types of word knowledge, like meaning, are amenable to conscious
learning. You can actually sit down, try to memorize meaning, try to match the word form
with the meaning, try to make mental links in your mind. You can also work on spelling
consciously, because once you know the spelling of some words, you can use that knowledge
by analogy to learn other similarly-spelled words. So some kinds of word knowledge are
more amenable to a conscious ‘Let’s learn this’ approach. But there are
other kinds, like collocations, that are not. We can teach a few collocations to certain
words, but it’s always going to be limited; there are millions of collocations.
Teaching all of the collocation partners for a word is just not feasible, and so this type
of knowledge is probably best learned from exposure.

Greta: But collocation is vital because it’s what
makes texts sound native-like and natural.

N.S.: A certain word has certain partners, but that
doesn’t necessarily help you when you take a different word. There’s no obvious
system and each collocation has to be learned individually because you can’t depend
on rules to help you. Collocation, the frequency of a word, the register of a word are all
use-based types of knowledge which are hard to teach. You can help your students to a
certain extent, but for them to really get a sense of how and where to use a word, they
basically have to learn from exposure and by building their intuitions.

Diane Schmitt: But I still think there’s a role for
teaching in that. I largely teach English for Academic Purposes, but I do bring up the
different types of word knowledge and my

students are not aware of many of them. If I ask ‘What does
it mean to know a word?’, when we get down to it, the students normally say something
about pronunciation, meaning, …

Greta: Dictionary meanings?

D.S.: …dictionary meanings, and maybe formality. So I
think there is a teaching role for continual awareness raising of the other things, in
that students need to be aware that they should be looking out for patterns and
collocations.

N.S.: We have these different kinds of word knowledge, so
teachers need to be aware of all of them, and make their students aware that they exist.
Obviously, students won’t learn all of the word knowledge information for each word
instantly. Collocations will take a long time to learn, but students have to be aware that
collocations are there, and that they are required to really master a word.

Greta: But it’s also important for teachers to help
learners become more aware of the need to be systematic in the way they learn, in the way
they record collocations, and that they recycle them.

N.S.: Yes, and that brings us back to the idea of
intentional versus incidental learning. I think the consensus nowadays is that we need
both. Before, it was `We have to teach it explicitly if it’s going to be
learned’, then we got away from that and it became top-down, communicative language
teaching: `It’ll just be learned incidentally by using the language.’

Greta: …that would be the ‘intuition’ you
were talking about…

N.S.: Right, but now people realize that we need both
approaches because they do different things. We need explicit instruction to teach at
least the meanings and the starting partial knowledge of the most frequent words in
English. You need to use the most frequent 2000 words of English to do virtually anything
in the language, so there’s a role for explicit instruction in teaching them, but
there are limitations in the number of lower-frequency words which can be taught. But
it’s not just that limitation, although it’s the thing that’s usually been
cited. Explicit teaching also has limitations in the types of word knowledge it can
actually address, as I mentioned before. So we need both the explicit instruction approach
and the exposure approach because they address different kinds of word knowledge. Also, we
need to have the exposure approach because it helps to recycle the words that are already
partially learned, perhaps from explicit teaching. Without this consolidation, the words
initially learned through explicit teaching may be forgotten and the effort wasted.
Reading is an obvious source of exposure. but you need to have a lot of it just to recycle
and consolidate the partially-learned words, let alone to be introduced to new ones.

Greta: Vocabulary is a key element in testing performance
at different levels of language learning.

N.S.: Yes, but here the question is what type of
vocabulary test is used. Traditional vocabulary tests typically measure written form and
meaning knowledge of pre-selected words. These features give the examiner control over the
words to be tested and conveniently produce answers which can be marked as
correct/incorrect. But work is also being done on test formats where learners produce a
piece of text and the words produced are analyzed. The advantage here is that we get a
better idea of a learner’s productive knowledge, and might even get some idea of the
learner’s knowledge of appropriateness, grammatical control, and so on. The problem
is that it is very difficult to predict which words will show up in any particular
learner’s examination output.

Greta: But students don’t necessarily show their best
in exam contexts…

N.S.: No, so perhaps a greater weighting should be given
to the day-to-day formative assessment which teachers do in the classroom as part of their
normal teaching. But I do think there’s a case for vocabulary testing which can help
us to judge a learner’s vocabulary size. In classroom situations, a vocabulary size
score can be very informative for teachers, particularly for placement or diagnostic
purposes. Beyond this, I think it is useful to have a certain amount of vocabulary testing
simply for the washback effect. If we as teachers think vocabulary is important, then we
should be testing it at least to some degree so that learners realize that it is a
learning priority. It goes back to the old truism: If you want learners to think something
is important, put it in a test.

Greta: When you’re measuring over a longer period,
intermediate students are the most frustrated because they are the ones who don’t see
their progress. Teaching intermediate students, one of the most difficult things is to
encourage them to read. Even a test is sometimes not enough because it doesn’t
motivate sufficiently to counter the frustration factor. People will spend hours with a
graded reader and a dictionary and this makes them more and more frustrated.

D.S.: One thing is that for intermediate students, the
issue is not necessarily learning more words, but learning more about the words that they
know. Most students measure themselves against their peers, and unconsciously against
their Ll reading. If you just constantly teach only new words, they’re probably being
forgotten nearly as quickly as they’re taught. It’s more important to go back
and consolidate these words than to teach another new word. It’s worth the investment
to go back, and that is something that most teachers might find that they don’t do.

Greta: Coursebooks don’t let you do that, and except
in a few contexts there isn’t any framework that helps teachers to review and to work
backwards. In ESP, there are publications such as Peter Wilburg’s filofax-like Business
English were he offers mind maps for learners to go back and to draw and redraw the
mind map.

N.S.: A lot of people criticize word lists. But I think
the problem lies in the way teachers have used them, rather than in any inherent

shortcomings. Teachers might ask their students to memorize some
words for homework and then test them the next day. But often that is the only time the
teachers work with those words. No wonder word lists don’t work if used like this.
But words lists make a lot of sense if we conceive of vocabulary learning as an
incremental process. Learners can study the lists at home on their own time and get an
initial exposure to the new words. The teacher can the use the precious classroom time to
consolidate the words, and expand the learner’s knowledge of them. This doesn’t
necessarily mean separate vocabulary exercises. Teachers have to make up examples to teach
grammar or any other linguistic skill, so why not use the vocabulary which students were
exposed to the night before? Many language games are also great for recycling vocabulary.
So although coursebooks might be restrictive in the way they present vocabulary, I think
there is a lot of scope to include vocabulary recycling in the supplementary materials. In
any case, most course books set vocabulary goals that are way too low.

D.S.: In Japan, there’s a list of 580 words to be
learnt after three years of junior high school, which is unrealistically low.

Greta: 2000 words would be about three years work in
Spain.

N.S.: If we know that 2000 words forms the lexical basis
for general oral communicative competency, I would advocate priming the vocabulary pump
early. Instead of teaching grammar at the beginning, I would make the first year primarily
a vocabulary-learning year. In essence, I think it makes sense to put the lexical
resources in place before we go on to work on the other aspects of linguistic knowledge.
For example, think of how much easier it would be to understand grammar if you could read
a wide variety of sentences illustrating the grammar point, and knew all of the words and
how their meanings related to each other. My hunch is that the time ‘lost’
initially by focusing primarily on vocabulary would be rapidly made up because grammatical
knowledge and pragmatic learning would advance so much more quickly once they were focused
on.

Greta: So you’re talking about a beginner’s
course, where would primary school learners start?

N.S: Let’s be radical, let’s say we’ve got
two years, about 80 weeks’ schooling, with two sessions a week. Now, if we divide
2000 words by eighty sessions a year that gives us 12 new words a session over two years.
The students would initially learn those words as homework, and then the teachers would
recycle, consolidate, and expand upon the words in the classroom. The teachers could use
receptive tasks for recently-learned words, and move to productive tasks for words which
had been recycled a number of times. The focus would be on the most frequent words, but
the words wouldn’t be selected solely on a frequency basis. Words necessary for
classroom management, like page. pencil, and eraser would be taught
early so that classroom instructions could be given in English as soon as possible. The
very frequent grammatical words wouldn’t be taught explicitly but the students could
start learning them incidentally from the teacher’s language input. Make it fun, make
it engaging, make it non-threatening.

I think such an approach would be motivating because 1) learners
expect to have to learn vocabulary and 2) they would be able to start communicating in a
meaningful way sooner. If you teach the first 2000 words in two years, then in three years
students would be able to communicate in L2 environments. These primary school learners
would be able to walk into a restaurant and buy a hamburger. They wouldn’t be
perfectly correct grammatically, but they would get their message across.

Having this vocabulary in place would also accelerate the
development of the four skills. The more vocabulary you have and the more automatic it is,
the more mental resources are freed up for other elements of language processing, such as
listening or reading.

Greta: So when can we expect this revolutionary primary
course to appear?

N.S.: When the Spanish ministry reads this interview…!

References

Nation, I.SP. 1990. Teaching and Learning
Vocabulary. Massachusetts: Newbury House.

Wilberg, Peter