Language in content instruction - LICI Project

When asked which of the following are words:
most people will answer car, read and firstly and perhaps pick up the single words 1 from
the collocations 2 (as, far, as, I, know; absolutely, convinced) but not the whole groups of
words. This is because a written word has been traditionally defined as a single stretch of
letters divided by a blank space before and after the stretch.
Why is vocabulary important?
From the 80s, the significance of vocabulary (or lexis) as part of language proficiency and
language learning has been understood differently from the earlier grammar-based view
of language learning and teaching (e.g. Nation, 1990, Sinclair, 1991). It is now commonly
believed that lexis is one of the most important components of language proficiency, more
important than grammar, for example. With the development of statistical techniques, the
measurement of vocabulary size and its relation to reading proficiency and measures of
intelligence have become possible. It has been shown that vocabulary size correlates
strongly with both reading comprehension and intelligence (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).
It has also been shown that deficiencies in vocabulary knowledge are an important cause
of academic failure and that teaching of content vocabulary, in particular direct
instruction of word meanings improves academic success (Beck, Perfetti & McKeown,
1982; Baumann & Kameenui, 1991).
Vocabulary knowledge is important for both L1 and L2. Laufer (1996) suggets that L2
learners need a vocabulary size of about 5 000 words to be able to read without difficulty
in their L2, unhampered by either lacking vocabulary skills in the L2 and/or deficient
reading skills in their L1. In addition to vocabulary size, also vocabulary depth seems to be
1 Vocabulary is frequently used to refer to single words, whereas lexis refers to multi-word units
and the word including its associations in the mental lexicon.
2 Collocation is "the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural
text with greater than random frequency" (Lewis, 1997:8)
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as far as I know; car; absolutely convinced; firstly; read; that’ll do