review play important role in academic practice especially in academic writing. this one is regarded as one of those model book reviews ever written for the journal elt.
review play important role in academic practice especially in academic writing. this one is regarded as one of those model book reviews ever written for the journal elt.
review play important role in academic practice especially in academic writing. this one is regarded as one of those model book reviews ever written for the journal elt.
typical language learners are largely omitted in this
volume. In my view, this is the missing bridge between the reflective practice of the first half of the book and the theoretical issues in the second. Lewis chooses to bridge that gap by including a short story in Calloways code (Chapter 6), showing how collocations central to a particular theme carry the weight of a texts meaning. However, it is perhaps only by including more detail about actual stages of learner collocational development that deeper questions of how collocations are learnt and mis-learnt may be better answered in the future. The appeal by Lewis remains pitched, first, towards using small native speaker corpora, concordances, and collocational dictionaries as the central resources for training learners to notice collocational patterns (Chapter 9 Materials and resources for teaching collocation); a second, weaker call is made for creating corpora of learner language-in-use for assessing collocational proficiency and typical blocked collocations or mis- collocations that different groups of learners may use (Peter Hargreaves, Chapter 10 Collocation and testing). Here, Hargreavess account of the research being done by UCLES into the Cambridge Learner Corpus is of particular interest, although, surprisingly, no mention is made of Grangers work with the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) into collocations and lexical phrases (Granger 1998). One other minor quibble with Teaching Collocation is the incomplete cross- referencing between works cited and the final bibliography (pp. 2445), where, for example, the reference for the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (cited several times in Chapter 7) is missing; a number of page numbers for journal articles are not included. An index would have been useful, too. All in all, the picture that Lewis presents is of an exciting pedagogic challenge, and an accessible research agenda. In his call for teachers to carry out their own action research into a lexical approach to language learning, Lewis seems aware that applied linguistic research on its own will not change how teachers ask their learners to learn lexis. Test for yourself the claims made of collocations, he appeals. Observe, hypothesize, experiment: it is a confident appeal, and one well worth teachers and learners addressing and answering together. References Granger, S. (ed.) 1998. Learner English on Computer. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Hoey, M. 1991. Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, M. 1993. The Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications. Lewis, M. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications. Schmitt, N. 2000. Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, R. and M. Bartram. 2000. Initiative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The reviewer Andy Barfield teaches general English and EAP to undergraduate and MA students at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. He is also actively involved in university English curriculum development, and in- service teacher development. He is currently working on a distance PhD in second language vocabulary acquisition with the University of Wales, Swansea. Email: andyb@sakura.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp Vocabulary in Language Teaching N. Schmitt Cambridge University Press 2000, 224pp., 35.00 (hbk) 12.95 (pbk) isbn 0 521 66938 3 Vocabulary in Language Teaching is one of a number of books on vocabulary to have come from researchers at Nottingham University. Starting with Ron Carters Vocabulary (1988, 1998) and continuing with books such as Carter and McCarthys Vocabulary and Language Teaching (1988), McCarthys Vocabulary (1990), and Schmitt and McCarthy (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy (1997), the Nottingham authors have shown us the importance of vocabulary within the English language. This may sound like a trite statement, but too often the main focus of the language has been on grammar, with vocabulary a kind of added-on, optional extra. Working mainly with corpora, they, along with others such as Sinclair (1991) and Lewis (1993), have been among the first to point out that words do not exist in isolation, that the open choice or slot-and-filler theory is not tenable: you cannot just put any word in any place in a sentence, even if the grammar is correct. Your choice of words frequently dictates what follows, as far as both grammar and other vocabulary items are concerned. Reviews 415 Schmitt, a former research student, and now a lecturer in English language at Nottingham, has been fortunate to have had such able teachers and colleagues. Schmitt picks up on many of the issues raised by Carter, McCarthy, and others in the field. If you have read much of the previous work, then this book might come as a slight disappointment: there is not a great deal here that is new or original. However, if you have not had the opportunity, or the time, to read previous books on vocabulary, then this is a very good introduction to recent research on vocabulary. It provides teachers with the background knowledge they need to understand current issues in vocabulary research, teaching, and testing. The book also has an excellent bibliography, thus giving people who are interested the appropriate references which will allow them to take further their reading in the various topics covered. This is important, as Schmitt deals with a lot in a fairly short book, and many readers will, I am sure, want to look more deeply at some of the issues raised. Schmitt is particularly good at explaining what it means to know a word, and at reminding us just how complicated learning words can be. As teachers, we sometimes naively feel that once we have explained meaning then we have done our job. Schmitt shows clearly that that is not the case: meaning is only one of a number of factors, including register, collocation, grammar, synonymy, and so on. Teachers know this; but it does no harm to have it pointed out so clearly. I have to say that at times I found the structure of the book slightly confusing, as I was not sure why the author was looking at a particular topic in a particular place. He tries to cover a great deal of material, but some of it does not fit quite comfortably into the book, and so has to be introduced more than once. It is, of course, reasonable to repeat topics later on in which have already appeared briefly in the Introduction. However, I did not find that this approach was always helpful. The issue of frequency, for example, was raised in different chapters, and I felt it would perhaps have been more helpful to have had all the information given at one place in the book. Also, for me, Chapter 2, History of vocabulary in language learning, seems wrongly placed, since the following four chapters deal with more theoretical issuesdifferent aspects of knowing a word, the use of corpora, and vocabulary in discourse. We then move on to vocabulary acquisition, teaching and learning vocabulary, and assessing vocabulary knowledge; and it is perhaps in this second half of the book that Chapter 2 more comfortably belongs. A minor quibble, perhaps; but one that kept coming back to me, as it was responsible for most of my I have been here before reactions. As someone who is very interested in the study of vocabulary, I was a little disappointed by the number of examples that Schmitt uses from other published work (mainly that of Carter and McCarthy). I wanted to see new examples, which corroborated those previously given, rather than repetitions of those previously published. When dealing with collocation, for example, Schmitt discusses the word blonde on p. 77, and says that it collocates almost exclusively with hair, and occasionally with a word like woman or lady. Hes right; but how often has this example been used? Again, on p. 78, Schmitt talks about what I (after Sinclair and Louw) call semantic prosody and he calls collocational prosodyi.e. the tendency that some words have to collocate with a definable semantic set of words, all or most of which have positive or negative collocations. One simple example of this is the phrasal verb break out, which habitually collocates with the nouns war, fighting, fire, and panic, all of which have negative connotations. Another negative example is rife, which collocates with words such as rumours, drugs, and violence. Schmitt gives the examples of cause (negative prosody) and provide (positive prosody), both of which were persuasively discussed by Stubbs (1995), without adding anything to what he has already said. There are many other examples that he could have given, which would have exemplified his point and also taken the study of collocational prosody on a little further. The more we know about the way words cluster, the better we should be able to teach them, and thus the more typically our students should be able to use them. However, these criticisms would probably not be relevant to someone new to the study of vocabulary. The examples given are all pertinent, and aptly express the points Schmitt is making. Presumably he has chosen them because they are so central to his argument. They also have the advantage of pointing readers towards the work of other authors in the field, which is, I am sure, one of the aims Schmitt had in mind when writing this book. He is an enthusiast for vocabulary studies, and obviously wants to share this enthusiasm with others. I have no doubt that he will do so with this book, which I would recommend to anyone coming into teaching or wanting to get to grips with the 416 Reviews major issues being discussed in the field of vocabulary studies. References Carter, R. 1988. (2nd edn. 1998). Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge. Carter, R. and M. McCarthy. 1998. Vocabulary and Language Teaching. London: Longman. Lewis, M. 1993. The Lexical Approach. Hove: LTP. Louw, B. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer?the diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies in Baker, M., G. Franco, and E. Tognini- Bonelli (eds.) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamin. 15776. McCarthy, M. 1990. Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmitt, N. and M. McCarthy (eds.). 1997. Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stubbs, M. 1995. Collocations and semantic profiles: On the cause of the trouble with semantic studies. Functions of Language 2/1: 133. The reviewer Gwyneth Fox started her career as an EFL teacher in Rome. She returned to the UK to lecture in Applied Linguistics and run teacher training courses at Birmingham Polytechnic. From 1981 to 1997 she worked on the COBUILD project at the University of Birmingham, writing dictionaries and grammars. During this time she travelled widely, giving talks, workshops, and seminars on corpora and vocabulary studies at conferences and universities around the world. She is now a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and works for Macmillan Heinemann ELT as their dictionary consultant. Research into Teaching English to Young Learners J. Moon and M. Nikolov (eds.) University Press Pecs Hungary 2000, 416pp., 15 from Blackwells Bookshop, University of Leeds isbn 0 963 641 568 4 Research into Teaching English to Young Learners consists of 20 papers from two international conferences held in Hungary and Poland in the autumn of 1999. The editors acknowledge that despite the current popularity of early foreign language programmes there is still insufficient empirical research to underpin this enthusiasm with evidence of how and to what level children develop proficiency in foreign languages in particular kinds of context, and on how realistic the aims are of many current curricular innovations for teaching English to young learners (TEYL) (p. 11). They state the three aims of the book, therefore, as being to raise awareness about the range of issues involved in researching TEYL, to identify directions for research, and to disseminate recent work carried out in different contexts by researchers in Europe and elsewhere (ibid.). These aims are clearly relevant in the broad context of the rapid increase in demand for the teaching of English to young learners. Issues such as teacher supply, teacher education, materials development and evaluation, young learner assessment, and continuity between primary and secondary education need to be thought through, researched, documented, and debated. Without the benefit of evidence and documented experience the profession risks forming policy through the repeated reinventing of wheels, and by resorting to anecdotes. This means of decision-making has been memorably characterized elsewhere by Bowers(1980: 71), as reliance on war stories and romances. As for the research focus, the volume is divided into four sections, moving from macro considerations of research agenda to the exploration of national and international findings, and then from focus on the teacher of young learners to the young learners themselves. As space does not permit a discussion of each article, I will limit my comments to one from each section. In the first section, General Issues in Researching Young Learners: Setting Agendas, Nikolovs article, Issues in Research into Early Foreign Language Programmes, provides a lucid, accessible, and balanced survey of child second language acquisition research issues, as seen from three points of view: the younger the better, the older and better, and the younger the better in some areas (p. 21). It also analyses the validity and reliability of the findings of early foreign language programmes of the 1990s. The article meets the volumes intended aim of suggesting future directions for research, with a list of implications for future research (p. 41), and comments such as: It is surprising that there is no study on how teachers proficiency, and especially pronunciation, influences young learners language development Reviews 417