Vocabulary Breadth and Depth in English Reading

Learning and teaching L2 vocabulary always interests me. I am going to share my thoughts about this study.

Li, M. and J. R. Kirby. 2014. ‘The effects of vocabulary breadth and depth on English reading,’ Applied Linguistics 2014: 1-25.

A. Vocabulary breadth and depth are closely related.

I never considered the relationship between vocabulary breadth and depth very seriously in the past, but now I have much better understanding of it. This study and others (Qian, 1999; Vermeer, 2001) revealed that breadth and depth correlated significantly. In everyone’s lexicon, words are not separated or independent. Instead, they form a vocabulary network. When the breadth of vocabulary is expanded, the network will become bigger and more complicated, which is beneficial to tightening links between words and thus enhancing depth of vocabulary. That means we can better understand different definitions of words in different contexts and their morphological structures (such as prefix, suffix, and root), which in turn makes it easier to learn more words.

B. Factors affecting (determining) vocabulary depth

How to measure vocabulary breadth and depth is always a question worthy of debate. Different scholars adopt different methods premised on their own understanding of these two terms. I would say the summary of Nation (2001) about vocabulary depth is precise and plausible: form (oral and written), meaning, and use. Certainly, there can be a lot more, including pronunciation, register, morphosyntactic properties, pragmatic features, and collocation (Laufer 1992; Nagy and Scott 2000; Read 2000). In this study, three aspects are examined: elaborated meaning, morphology, and collocational use of words.

Personally speaking, my knowledge of vocabulary depth is only confined to two areas, different meanings and uses of a word. Nevertheless, previously I did not realize the importance of morphological awareness, although I have known something about roots and affixes since I was a little kid. (Yet I do not even remember how I learned about these, since none of my English teachers ever seriously mentioned them in class.) What further surprises me is that, results of the research show that morphological awareness is the most significant indicator of vocabulary depth, while collocational use of words examined by multiple-meaning vocabulary test is the least significant one. I never expected this before because it contradicted my reading experience to some extent. During the High School Entrance Examination, University Entrance Examination, TEM 4, CET 4 and IELTS, most difficulties of comprehension should be attributed to failure of understanding a specific meaning or use of a word in a given context. I did sometimes guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word according to its morphological structure, whereas I would not say it was of great help.

C. A question about the word definitions task

In this study, twelve words are selected to assess vocabulary depth in the word definitions task. Scoring criteria include four features: category, function, description and value. Whereas participants are not informed that they have to say about each word from these four perspectives, although they are given examples. Hence, I wonder what if they do not know what should be included in an elaborated definition of a word. I believe all students in middle school know the word “apple” very well, but if they are asked to define it even in Chinese, not everyone can manage to meet the criteria of four features.

D. Implications for vocabulary teaching

The last part of this article discussed implications for vocabulary teaching inspired by the results. Given the importance of morphological awareness, teachers are advised to highlight morphological structures of a word. Furthermore, vocabulary breadth and depth are not mutually exclusive and we should put a high value on both of them. Lastly, for EFL students, it is particularly difficult to enhance vocabulary depth due to limited exposure to English outside classroom. It reminds me of the way I learned vocabulary in school. My teachers seldom encouraged morphological analysis. However, my high school did well In terms of multiple meanings and collocational uses. Not only did it offer us workbooks designed by our teachers with summaries of different meanings and collocations of every new word, but it also checked whether we learned these by heart in exams. Nevertheless, to be frank, because there were very few opportunities to use them in daily life, we quickly forgot most of them except the most salient meaning. Indeed, a popular saying in my country about foreign language learning goes, “The first step is to learn vocabulary.” I always maintain that this “first step” is never easy and instead it can be so arduous that you will finally realize it is not a “step”, but a process ongoing through all stages of learning a new language.

References

Laufer, B. 1992. ‘How much lexis is necessary for reading comprehension?’ in H. Béjoint and P. Arnaud (eds): Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics, MacMillan, pp. 126–32.

Li, M. and J. R. Kirby. 2014. ‘The effects of vocabulary breadth and depth on English reading,’ Applied Linguistics 2014: 1-25.

Nagy, W. E. and J. A. Scott. 2000. ‘Vocabulary processes’ in M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, and R. Barr (eds): Handbook of Reading Research. Erlbaum, pp. 269–84.

Nation, I. S. P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.

Qian, D. D. 1999. ‘Assessing the roles of depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension,’ Canadian Modern Language Review 56: 282–308.

Read, J. 2000. Assessing Vocabulary. Cambridge University Press.

Vermeer, A. 2001. ‘Breadth and depth of vocabulary in relation to L1/L2 acquisition and frequency of input,’ Applied Psycholinguistics 22: 217–34.