Knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language (original) (raw)

This special issue of JFLS focuses on what learners know about French words, on how they use that knowledge and on how it can be investigated and assessed. In many ways, it is a sequel to the special issue on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language edited by Myles and Towell that appeared in JFLS in 2004. While articles on the L2 acquisition of the French lexicon have appeared in a variety of journals, including JFLS, this special issue (SI) is the first volume which specifically focuses on lexical knowledge and use among learners of French as a second language. The issue is timely, because of the growing importance of vocabulary in the SLA research agenda, but also because research into vocabulary acquisition appears at the top of a list of areas in which teachers of Modern Foreign Languages are most interested (Macaro, 2003: 6). Over the past few decades interest in research into Second Language Acquisition has grown exponentially, as can be seen in the number of textbooks and handbooks that have appeared in recent years (Ritchie and Bhatia, 1996; Cook, 1996 et seq.; Doughty and Long, 2001; Myles and Mitchell, 2004), as well as in the formulation of new theories of SLA, such as Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998), Acquisition by Processing Theory (Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2004) and the Extended Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2005), which complement approaches to SLA that are based on Universal Grammar. As Myles and Mitchell (2004: 91) put it, approaches to SLA which are based on Universal Grammar, have mainly focused on describing and explaining morphosyntactic development in learners, and much less on other aspects of the linguistic system. In the Minimalist Program, however, the differences between languages are seen to be mainly lexical in nature. According to Cook (1998), the Minimalist Program is lexically-driven in that the properties 269 The M4 Applied Linguistics Network of lexical items shape the sentence rather than lexical items being slotted into pre-existent structures. As a result, the task the L1 learner faces is mainly one of learning the lexicon (lexical and functional items), which then triggers the setting of universal grammatical parameters. This approach is reflected in the Lexical Learning Hypothesis (Ellis, 1997) according to which vocabulary knowledge is indispensable to acquire grammar (see also Bates and Goodman, 1997). There are many reasons why understanding how words are learned and used and how we can measure that knowledge is also crucially important for researchers working in Applied Linguistics, in particular for those with an interest in Education. As Milton (this volume) points out, vocabulary knowledge can be quantified in ways that other aspects of language knowledge cannot, which makes this area particularly attractive for the development of indices and measures that can be used in a variety of educational (and clinical) contexts to assess learners' or patients' language profiles. The importance of vocabulary has been demonstrated in a wide range of studies. It is widely accepted that lexical knowledge is one of the main prerequisites for academic achievement of monolingual and bilingual children (see Daller, 1999; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001). According to Meara and Bell (2001), teachers' judgements of L2 texts appear to be based to a large extent on the type of vocabulary used by the students. In a similar vein, Malvern and Richards (2002) show that teachers' subjective rating of students' range of vocabulary in oral interviews correlated very highly (all values above 0.97) with their judgements about fluency, complexity, content and accuracy. The language threshold for reading is also largely lexical. Anderson and Freebody (1981) report a high correlation between tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension across a range of studies in first language reading research. Laufer (1992) points to similar results for second language acquisition. She also provides evidence that for text comprehension a vocabulary large enough to provide coverage of 95% of the words in a text is needed. Hu and Nation (2000) even put the boundary for unassisted reading at 98%. A focus on vocabulary can also provide new insights into the distinction between implicit and explicit learning (Ellis, 1994; Hulstijn, 2003). Recent research has focused on incidental vocabulary, i.e. vocabulary that second language learners develop while they are focused on a task other than on learning new words (Gass, 1999). Most scholars agree that except for the first few thousand most common words, L2 vocabulary is predominantly acquired incidentally (cf. Huckin and Coady, 1999). If this is correct, there are important implications for the ways in which vocabulary is offered in language classes and textbooks. The role of explicit versus implicit (or incidental) vocabulary learning is also taken up in two contributions to this special issue (Houten, Bulté, Pierrard and Van Daele; Graham, Richards and Malvern). Much less is known with respect to the pragmatic and sociolinguistic knowledge about individual items, i.e. information about the ways in which particular words are used dependent on the formality of the conversation, the characteristics of the interlocutors and the topic of the conversation. How L2 learners acquire pragmatic 'O' level in the past. This enormous decline is probably due to pressure to increase the numbers taking and passing the examination, as well as to a reduction in the classroom hours available for learning, and a change in the examination format. Milton also reports about the receptive vocabulary of 66 students taking single and joint honours French at a British university using the same testing methodology.