Etymology

Subject of the work. This work provides a thorough discussion of the incremental nature of vocabulary knowledge, organized in terms of these three dimensions, and drawing on relevant research in L2 and FL contexts.
Task of the work . This work comprises reviews and discussions of relevant studies concerning the incremental nature of vocabulary acquisition. Learners’ size of their SL/FL vocabulary gradually develops in a number of ways, with multiple exposures to target words enhancing the process. We can infer that vocabulary learning is not limited to the meaning facet of word knowledge and that other facets of lexical knowledge are part of the learning process. This implies that the description of vocabulary knowledge based on the meaning aspect is not accurate and does not do justice to the complexity of word knowledge. We have seen that the mastery of word knowledge is best seen as being on a continuum, both overall as well as in respect of single word knowledge. Television. Research with native English speakers indicates that educational television programs can be a source of language learning for these students. Several studies have also found that exposing ELLs to high-quality television can also be effective in developing their vocabulary. For example, Neuman and Koskinen found that middle-grade ELLs who watched captioned episodes of 3-2-1 Contact, a high-quality science program, outperformed their classmates who just read from their science textbooks on measures of word recognition, understanding sentences, and word meaning. In addition, these students also performed better than their classmates who watched the television program without captions. It should also be noted that only ELLs with sufficient English proficiency benefited from the television programming, indicating the need to consider this variable when designing instruction.

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Chapter I English Proficiency and Vocabulary Learning

We know that ELLs move along a continuum of English proficiency, with overlapping stages of language acquisition (Ellis, 1982). This means that teachers can use instructional strategies that scaffold students’ incomplete knowledge of the language system to a greater or lesser extent depending on their degree of English proficiency. [1]
ELLs face various types of linguistic demands when learning second-language words. At the most emergent stages of English proficiency, the task of orally segmenting words in a sentence poses challenges, as this task is tied to knowledge about phonological, syntactic, and lexical features in the language. The silences and pauses we think we hear between words in a language are not actually there in reality. In natural language, the speech signal is a continuous stream of sound. There are no pauses. As proficient English speakers, we ―hear‖ pauses because we apply our knowledge of phonology, grammar, and words to appropriately segment the utterance. You have probably experienced this phenomenon when listening to someone speaking in a language you do not speak and been left with the impression that words in that language are very, very long!
To acquire word meanings incidentally from mere exposure to a language, learners need to be able to perceive individual words. The ability to do this de-velops in close relation to phonological and grammatical knowledge. Also, to ac-quire word meanings from context, as often occurs in first-language acquisition, learners need to be able to exploit the grammatical and semantic cues surrounding the unfamiliar word. A learner needs to know the meaning of the words that surround the unfamiliar word as well as how the words relate to one another. This can only happen in conjunction with ELLs’ development of English proficiency. The development of English proficiency takes time, but can be expedited with direct and systematic second-language vocabulary instruction. Hence, we will not spend much effort reviewing research on learners’ incidental acquisition of second-language vocabulary aside from acknowledging that it happens when learners have
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access to the second language (thankfully!) and that we can help move this natural

process along by providing students with access to rich and varied communicative experiences that involve native speakers of the language students are acquiring (August & Shanahan, 2006a). Instead, we will focus primarily on what we know about promoting second-language word learning through classroom instruction that is deliberate and systematic. [2]

The Role of First-Language Proficiency in English Vocabulary Learning We know that ELLs move along a continuum of English proficiency, with overlapping stages of language acquisition. This means that teachers can use instructional strategies that scaffold students’ incomplete knowledge of the language system to a greater or lesser extent depending on their degree of English proficiency.
ELLs face various types of linguistic demands when learning second-language words. At the most emergent stages of English proficiency, the task of orally seg-menting words in a sentence poses challenges, as this task is tied to knowledge about phonological, syntactic, and lexical features in the language. The silences and pauses we think we hear between words in a language are not actually there in reality. In natural language, the speech signal is a continuous stream of sound. There are no pauses. As proficient English speakers, we ―hear‖ pauses because we apply our knowledge of phonology, grammar, and words to appropriately segment the utterance. More heat than light has been generated with respect to the incremental learning of multiple word knowledge aspects through extensive reading. Pagoda and Schmitt provide a good example to capture degrees of not only the knowledge of meaning but also other types of lexical knowledge such as spelling and grammatical characteristics. For this purpose, they conducted a case study of a 27-year old learner of French. The task was to read four graded readers with roughly a total of 30,000 words over a period of a month.

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1.1The Role of Instructional Context

The literature on the amount of vocabulary instruction in classrooms consists of a handful of studies. In one study of vocabulary instruction in 4th- through 8th-grade classrooms in Canada, Scott, Jamieson-Noel, and Asselin found that about 12% of the time in language arts classrooms was devoted to vocabulary instruction, but only 1.4% of the time was spent on vocabulary instruction in other academic subjects. They also found that most instruction involved mentioning meanings and assigning vocabulary to be learned, rather than providing more effective vocabulary instruction based on recent research in the area.
Foorman, Goldenberg, Carlson, Saunders, and Pollard-Durodola examined the biliteracy and bilingual development of approximately 850 mostly Hispanic children in kindergarten through 2nd grade who were enrolled in English immersion, dual-language, or transitional bilingual programs in two urban sites and one border site in Texas and in one urban site in California. As part of the study, the authors examined the amount of time teachers spent in various activities during the reading/language arts and language development blocks. Findings indicated that there were big differences between the states. Irrespective of language model, teachers in California allocated much more time to oral language development in each grade (ranging from 30% to 87%) than teachers in Texas (ranging from 7% to 27%), where teachers focused more on word work and working with text. Where oral language instruction did take place, it consisted of oral language/discussion, English language strategies, Spanish language, and vocabulary. A study by Mora-Harding (2009) of the instructional practices used by 36 teachers in nine South Florida public elementary schools serving high numbers of Spanish-speaking students indicated that teachers spent only 6% of the time devoted to the English Language Arts block on instructional strategies involving vocabulary.
Considering studies of the vocabulary instruction observed in actual class-rooms, it appears that there remains a great deal of room for improvement, both in terms of time spent on instruction and in methods. The sorts of powerful vo-
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cabulary instruction documented in the research described in the next section of the

chapter needs to become more common, vocabulary instruction needs to become more frequent in academic areas such as science and social studies, and something needs to be done to help students with relatively small vocabularies catch up with their classmates. Given the focus on vocabulary acquisition in the Common Core State Standards, we are hopeful that these changes will begin to take place in the near future.