The Role of Vocabulary Teaching

A consideration of the knowledge that is assumed by lexical competence is offered as a frame of reference for assessing vocabulary teaching. Linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of word knowledge are examined. These include word frequency, vocabulary growth in native speakers, collocation, register, case relations, underlying forms, word association, and semantic structure. Vocabulary techniques are discussed according to the way that they attempt to build up these aspects of vocabulary knowledge.