Not everyone may know that Robert has written “the” primer for use with parents, etc. so that they can understand more of what we do (click on the Primers hard link above for that). But Robert has also written extensively on the topic of textbook adoption. Those articles can also be found on the Primers hard link as well, just below the important article mentioned above.
Now here another article on the topic of textbooks by Robert, and thank you Robert:
Hi Ben,
I came across an article in Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, a publication of AATG, about vocabulary frequency and three German textbooks; it was very interesting. Here is a bit of a summary.
In real life, we learn vocabulary randomly as we encounter it in our environment. In the classroom, teachers need to be deliberate about which vocabulary they teach because students will learn only a limited amount of vocabulary.
“Psycholinguistic research has shown that in a foreign language classroom, students are likely to become frustrated when confronted with excessive amounts of unknown vocabulary.“
One major point of consensus is that frequency is a useful guideline (though not the only one) for selecting and sequencing vocabulary. This is based on two main features of vocabulary-frequency studies: 1) Some words occur very often while others occur very rarely [duh], and 2) a relatively small number of high-frequency words are needed to account for a large proportion of the words in a text. In English, for example, 85% of the words in a spoken text come from the 1,000 most frequent words. (Studies in German show similar results.) Other guidelines for choosing vocabulary include the inclusion of specialized vocabulary (e.g. classroom objects and procedures) and vocabulary that addresses student interests.
In the three German textbooks analyzed („Deutsch heute“, „Kontakte“, and „Neue Horizonte“), the following statistics prove „interesting“:
– Students are expected to learn between 1,658 and 2,166 words (in a one-year program), and up to half of those words don’t even make the top 2,000 words in German
– The textbooks omit between 37% and 47% of the top 1,000 words entirely
– The top 2,000 words make up between 39% and 53% of the total vocabulary in the textbooks; between 29% and 44% of the vocabulary in the textbooks doesn’t even make the top 4,000 words.
For me, this study adds another reason to reject published textbooks: they don’t teach the vocabulary that students need and they overload students with low-benefit vocabulary. Teaching high-frequency vocabulary first enables students to comprehend the language that most people use most of the time in speech and writing, thus empowering them to acquire more vocabulary on their own; by recycling the high-frequency words, students acquire them more quickly („…the full effect of natural recycling can be realized best by reiterating the most frequent words in the learning process as soon as possible“); and by „permitting the learner to understand the meaning of a discourse and allowing linguistic patterns to become more transparent, vocabulary knowledge can help grammar acquisition.“ (Just another way of saying that the unconscious mind will map the grammar as the conscious mind attends to meaning; by making the discourse comprehensible, the brain has the ability to attend to form.)
If anyone is interested in a little more detail, I’ll be glad to send them a copy of my notes. If anyone wants to read the original article, it’s in Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, Volume 43, Number 2 (Fall, 2010). The author is Silke Lipinski.
Robert