Does anyone know the number of words in the average person’s spoken vocabulary? We in DPS had lunch today and the number 250 came up. Whatever the number is, I know that when we hear it in workshops it is always surprisingly low.
I mean, we can and of course will use some words beyond those 250, but in order to get around in our language on a daily basis I am under the current impression that all we need is that basic group of 250. Correct me on this if I am wrong.
The number of words is hardly important – it makes no difference what the correct number of words is, except inasmuch as the fact that there are so few of them makes a crucial point about how this idea effects what we choose to teach our kids in our classrooms – CI or lists of words?
What is the point of teaching a lot of words if our kids can’t put them in basic sentences? What is the point of teaching a lot of words if they never really hear the language? I think this is a good use of the “can’t see the forest (the real language) for the trees (individual words)” adage.
Why teach a big list of words like trunk of a car etc. – I had to do that in a college class once and it sucked for me and my students. Words like collarbone are words that our students may (almost certainly) never use, although after six years of middle/high school French and three of college I went with Washington University St. Louis to Strasbourg, France for a year and, in my first week there broke the bejangles out of my left collarbone on my new road bike and was actually able to say clavicule (probably only because it was a cognate) to the emergency personnel but, en effet, that’s all I could say. Bonjour and clavicule. Besides, they could figure it out because there was an American lying in their street cussing and writhing and pointing to his collarbone anyway. So all I could do there was cuss in English and let them communicate with each other in French because, after my nine years of formal training in French up to that point, leading to a major from WU in French (shame on them for giving me that degree – I didn’t know any French even if I was a specialist in stem changing verbs and if clauses), I really hadn’t heard much of the language. I do remember saying Bonjour to a crowd as they put me in the ambulance, but I remember the sheer frustration of not being able to communicate with anyone at the hospital.
Anyway (nice rant, Ben) why learn useless words, which is shaming to all but the perfect little memorizers, when we could be repeating the 250 so often that our students can seriously and for real begin to prepare themselves for the output game of putting those 250 into various arrangements to form sentences? It may sound like just a few words, 250, but do the math on how many ways those words can be combined, and then ask yourself if our students need to learn them COLD so that they can output them with some ease maybe as early as the third year of study. I mean, in my cases I couldn’t output much after nine years! When are people going to wake up to this?
I would add that I stand by my current position that two full years of just using those words most of the time in our comprehensible input is barely a sufficient start towards real spoken output, because of all the combinations possible.
I know that if some curriculum badge from a district or within my school came up to me and ordered me to teach those long lists of useless words instead of using those 250 OVER AND OVER AND OVER in interesting and meaningful comprehensible input (got that term from Joe Neilson – the interesting and meaningful part), I would refuse and offer my resignation to whomever wanted it, with a flourish.
All of the new state standards are or will soon be all about proficiency, anyway, and if we are not repeating those 250 enough, mistakenly assuming they’ve been “taught”, in the first few years (they haven’t!) and instead are teaching big lists throughout the year, and then testing the kids on those fairly useless words, then we are not teaching towards their proficiency but towards their shaming. God forbid that they break a collarbone in another country after nine years of studying that country’s language and only be able to say hello collarbone to them.