The Role of Vocabulary in EFL Learning

The rapid growth of English as an international language of communication has stimulated its worldwide popularity in language teaching and learning for decades. In

many non-English-speaking countries, such as Taiwan, English is even a requested subject in the compulsive education system, six-year education in elementary school and three-year education in junior high school. However, the status of English, either ESL or EFL, varies along with different sociocultural contexts. Brown (2001), one of the most reputable experts in language teaching and learning, defined the two statuses as follows.

(1) ESL: to refer to English as a Second Language taught in countries (such as the US, the UK, or India) where English is a major language of commerce and

education, a language that students often hear outside the walls of their classrooms (p.3).

(2) EFL: to refer to English as a Foreign Language taught in countries (such as Japan, Egypt, or Thailand) where English is not a major language of commerce and education and students do not have ready-made contexts for communication beyond their classrooms (p.3; p. 116).

Due to the significant differences between these two statuses, Brown (2001) also cautioned that distinct pedagogies should be applied in the two contexts respectively.

Thereby, comparing with ESL, language teaching and learning in an EFL context, as Taiwanese English Education, is clearly a different and greater challenge for both learners and teachers.

In EFL learning, vocabulary is always deemed as an important element. Under the huge pressure brought by the backwash effect, namely the effect of testing on teaching and learning (Hughes, 1999), in Taiwan, the focus of English teaching mainly depends on how to expand the vocabulary size of the students and therefore to enhance their English ability in reading and writing. Many English teachers start their lessons by introducing new words before thy go further to the reading and students tend to review vocabulary first while preparing for their tests. That prevalence

conveys the messages that increasing the size of vocabulary has become the priority for EFL learners in Taiwan (Liu, 2002).

In addition to the backwash effect and the status of vocabulary as the priority in teaching and tests, the importance of vocabulary in EFL learning could also lie in the roles as the significant indexes of learning difficulty, learners’ errors, and language proficiency.

2.1.1.1 An Index of Learning Difficulty

As Nagy (1989) claimed that “lack of adequate vocabulary knowledge is already an obvious and serious obstacle for many students,” plenty of language learners not only consider vocabulary responsible for their frustration and as a serious obstacle (Nation, 1990) but also view vocabulary as an index of learning difficulty.

While probing into the core of communication problems, Nation (1990) pointed out that the breakdown of communication attributed to the fact that “learners feel that many of their difficulties in both receptive and productive language use result from an inadequate vocabulary” (p.2). In speaking another language, Wallace (1982)

emphasized that the most frustrating experience was the failure of finding proper words to express oneself. As for reading, Klare (1984) proclaimed that vocabulary had drastic effects on the readability of texts. Gorman’s study (1979) also showed that for the ESL learners, 68% of the difficulty in academic reading resulted from insufficient vocabulary. In the survey conducted by Leki and Carson (1994), the L2 college students acknowledged vocabulary as the difficulty-maker in academic writing tasks.

Thus, it is obvious that the more limited a learner’s lexical competence is, the more difficulty he or she may encounter during the process of language learning.

2.1.1.2 An Index of Learners’ Errors

As mentioned above, inadequate vocabulary, namely lexical errors, could seriously hinder communication. The result of Kelly’s (1991) experiment illustrated

that among the errors made by the advanced EFL learners in Belgium while listening to excerpts from British radio broadcasts, 60% of the errors were lexical. What was more shocking was that the lexical errors could cause complete misunderstanding of part of the texts and then made up about three-fourths of listening comprehension obstruction.

Comparing with grammatical errors, lexical ones still play a more influential role in language learning. Angeli (1974) attested that 48.5% of lexical errors impeded listening comprehension, much higher than 13% of syntactical errors. By the same token, Meara (1984) figured out the ratio of lexical errors to grammatical errors was as high as 3:1 or 4:1. Besides, Widdowson (1978) manifested that for native speakers, well-structured utterances with inaccurate vocabulary brought more difficulty in comprehension than ungrammatical utterances with accurate lexis.

2.1.1.3 An Index of Language Proficiency

It is out of question that a learner’s lexical ability correlates with his or her language proficiency, inclusive of four basic language skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For oral and aural aspects, Washburn (1992) calculated 2,000 most frequent words were necessary for daily conversations while Kelly (1991) evaluated 5,000 most frequent words were prerequisite in order to understand 95% of a news report broadcast.

As for non-verbal aspects, lexical knowledge is definitely one of the most

dominant determinants of readability of a text (Simic, 1990). Particularly for language learners at lower levels, like Taiwanese high school students, vocabulary knowledge plays a more significant role in reading comprehension (McQueen, 1996). From Read’s (2000) points of view, if a learner’s vocabulary is under a certain threshold level, he or she could suffer from decoding the basic elements of a text and

discouragement from advancement of reading comprehension. In order to read

unsimplified texts effortlessly, Bamford (1984) suggested that a lexicon of at least 3,000 headwords be required. When it comes to writing, learners have to enlarge their productive vocabulary (Nation, 1990).

Based on the strong correlation between vocabulary and EFL language learning discussed above, the important role of vocabulary as indexes of learning difficulty, learners’ errors, and language proficiency should be apparent. The significance of vocabulary in EFL language learning could be concluded with Laufer’s (1986) advocacy that “without adequate lexis there is no proper language competence or performance” (p.70).