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Why are Some Words More Difficult than Others? Some Intralexical Factors that Affect the Learning of Words

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Abstract

Dieser Artikel versucht auf der Grundlage von empirischen Untersuchungen einige Faktoren zu beschreiben, die dafür verantwortlich sind, daß ein neues Wort in einer Fremdsprache schwerer oder leichter erlernt wird. Die Faktoren, die dieser Artikel beschreibt, sind ‘intralexikalisch’, d.h. sie stammen aus dem betreffenden Wort selbst; z.B. Schwierigkeit der Aussprache oder morphologische Komplexität.
... This vision of the teaching practice is fairly new. Until the late 1970s, vocabulary was relegated to a second place, studies on vocabulary were scarce (O'Dell, 1997, p. 258) and the few existing focused on methodological aspects of vocabulary instruction, rather than on vocabulary itself (Laufer, 1990). This tendency towards ignoring vocabulary teaching was directly applied to the teaching practice. ...
... Lightbown & Spada, 1999). But, in the 1980s, studies on vocabulary became more and more common (Laufer, 1986(Laufer, , 1990Meara, 1980Meara, , 1996aMeara, , 1996bNation, 1974Nation, , 1975Nation, , 1983Nation, , 1990Richards, 1976;Xue & Nation, 1984), showing that the acquisition of vocabulary was central to master a language. This shift in the conception of language learning contributed to the blossoming of a new area of research, in which vocabulary constituted the central focus (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008). ...
... However, a large number of studies have established that knowing a word involves many other aspects, such as knowledge of the word form, its structure, and its syntactic behaviour. To illustrate, Laufer (1990) has suggested that knowing a word includes learning the word form, word structure, syntactic behaviour, meaning, and associative relations with other words. This view is consistent with Taylor' s proposal, cited in López Campillo (1995), which defines word knowledge as knowledge of frequency of occurrence, style, register, dialect, semantic and syntactic collocations, morphology, semantics, polysemy, and translations. ...
Article
En las últimas décadas, el vocabulario se ha erigido como parte esencial en el desarrollo de una lengua para un correcto desarrollo de la misma (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008; Milton, 2009; Schmitt, 2008; Nation, 2010). Debido a esta importancia, la investigación en la adquisición de vocabulario ha desarrollado una serie de instrumentos que pueden ser utilizados para medir el tamaño de vocabulario receptivo (Nation & Beglar, 2007; Meara, 1992; Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001). Este estudio analiza diversas herramientas con el objetivo de observar si hay diferencias en las mediciones de vocabulario, y si las hubiera, para seleccionar cuál de ellas sería más adecuada para utilizar con alumnos de Educación Secundaria. Específicamente, dos tests, el Checklist (Meara, 1992) y el Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLT) (Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001) fueron usados en este estudio. Se les administraron el primer nivel de ambos cuestionarios a un total de 138 alumnos cursando tercero de Educación Secundaria. Los resultados se obtuvieron haciendo uso de diferentes fórmulas: en el caso del VLT, se utilizó la fórmula propuesta por Schmitt, Schmitt y Clapham (2001). En el caso del checklist, se siguieron dos fórmulas diferentes: una propuesta por Meara y Buxton (1987) y otra desarrollada por Meara (2010). Finalmente, los resultados surgidos de la implementación de las diferentes fórmulas fueron comparados entre ellos y con otros estudios. En base a los resultados obtenidos se puede afirmar que la selección del instrument de medida tiene un impacto directo en los resultados obtenidos.
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... Each time a learner meets a word, he or she notices new features and each layer of knowledge adds to the learner's understanding of the word. Teachers are advised to be selective about the words they target and to take into consideration the "learning burden" of a word, or the amount of effort needed to master it (Laufer, 1990;Nation, 2001). Other factors also come into play, such as the spacing of intervals between encounters and the contexts in which the word is presented. ...
... In contrast, a natural Polish sentence contains up to about 10 words, which supports the statement that the examined companies deviated slightly from the accepted standard of building sentences in Polish. In addition, words differ in meaning, pronunciation, parts of speech and also in length (Laufer, 1990). Word length can be objectively measured by, for example, the number of syllables, while words that are used most frequently tend to be shorter than those that are used less frequently, which is consistent with Zipf's law (Laufer, 1990, pp. 297-298;Ellis, 2002;Reeves et al., 2005, p. 184;Seretny, 2006Seretny, , 2016Siegfried et al., 2004). ...
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