Lexis

Lexis is not a Japanese luxury car manufacturer, it is the stock of words in a language. It is one of two language systems we have looked at. Can you remember the other?

Key areas here are different meanings (denotative and figurative), grouping words (e.g. lexical sets, word families etc.), word form (e.g. affixes, compounds etc.) and use (e.g. collocations, idioms etc.).

Test yourself with these questions:
1) What are buy/by/bye examples of?
2) How about trunk (of a car) and trunk (of a tree)?
3) Take a look at this advertisement from The Netherlands. The Dutch word for the determiner 'this one' is "Die". Of course the kid is not wishing his mother misfortune, this is a funny example of what?

From here

How many of the key concepts and the language teaching classroom can you recall?

From here

Paul Nation is a respected expert on vocabulary and works at Victoria University in Wellington. He thinks the goals of a vocabulary learning programme should be:

1. The learning of useful vocabulary that helps learners' language learning goals such as learning English for academic study, for social uses or for particular purposes such as reading newspapers and watching TV.

2. Retaining the learning so that the vocabulary knowledge is still available after the course ends.

3. Making the vocabulary available for meaning-focused use both receptively and productively.

What do you think Paul means by useful vocabulary? What are the learners' language learning goals so important? Can you remember your goals when you decided to learn English? How did these affect your vocabulary learning?

What do you think he means in number 3, receptively and productively? Do you remember how many key words are in the Longman dictionary? Do you think these are receptive or productive words?

Here is a link to the excellent online dictionary I mentioned in class today.