Applying usage-based teaching methods on short courses through the implementation of vocabulary notebooks
Chapter 1: Introduction
This research paper aims to ascertain if usage-based methods of teaching implemented via vocabulary notebooks would be received positively by teachers and learners within my teaching context: that is, short courses at the British Council (BC) in Riyadh. I chose this area of research because vocabulary is particularly difficult for Arab learners; Swan and Smith mention there is virtually no positive transfer: “only a minimal number of words in English are borrowed from Arabic” (1987: 153). This factor, coupled with the BC courses being short, make lexical acquisition very tricky. However, before outlining my teaching context and the participants’ information, I shall provide some clarification on the origins of the word ‘usage-based acquisition’ as it is central to the concerns of this paper.
Amongst the emergent fields of language study in recent years, psycholinguistics, under the super-ordinate of cognitive science, has started to become predominant in second language acquisition (SLA) studies (see Scovel, 2001; Schmitt and Celce-Murcia, 2010; Ellis, 1997). Research by Dornyei (2009) cited in Schmitt and Celce-Murcia (2010) points to the fact that the interest in psycholinguistics has in turn been driven by several sub-fields, such as cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience.
The term ‘psycholinguistics’ refers to “…the study of the cognitive processes that support the acquisition and use of language” (de Bot and Knoll, 2010: 124) and historically is grounded in research into child and first language acquisition (L1); however, after recognizing that bilinguals or those actively acquiring a second language (L2) outnumber monolinguals in the world, the importance of extending the study to SLA was recognized (Ibid.: 124).
Within psycholinguistics a number of labels exist for an associated collection of research areas: ‘connectionism’ (Elman, 2001), ‘emergentism’ (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2006), ‘usage/exemplar-based SLA’ (Ellis, 2008) and ‘construction grammar’ (Tomasello, 2003) are all cited in Schmitt and Celce-Murcia (2010) as belonging to this interconnected research field. Thornbury (2006), by way of clarifying these terms, states that as the frequency of encounters with an item – or exemplars - is the basis for grammar knowledge, the term ‘exemplar theory’ was coined and ‘emergentism’ came into being as the learner’s grammar is said to ‘emerge’ “…as patterns are identified and extracted from the data…” (235); Lightbown and Spada (2006) account for the term ‘connectionism’ by stating that connectionists believe “….learners gradually build up their knowledge of language through exposure to the thousands of instances of the linguistic features they eventually hear” (41). Ellis also refers to the learner being seen as “…an information processor, receiving and autonomously processing input in the black box of the mind” (1997: 241) and cites work by Kramsch (1985) who calls this process ‘the input metaphor’ and research by Lantolf (1995) who labels this process ‘computationalism’.
Although all the theories have different labels, they share at heart the belief that language is a cognitive process and acquired primarily through usage in communicative activities. As they have this key feature in common the term ‘usage-based’, as found in Thornbury (2006: 235), can be used to describe them collectively. Within this research paper I shall refer to them as ‘usage-based methods’ and use the abbreviated form ‘UBMs'.
Sample of MA Thesis © Marcus Coates