Vocabulary in Context: Psycholinguistic, Corpus Linguistic and Pedagogical Perspectives

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This project aimed to clarify the cognitive mechanism of the second language learners in acquiring new words and to demonstrate an ideal way of teaching vocabulary in English class. The project was based on two phases-psycholinguistic perspective and corpus linguistic perspective-and three steps-theoretical study, empirical study and pedagogical study. "What is ' to know a word'?" is a tough question we encountered and we concluded that we should follow some conventional methods to assess a learner's word knowledge. We conducted some experiments, which included two large ones with as many as 150 subjects in Japan and Australia.The research results were presented at 20 conferences including 11 international conferences. Besides the publication in journals and books, original research results were published in interim and end-of-the-term reports. In the interim report in 2005 appeared "Vocabulary size and L2 reading comprehension" (Fukaya), "Reading task and vocabulary acquisition" (Horiba ＆ Fukaya), "Early lexical acquisition" (Murasugi ＆ Nakatani), "A corpus-based tool for learning English adverbial connectors" (Narita), "Phonological recoding in visual word recognition in Japanese-English bilinguals" (Ozaki), and "Depth of vocabulary knowledge in second language acquisition" (Tajika). The end-of-the-term report is composed of 8 articles, four of which are original articles: "The ontology of functional categories" (Murasugi ＆ Nakatani), "Choice of vocabulary in clinical English" (Noda), "Crosslinguistic influence in L2 vocabulary acquisition" (Okuwaki) and "Effective reading speed test for EFL learners" (Kotani ＆ Isahara).The research results indicated some relation among proficiency, vocabulary size, topic interest and text difficulty.