Vocabulary in Context: Psycholinguistic, Corpus Linguistic and Pedagogical Perspectives

本研究旨在阐明第二语言学习者习得新单词的认知机制，并展示一种理想的英语课堂词汇教学方法。该项目基于两个阶段--心理语言学视角和语料库语言学视角--以及三个阶段--理论研究、实证研究和教学研究。“什么是‘认得一个字’？”是我们遇到的一个棘手的问题，我们得出结论，我们应该遵循一些传统的方法来评估学习者的单词知识。我们进行了一些实验，其中包括日本和澳大利亚的两个大型实验，被试多达150人。研究结果在20个会议上公布，其中包括11个国际会议。除了在期刊和书籍上发表外，原始研究成果还以中期和期末报告的形式发表。2005年中期报告中出现了“词汇量与二语阅读理解”(Fukaya)、“阅读任务与词汇习得”(Horiba&Fukaya)、“早期词汇习得”(Murasugi&Nakatani)、“基于语料库的英语状语连接词学习工具”(Narita)、“日英双语者视觉单词识别中的语音记录”(Ozaki)以及“第二语言习得中的词汇知识深度”(塔吉卡语)。期末报告由8篇文章组成，其中4篇是原创文章：《功能范畴本体论》(Murasugi&Nakatani)、《临床英语词汇选择》(Noda)、《跨语言对二语词汇习得的影响》(Okuwaki)和《EFL学习者有效阅读速度测试》(Kotani&Isahara)。研究结果表明，英语学习者的水平、词汇量、话题兴趣和篇章难度之间存在一定的关系。

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.