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 Lang. Teach. (2011), 44.4, 1–11 
c Cambridge University Press 2011
doi:10.1017/S0261444811000267

1 Thinking Allowed

2 Research into practice: Vocabulary

3 I. S. P. Nation LALS, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

5 This article is a personal view of the application of research on vocabulary to teaching and
6 how there are three different types or categories of relationship between that research and
7 the teaching to which it is applied: first, where the research is not applied or not applied well,
8 second, where it is reasonably well applied, and third, where it is over-applied. For each of
9 these three categories, I look at what I consider to be the most important areas of research
10 and suggest why they fit into that category. The topics covered include planning vocabulary
11 courses, distinguishing high frequency and low frequency words, extensive reading, the
12 deliberate learning of vocabulary, academic vocabulary and vocabulary teaching.

13 Editorial note T1

14 This new strand in the journal provides a space for contributors to present a personal stance
15 either on future research needs or on the perceived current applications of research in the
16 classroom. Like much of our current content, it echoes the historical uniqueness of this journal
17 in terms of its rich and expert overview of recent research in the field of L2 teaching and
18 learning. However, this new strand takes such research as its starting point and attempts to
19 look forward, using these findings both to debate their application in the language learning
20 classroom and also to suggest where research would be best directed in the future. Thus, the
21 objective of both types of paper is eminently practical: contributors to the research agenda
22 will present suggestions for what research might usefully be undertaken, given what is
23 currently known or what is perceived to be necessary. In the research into practice papers
24 there will be critical appraisal both of what research is, and is not, getting through to the
25 language learning classroom, policy making, curriculum design, evaluation of teaching and/or
26 assessment programmes, and practical suggestions made for improving such outcomes.

27 1. Introduction

28 In the 1980s, research on second language (L2) vocabulary learning was considered to
29 be a neglected aspect of second language acquisition (SLA) research (Meara 1980). This
 2 THINKING ALLOWED

30 situation has changed strikingly, with over 30% of the research on L1 and L2 vocabulary
31 learning in the last 120 years occurring in the last 12 years. Because this research is largely
32 within the area of applied linguistics, it is important that its findings move forward into
33 teaching. In this overview, I give a personal view of the application of research on vocabulary
34 to teaching and how there are three different types or categories of relationship between
35 that research and the teaching to which it is applied: first, where research is not applied
36 or not applied well, second, where it is reasonably well applied, and third, where it is
37 over-applied. For each of these three categories, I look at what I consider to be the most
38 important areas of research and suggest why they fit into that category. The topics covered
39 include planning vocabulary courses, distinguishing high frequency and low frequency words,
40 extensive reading, the deliberate learning of vocabulary, academic vocabulary and vocabulary
41 teaching.
42 It may be worth explaining the viewpoint from which I am making the observations in
43 this article. Most of my teaching experience is at pre-university level and in teacher-training
44 institutions. However, the language teaching methodology courses I teach try to serve teachers
45 at all levels, and I think that the principles shaping a good language course are much the
46 same at any level of language proficiency. My viewpoint, then, is primarily as a researcher
47 and writer about vocabulary teaching and learning, but one who has continual contact with
48 teachers, both ESL and EFL teachers.
49 The aim of this paper is to look at gaps in the application of research findings. There are
50 also gaps in research, and two recent books (Schmitt 2010; Nation & Webb 2011) explore
51 these gaps and provide guidelines for future research.

52 2. Vocabulary research findings that have not been well applied

53 2.1 Planning a vocabulary course

54 The most important job of the vocabulary teacher is to plan. Planning involves choosing the
55 most appropriate vocabulary for a particular group of learners and making sure that there is
56 a suitable balance of opportunities for learning. Most models of curriculum design (Graves
57 2000; Nation & Macalister 2009) include needs analysis, environment analysis (sometimes
58 included as part of needs analysis) and the application of well supported principles of learning.
59 Needs analysis involves looking at where the learners are now in their knowledge and where
60 they need to go in order to be able to do the things that they want to do (Nation 2006). From
61 a vocabulary perspective, measuring learners’ vocabulary size, or at least their knowledge of
62 the high-frequency words of the language, is an important part of needs analysis. There are,
63 however, dangers in using vocabulary tests, the most significant of these being that the learners
64 do not take the test seriously, so the scores do not reflect their true knowledge. Although there
65 are now several measures of vocabulary knowledge freely available (see www.lextutor.ca, and
66 www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx), it is unusual to find teachers who have a
67 well supported idea of what vocabulary their learners already know. As a result, language
68 courses often contain a mixture of useful vocabulary and vocabulary that by no means
69 represents the best choice for those learners. Research by McNeill (1994), for example,
 I. S. P. NATION: VOCABULARY 3

70 found that teachers did not have good intuitions about what vocabulary their learners
71 know.

72 2.2 High frequency and low frequency words

73 A person’s vocabulary is made up of high frequency and low frequency words. This distinction
74 is embodied in Zipf’s law (Zipf 1949), which describes the rapid drop in frequency of words
75 in a frequency-ranked list. Palmer & Hornby (1937) and West (1953) used Thorndike’s word Q1
76 counts to make 1000 and 2000 level lists for teaching, and these lists certainly informed
77 the development of lists for graded reader schemes. Research on text coverage by words at
78 various frequency levels highlights the importance of the high-frequency words (Nation 2006).
79 The high-frequency/low-frequency distinction is an important one, because teachers should
80 deal with high-frequency words very differently from the way they deal with low-frequency
81 words (Nation 2001). The idea behind this distinction is that the high-frequency words make
82 up a relatively small, very useful group of words that are important no matter what use is
83 made of the language. Because each word in this group is frequent, the learners will get a
84 very good return for learning them. The low-frequency words, on the other hand, consist
85 of tens of thousands of words that occur very infrequently, are often restricted to certain
86 subject areas, and thus do not deserve any substantial amount of classroom attention. Once
87 they know the high-frequency words of the language, the learners need to learn the low-
88 frequency words, preferably in a rough order of importance for them (see Nation 2009 for a
89 description of the numbers of words in a text at various low-frequency levels). From a teacher’s
90 perspective, the best approach to low-frequency words is through training in strategies such
91 as guessing from context, deliberate learning using word cards and mnemonic tricks like
92 the keyword technique and word parts, and using dictionaries to help learning. These
93 strategies are so widely useful that they justify the use of classroom time. The goal of strategy
94 training is that learners will eventually be able to use the strategies without the help of a
95 teacher.
96 Most teachers are aware of the finding that there are very useful high-frequency words,
97 but the idea of vocabulary control and selective principled attention to certain kinds of words
98 is an idea that teachers are often reluctant to take on. One source of this reluctance comes
99 from teachers who were trained as teachers of native speakers. It is generally considered
100 that when teaching native speakers, exposing learners to a rich and varied vocabulary is
101 helpful, because when they come to school, young native speakers already have quite a
102 large vocabulary (somewhere between 3000 and 5000 word families) which includes most
103 of the high-frequency words of the language. The situation, however, is very different for
104 non-native speakers learning EFL. When they begin learning English, they may already
105 know some English words that exist as loanwords in their L1 as well as English words
106 they have met in their daily life. In most cases this is likely to be only a few words,
107 and their major job is to learn the high-frequency words of the language as quickly as
108 possible, a task that is made easier if they meet these words often, focus deliberately on
109 them (Elley 1989), and are not distracted by substantial numbers of low-frequency words
110 (Nation & Wang 1999; Nation 2009). The reason for a lack of planning of vocabulary
 4 THINKING ALLOWED

111 learning is probably that teachers do not think that vocabulary learning needs to be
112 planned, and if it does the course book will take care of that. Usually, the course book does
113 not.

114 2.3 Extensive reading

115 A very useful way of learning high-frequency words is to do extensive reading with graded
116 readers. Graded readers are books which are specially written using a controlled vocabulary
117 and are available at various levels from as low as 100 words to somewhere around 3000 words.
118 There are numerous series of graded readers and every major ELT publisher has their own
119 series, sometimes more than one. Most teachers are familiar with graded readers, and may
120 be aware of the research which shows that including an extensive reading component in
121 a language course can have very positive effects on vocabulary growth and a wide range
122 of other aspects of language knowledge and language use (Elley & Mangubhai 1981).
123 However, only exceptional schools seem to include a graded reading program as a part Q2
124 of their language courses. There are several reasons why there is a reluctance to set up an
125 extensive reading program. One is a lack of knowledge of the research on extensive reading,
126 although most teachers who have engaged in any professional development program are
127 likely to be aware of this research. Another could be lack of funds to buy the graded readers
128 needed to set up a program, but this is unlikely to be a major reason, because there are
129 various ways of setting up an extensive reading program without too much expenditure
130 (Waring 2000). The most important reason is likely to be a lack of time in the language
131 program, combined with the belief that direct teaching will make more effective use of
132 this time. If learners have only four or five hours of English a week, devoting one of these
133 hours to extensive reading may seem a frivolous thing to do. Related to this is the idea
134 that extensive reading should be enjoyable and should not involve a lot of teacher input.
135 Teachers may feel somewhat guilty if almost a quarter of their English class time does
136 not involve them teaching and the learners are involved in what seems like a leisure time
137 activity.
138 The obvious solution to this is to set extensive reading as homework, but, depending
139 on the learners, this may end up as work that only a few learners do. Research
140 by Takase (2007), however, shows that if extensive reading is initially given a small
141 amount of classroom time while the learners become used to it, the amount of extensive
142 reading done at home can increase greatly. Fortunately, this reluctance of teachers
143 to set up proper extensive reading programs has now become a focus of research
144 (Macalister 2010), and this may help us understand why a well-researched activity like
145 extensive reading is still not a commonly accepted and applied part of an English
146 course.
147 An important reason why extensive reading is not as widespread as it should be is that
148 many teachers misuse the term. That is, they do what they call extensive reading, but it bears
149 a closer resemblance to intensive reading. Replacing an inappropriate existing meaning for a
150 term by a new one may be a daunting task.
 I. S. P. NATION: VOCABULARY 5

151 2.4 Rote learning of vocabulary

152 So far, we have looked at two research findings that are not well applied: the idea
153 of setting vocabulary goals and using vocabulary control to help reach them, and
154 extensive reading programs. The third finding I want to focus on is sometimes set up
155 as in opposition to something like extensive reading. This is the idea of using bilingual
156 word cards for deliberate decontextualised rote learning of vocabulary. Learners have
157 known the value of this for a very long time, but teachers tend to see it as the very
158 opposite of what they are supposed to do in a communicative approach to language
159 teaching.
160 There has been a long history of research into the deliberate learning of vocabulary
161 (Thorndike 1908; Griffin & Harley 1996). Much of this research has been done in psychology
162 as a part of research on memory and forgetting (Pyc & Rawson 2007). The findings
163 are very clear. A large amount of vocabulary can be very quickly learnt and retained
164 for a long period of time by using spaced retrieval and, where necessary, mnemonic
165 techniques such as the keyword technique (McDaniel, Pressley & Dunay 1987). Vocabulary
166 which is quickly learnt in this way is not quickly forgotten. The use of the L1 and
167 pictures to provide the meaning for words is generally more effective than the use of L2
168 definitions. There is now research (Elgort 2011) which shows that such learning not only
169 results in explicit knowledge but also results in implicit knowledge, which is the kind of
170 knowledge needed for normal language use. This recent finding is not yet well known
171 and suggests that the learning of vocabulary is different from the learning of grammar, as
172 research on grammar indicates that deliberate learning does not directly result in implicit
173 knowledge.
174 As we saw earlier in this paper, learners need large vocabularies in order to deal with
175 unsimplified material without a great deal of outside support (Nation 2006). The deliberate
176 learning of vocabulary using word cards is one way of speeding up learners’ progress towards
177 an effective vocabulary size. This deliberate learning, however, must be seen as only one part of
178 a well balanced learning program. About one quarter of the time in a well planned program
179 should involve deliberate learning, and of this, learning using word cards should occupy
180 about a third or a quarter (Nation 2007). Learning using word cards can be done efficiently
181 or inefficiently, and learners need guidance on the principles behind efficient learning. These
182 principles are strongly research-based and include the use of spaced retrieval (Pyc & Rawson
183 2007), mnemonic techniques where necessary (Pressley 1977), reordering of the word cards
184 to avoid serial learning, the L1 and pictures to represent the meaning of the words (Laufer
185 & Shmueli 1997), repetition, and the avoidance of interfering items (Tinkham 1997; Waring
186 1997). Learners benefit from training in the application of these principles, but very few
187 teachers seem prepared to make such strategy training a regular part of their vocabulary
188 program. The solution that I use to overcome this reluctance is the principle of the ‘four
189 strands’ (Nation 2007), which sees a well-balanced program as consisting of four equal parts:
190 meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency
191 development. Three of these parts are strongly message-focused, so a focus on deliberate
192 learning is well balanced by the overwhelming focus on understanding and conveying
193 messages. One effect of the four strands is to place the deliberate vocabulary learning in
 6 THINKING ALLOWED

194 the wider curriculum context so that it is not seen as an alternative to communicative
195 learning but as a support.
196 It is also important that teachers see the learning of vocabulary as a cumulative process
197 in which deliberate learning using cards is just one step (but a very significant one) in the
198 eventual rich knowledge of a word.

199 3. Vocabulary research findings that have been well applied

200 3.1 Academic vocabulary

201 Coxhead’s (2000) research on the Academic Word List is widely known by teachers and course
202 designers, as is indicated by the number of texts based on the word list (see, for example,
203 Schmitt & Schmitt 2005; Zimmerman 2007), and the number of websites which make use of
204 the list.
205 The Academic Word List contains 570 word families divided into ten sublists. The list was
206 made by finding words that were wide ranging and frequent in academic texts but which
207 were not in the first 2000 words of English. The corpus used for the study included texts
208 from the humanities, science, commerce and law. The Academic Word List covers around
209 10% of the running words in academic text. When this is added to the roughly 80% coverage
210 provided by the first 2000 words of English, for a relatively small amount of learning learners
211 have access to a very large proportion of the running words in a text. The Academic Word
212 List also covers around about 4% of the running words in newspapers, which is much better
213 coverage than that provided by the third 1000 words of English.
214 The most obvious reasons for the widespread use of the Academic Word List are that it
215 is a resource that is immediately applicable, and that Coxhead made the list freely available
216 in a variety of formats. There is also the additional reason that the most obvious users of the
217 list are teachers at tertiary level, and it is they who are most likely to have done specialist
218 courses in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. As a part of this academic
219 training they are likely to have come in contact with the idea of academic vocabulary and
220 the Academic Word List itself.
221 There have been critics of the list (Hyland & Tse 2007), whose criticisms are justified,
222 although they are aimed mainly at turning the list into something that it was not intended to
223 be. The strength of the list is that it applies to a wide range of academic areas. At the same
224 time this is its weakness, because words are used in a particular academic area might not be
225 used in exactly the same way in another, although research by Wang & Nation (2004) showed
226 that there is very little homonymy in the list.

227 3.2 Other findings

228 Generally, teachers are aware that learners need multiple exposures to vocabulary in order
229 to learn it, and that learning a word involves several aspects of knowledge. They are also
230 aware of the importance of multiword chunks in language learning, and recent research being
 I. S. P. NATION: VOCABULARY 7

231 published on this, particularly that providing readily accessible lists of multiword chunks, is
232 likely to be well applied.

233 4. Vocabulary research findings that have been over-applied

234 While the communicative approach initially had a largely negative effect on the deliberate
235 teaching and learning of vocabulary, teachers have continued to see the importance of giving
236 direct attention to words. There is plenty of evidence to show that the deliberate learning of
237 vocabulary is an effective means of increasing vocabulary size. This evidence is of three main
238 types.
239 Firstly, there is evidence from studies involving both deliberate learning and incidental
240 learning (Hulstijn 1992; Barcroft 2009; File & Adams 2010). In each case, deliberate learning
241 results in more learning than incidental learning. From my perspective, I find it hard to get
242 excited about this comparison, though it does provide evidence for the value of deliberate
243 learning. One reason for my lack of enthusiasm is that I see both kinds of learning, incidental
244 and deliberate, as essential parts of a well-balanced program; another is that they promote
245 different aspects of vocabulary learning. Explicit deliberate learning is probably best for
246 learning the more salient aspects of word knowledge, particularly the form-meaning link. It
247 is quite hard to acquire the contextual aspects of word knowledge from this kind of learning,
248 such as collocations and frequency intuitions. Conversely, these are exactly the kinds of word
249 knowledge enhanced by widespread exposure and the incidental learning that comes from
250 it, even though the rate and efficiency of learning is much less.
251 Any program offering only one of these kinds of learning would be a very deficient program
252 indeed. Another reason for my lack of interest in comparisons of deliberate and incidental
253 learning is that they tend to not take into account other types of learning that come about
254 through incidental learning. For example, if vocabulary learning occurs during reading, what
255 improvement also takes place in grammatical knowledge, in reading skill and in knowledge
256 of the world?
257 Secondly, studies such as those by Waring & Takaki (2003) and Pigada & Schmitt (2006)
258 appear to demonstrate the different strengths and kinds of vocabulary learning that can occur
259 incidentally, leading us to suspect that earlier studies using single measures of vocabulary
260 gain may have underestimated the amount of vocabulary learning that occurs. Incidental
261 vocabulary learning rates are necessarily rather low because there are so many other things
262 that learners need to give attention to when such incidental learning occurs. However, this
263 may be regarded as implicit evidence against incidental, and in favour of deliberate, learning. Q3
264 Thirdly, there is very strong evidence for the value of deliberate learning from studies that
265 focus only on deliberate learning. The very long history of published studies of this type
266 includes studies by Thorndike (1908), Webb (1962), Lado, Baldwin & Lobo (1967), Crothers
267 & Suppes (1967), Beaton, Gruneberg & Ellis (1995), Griffin & Harley (1996). These studies
268 consistently show very high rates of learning over relatively short periods of time with good
269 long-term retention. There is now also evidence (Elgort 2011) that this kind of learning results
270 immediately in implicit knowledge that is characterised by being subconsciously and fluently
271 available and well integrated into the learner’s language system.
 8 THINKING ALLOWED

272 4.1 Vocabulary teaching and vocabulary exercises

273 These three kinds of evidence strongly support the idea of giving deliberate attention to
274 words. However, the acquisition of vocabulary may be overemphasised if it is done largely
275 through teaching rather than learning. There is an important distinction to be made between
276 vocabulary teaching and vocabulary learning. As commonsense and research evidence tells us,
277 teaching does not necessarily lead to learning. Some recent studies provide useful evidence of
278 this. Walters & Bozkurt (2009) found in a study involving vocabulary notebooks that even with
279 the sustained deliberate attention needed when using the notebooks, only about 40% of the
280 vocabulary notebook words were learnt receptively and 33% productively, clearly indicating
281 that teaching does not equal learning. File & Adams (2010) found in their experimental study
282 that teaching had a 35–48% effect for the vocabulary deliberately taught, as measured by Q4
283 an immediate post-test. The evidence from L1 studies is even less impressive in terms of
284 time spent on teaching vocabulary and the number of words actually learned (Carlo et al.
285 2004).
286 There is also evidence from research which tests the involvement load hypothesis (Hulstijn
287 & Laufer 2001; Folse 2006; Webb 2007; Kim 2008; Keating 2008) that the amount of
288 vocabulary learning from vocabulary-focused activities is only a small proportion of the
289 words actually studied. Keating (2008), for example, found that sentence writing – the most
290 effective activity – resulted in around half of the words being learned. Other activities, such
291 as texts with glosses and read-and-fill-in-the–blanks, had poorer results. Hulstijn & Laufer
292 (2001) had slightly better but by no means perfect scores with the same activities. Folse’s
293 (2006) best activity, using the same word to complete three sentences, also resulted in around
294 half of the words being learned. These low learning rates are not criticisms of these studies,
295 and quoting them is a bit unfair in that the studies are designed to avoid floor or ceiling
296 effects in their results. Nonetheless, they used typical vocabulary-learning activities, tried to
297 use them as realistically as possible and tried to measure learning in a useful way. The results
298 also agree with a classroom-based L1 study by Biemiller & Boote (2006), who found that
299 about 40% of the words they taught were actually learned.
300 I see the effects of over-application of the value of deliberate attention to vocabulary
301 resulting in (1) too much vocabulary teaching and (2) too many teacher-imposed vocabulary-
302 focused activities and exercises. Well directed deliberate vocabulary learning using word cards
303 is very effective, and much more efficient than teaching and vocabulary exercises. It would be
304 more useful to reduce the time given to vocabulary teaching and doing vocabulary exercises
305 and use this time for extensive reading, fluency development, and meaning-focused input
306 and output activities.

307 4.2 Vocabulary testing

308 There are now several vocabulary tests readily available for teachers to use. While they may
309 often be used appropriately, they are often used where they should not be used, or used
310 incorrectly. The Vocabulary Levels Test has tended to be used as a proficiency measure
 I. S. P. NATION: VOCABULARY 9

311 rather than the diagnostic measure it was designed to be. Read (2000) has commented on
312 this problem.
313 The Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar 2007) has only recently become available for
314 use in both monolingual and bilingual forms. It will be interesting to see how this test is used,
315 and how well it informs teaching.
316 There is a growing body of evidence on the need for a large vocabulary size. One of the
317 ways in which teachers can apply this knowledge is to inform learners of vocabulary growth
318 goals and use tests to help them see where they are at present in their vocabulary knowledge.
319 The online tests available at Tom Cobb’s website www.lextutor.ca provide very accessible
320 and efficient ways of helping learners get this information. We may see an increase in the
321 metacognitive knowledge that teachers provide for learners about vocabulary size, and more
322 of a dialogue between teachers and learners about the nature of vocabulary growth and
323 learning goals.

324 5. Conclusion

325 Overall, knowledge about the teaching and learning of vocabulary is getting through to
326 teachers, material writers and course designers. There is, at least, very much more research
327 and writing about the teaching and learning of vocabulary than there was twenty years ago.
328 There has also been substantial growth in high quality professional development courses
329 for language teachers, particularly Masters’ degrees and Diploma courses in TESOL and
330 applied linguistics, many of which are offered online for distance study, and teachers are
331 taking up these opportunities. Some of these programmes include courses on the teaching
332 and learning of vocabulary, or at least include it in their language teaching methodology
333 courses.
334 It may be that the problems in the application of research come from teachers’ desire (and
335 perhaps need) to simplify the findings of research. This may result in misapplication, but it
336 seems important for researchers to suggest clear principles that teachers can apply, and that
337 are supported by research.
338 It may also be right and proper that there is a gap between research findings and classroom
339 application. While research should evaluate and question existing practices, it is probably
340 more important to focus on exploring new approaches and suggesting innovations. Because
341 there is little replication in applied linguistics research, there may be value in taking time to
342 evaluate findings and subject them to critical scrutiny before rushing into application.

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349 grades. Journal of Educational Psychology 98.1, 44–62.
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438 PAUL NATION is professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language
439 Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. He has taught
440 in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan. His specialist interests are language
441 teaching methodology and vocabulary learning.