Jakub Konopka

AJSP2 LDI2

Vocabulary critical analysis

The book I chose to analyze is simply called Vocabulary. As the name of the book already suggests the book deals with the aspects of teaching and learning vocabulary. The author of this book is Michael McCarthy, a lecturer in Modern English Language in the Department of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. His main research interests are applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and spoken corpus linguistics. McCarthy has written over 20 books concerning vocabulary. For example, he is a co-author of Cambridge Grammar of English; he also contributes to the series of English Vocabulary in Use and to the new Cambridge course books called Touchstone.

The book I chose is divided into three parts. The first part is called Explaining vocabulary. The main aim of this part is to highlight and explain the theoretical, descriptive and psycholinguistic models of the vocabulary of English to learners. Each rule or notion consists of a theoretical description with explanation and an activity where the rules are implied. The chapter is based on two different levels: a linguistic level where the usage and rules are explained and a mental level that shows us the way human mind works while learning vocabulary. The second section of Vocabulary works with the insights from the section one, it focuses on how those insights are modified in order to achieve an efficient vocabulary-learning process. For example, the chapter includes methods of how to pick a vocabulary to learn, how to teach the vocab in the class, how to encourage learners autonomy while learning vocabulary, how to work with dictionaries and references and so on.

Jakub Konopka

AJSP2 LDI2

The last section of this book is basically a collection of tasks that should help teachers to identify their learners problems concerning vocabulary learning. Each activity is described in terms of the aim, resources, procedure and evaluation of the activity. The text is written in a plain style, although one might be confused by books main aim. McCarthy states in the beginning of the book that the main goal is to improve teachers continual professional development. Understanding it doesnt require any sort of knowledge on the part of the reader. The autonomous students could certainly benefit from this book. However, if used as a tool to lead language classes, it surely requires greater knowledge on the teachers part, since the book gives only the basic explanations and schemes and expects deeper knowledge of the subjects. From this point of view I dont see any way the stated aim of the book might be achieved. Moreover, the tasks in the first two sections of the book are very helpful to demonstrate the explanations that the author provides, but it might be more helpful if some conclusion or correct answers were provided at the end of the activities too. Nevertheless, in terms of the rules and theories provided in this book, it is easy to find further documents to study, because the author provides the reader with a lot of references to other books and all his arguments are also supported by those references. The last reproach might be that McCarthy says the context for learning new words isnt that important:
Words may be presented in or out of the context, As we have seen, methods such as grids, networks do not rely on context to establish meaning and, even where the words crop up in context, the teacher may deliberately de-contextualize them temporarily in order to get a general meaning, only to recontextualize them later. (McCarthy 1990:111)

It is surely important to know and understand this notion, although I disagree with its usage. Especially younger learners might have problems learning this way, since their cognitive and metacognitive thinking is not developed enough yet. Context may blur the general meaning of the words, but it is the context or support of the other senses and so on that helps learners remember the words efficiently. McCarthy himself describes this in his books. Authors such as Scott Thornbury or Jeremy Harmer even suggest creating situational presentations that focus on providing a scenario which clearly contextualizes the target word. (Thornbury 2004:81) Sometimes the context is not possible and teacher has to explain some word without using context, in this case it is important to know how to do it, but

Jakub Konopka

AJSP2 LDI2

McCarthy gives it much of importance in comparison to the teaching of new vocab by using contextualized environment. In conclusion I think this book might be very helpful as a guidebook through learning vocabulary for students of English and as an aid for beginning teachers.