Shaking my head

There is an ongoing discussion on the Language Expert group I am a member of right now.  Someone posed the question about how the best way to learn vocabulary was.  I have been amazed at the experts' answers in the group.  It reinforces my already shaded view about vocabulary after a great number of courses in language acquisition (both first and second), after 5 years experience teaching a native language vocabulary course to 17 and 18 year-olds, after raising two children as they acquired language in all its various forms, and after doing first-hand field research in the area.  The experts prefer methods that will only work to get a very basic number of words learned, which is probably why public schools have circulated some very soft research concerning the importance of vocabulary learning for its secondary students (elementary too, for that matter, but the angle is usually a little different).

For the record, it's really, really simple.  Stephen Krashen captured the idea in an eloquent equation on the same order that Eistein captured the eloquent equation to base his theory of relativity on.  V=i+1.  Learning vocabulary is a matter of input +1 more word (or phrase or term or semantic domain).

It's really that simple, but for those who want complex, the second phase of  learning vocabulary is that there are 5 reasons for learning vocabulary.  These reasons govern the entire vocabularies of people whether you talk about reading, writing (typing nowadays), or speaking.  The reason for the soft research is that very few true field tests exist for those learning words above the age of 6.  And there's a great reason for that.  After age 4 really, the backgrounds of children are so different and the personalities of children mixing with those backgrounds are so different, that there is no uniform way to know the true extent of people's vocabularies.  Tests cannot be constructed that fathom the number of words children know, much less know which words they have in common above the 8,000 word level.  So, getting children to learn vocabulary according to a particular method or with an established regimen of lists is ludicrous.  That is simply not how people learn words!!!

Cognitive and memory studies have contributed some to how people learn words, and language acquisition has contributed as well.  These are two areas unknown to most educators.  So, the researching arm of educaton is left to guess basically how words are learned.  They have turned to one of the softest and most recent areas of education to be developed - reading.  Heaven forbid that reading should inform vocabulary learning.  Most of those studies ignore completely how children come to the task of learning to read.  Most reading teachers and scholars ignore Krashen and Richard Gentry (himself a reading expert) and pursue some sort of universal way of reading acquisition model, following Marie Clay usually and Louisa Moates.

I guess I shouldn't care so much.  Reading will be dead in the water in 10 years or less anyway.  It's just that I have friends in education and I hate seeing them bang their heads against the wall.  People's judgments are only as good as their information.  I wish my friends could see the information I have seen, but they are going to have to go outside what is being fed to them by the school systems to get it.  School systems perpetuate circular reasoning,  ideas that feed their preconceived notions.  That's really not a good educational model, but it is an absolutely abhorrent model for word development and the associated subjects using words.