Learning and Teaching Second Language Vocabulary

LEARNING AND TEACHING SECOND LANGUAGE VOCABULARY
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Learning and Teaching Second Language Vocabulary
English is the most spoken language globally, with over 379 and 753 million native and non-native speakers. Just like Greek was a universal language between 500 BC and 100 BC and Latin in the Middle Ages, English is the universal language of modern society. With increasing globalization, cross-cultural interaction, and immigration, learning English is necessary for non-native speakers. Thus, acquiring English as a second language is an essential feature of the American education system. In the learning process, researchers agree that vocabulary skills are the basis of the foundation of English as a second language (Folse, 2012; Chou, 2018). Therefore, the vocabulary development area has attracted the attention of scholars and researchers in the education sector seeking to establish practical approaches for teaching and learning. The current paper aims to provide a critical appraisal of findings related to learning and teaching L2 vocabulary, highlight the main concepts and tools that inform L2 teaching and propose an approach to teaching vocabulary in a specific ELT context.
Literature Review
To gain proficiency in a second language (L2), students must face challenges in pronunciation, pragmatics, composition, syntax, and vocabulary. For English learners, Folse (2012, p. pp. 1) contented the most critical category in learning English is L2. This means that while learners can get by with even weak syntax, a lexical gap can bring any conversation to an immediate halt. Understanding approaches to learning and teaching vocabulary are key features among researchers and scholars.
Resources for Researching Vocabulary
Teaching and learning vocabulary has been the main focus of many researchers in education. As a result, there is an increasing need for resources to facilitate these research projects. According to Anthony (2018), the primary source of data in these types of research is corpus data, while world lists have mainly remained the secondary sources of data. Looking at the future, Anthony (2018) predicts that tools to visualize relationships between vocabulary items will be among the most likely improvements shortly. In agreement with Wright and Cervetti (2016), in their systematic review of vocabulary research, they emphasized that most contemporary research outcomes have relied on corpus data as the primary data source and word lists as the secondary data source.
Corpus data has been utilized to draw specific conclusions or compare with outcomes of ongoing primary research. Expanding on Wright and Cervetti's findings, Schmitt (2019) adds that among these resources, there are six main areas of vocabulary research; including developing practical models for the acquisition of vocabulary, understanding the development of vocabulary knowledge from receptive mastery to productive mastery, incorporation of lexical teaching, exploration of language exposure in extramural. Thus, contemporary research findings that rely on these data resources and approaches promise to be relevant, trustworthy, and valuable...