Word-Frequency and Vocabulary Acquisition: An Analysis of Elementary Spanish College Textbooks in the Usa

Abstract

At universities in the United States, first-year Spanish instructors often wonder why their students perform below expectations in vocabulary tests. This paper addresses this question by presenting an analysis of five leading first-year college Spanish textbooks published in the United States. This analysis consists of two parts: 1) mapping the textbooks' vocabulary lists as well as the vocabulary that appears in their reading input against the vocabulary-frequency information provided in A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners written by Mark Davies and published by Routledge in 2006, and 2) using estimations available in the current literature to infer logistical aspects that need to be considered in first-year college Spanish such as amount of contact-time with the material to be learned, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and the relationship between the receptive and productive dimensions of vocabulary acquisition. The results show that some pedagogical fine-tuning may be needed to align the amount of vocabulary presented in textbooks as well as their vocabulary selections with research findings on vocabulary acquisition and Spanish vocabulary frequency.

Conceptual Demography in Upper Secondary Chemistry and Biology Textbooks’ Descriptions of Protein Synthesis: A Matter of Context?

“…Over the length of a text, certain terms may be repeated. The frequency of their recurrence has been referred to as the “vocabulary frequency,” which quantifies the number of times a learner comes into contact with specific terms ( Godev, 2009 ). It is suggested that increasing the number of times a learner encounters a term will deepen his or her learning of that term ( Urzúa et al.…”

“…It is suggested that increasing the number of times a learner encounters a term will deepen his or her learning of that term ( Urzúa et al. , 2006 , in Godev, 2009 ). According to Tzeng et al.…”

“…The ordering of the technical terms strongly affects both the text’s meaning-­making capacity and its readability ( Perfetti, 2007 ). In particular, the duration of a term’s use (i.e., the extent to which it occurs regularly in the text rather than being confined to specific sections) affects the length of time over which students encounter that term, which has been suggested to enhance the likelihood of learning a concept ( Godev, 2009 ). Linderholm and colleagues (2004) point out that the spatiotemporal aspect of a text is important for coherence-based retrieval of the meaning of a text.…”

Determining ESL learners’ vocabulary needs from a textbook corpus: challenges and prospects

“…This contrasts with ignorance of those words that are strewn all over the text, which potentially compromises the comprehension of the several parts of the text in which they are used. High frequency of a word in a text guarantees learner contact with it (Godev 2009) and impacts their textual comprehension.…”

“…The role of words in communication has been deemed analogous to that of molecules in physical structures (Eskey & Grabe 1988), where the former constitutes the existence of the latter. Vocabulary knowledge is considered predictive and reflective of reading achievement (Pikulski & Templeton 2004;Godev 2009). …”