ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#106 | December 5 | ISSN 0975-3036
source: teachingenglish.org.uk
This article discusses how much attention language teachers should pay to vocabulary acquisition research, particularly with regard to repeated encounters with lexical items.
Introduction
Sometime in the middle of the last century, Benjamin Whorf, famous for his contention that language shapes thought, made a controversial statement about the Eskimo language having seven words for snow. Frequently quoted or, rather misquoted overtime, Whorf’s number of snow words was inflated to nine, twenty, fifty, and even one hundred. A similar snowball effect seems to be taking place with the contentious issue of how many exposures a vocabulary item needs for its retention.
About 20 years ago, researchers originally proposed that a second language (L2) learner needs six exposures to a word in order to retain it. However, with the emergence of more and more research into vocabulary acquisition, the number swelled to 10, then 15 and has now reached 20. Do we really need 20 exposures to the word? How realistic is it? What constitutes an exposure?
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