Dale Brown (Osaka University)

1. Featured Speaker Presentation (14:30-16:00)
Presentation Title: Vocabulary and textbooks: What textbooks do, what they don’t, and what you can do
by Dale Brown (Osaka University)
The commonsense view of vocabulary learning is that learning a word means learning its meaning. Vocabulary researchers, however, have established that there is a lot more to learning a word than this. Full
mastery of a word includes, among other things, knowing its spoken and written form, knowing the concepts it can refer to and what other words it is related to, and knowing the grammatical and collocational patterns
it occurs in. Classroom observation studies appear to show that teachers, for the most part, take the commonsense view and focus on word meaning. This presentation will begin by reporting on a study which
aimed to find out whether the same is true of textbooks. The study investigated how and to what extent nine aspects of word knowledge (based on Nation’s well-known framework) are dealt with in nine general English textbooks covering three proficiency levels. The study found that in general they do indeed have a narrow focus. Two of the nine aspects receive a great deal of attention, while most of the other aspects receive only scant attention, and some are almost wholly absent from the textbooks.
The second part of the presentation will suggest that since textbooks have such a limited view of vocabulary, teachers need to take the responsibility for looking at other aspects of vocabulary knowledge in the classroom. To that end, a range of vocabulary activities involving the other aspects will be introduced. The focus will be on activities that require little preparation and that can be easily used to follow up on the vocabulary activities that are standard in many textbooks. The intention is to help teachers build on the foundation that textbooks provide, and give them the means to extend the range of vocabulary knowledge dealt with, the ultimate aim being to give learners a deeper and more secure knowledge of the vocabulary items concerned.
Dale Brown teaches at Osaka University and is pursuing a PhD in Applied Linguistics with Cardiff University. His primary research interests are in extensive reading, the analysis of language teaching materials and
vocabulary acquisition. In his PhD research he is looking at the development of EFL learners’ knowledge of collocations.
2. Business Meeting (16:15-17:15