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1DEVELOPMENT OF LEXICAL COMPETENCE AND VOCABULARY NORMS OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Karimova M.F.
Doctoral student of TSPU https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13893746
Abstract. The process of organizing and carrying out educational activities includes knowledge transfer, its reception, understanding, memorization and practical application. At present time a special importance is attached to the introduction of new modern technologies, their effective and rational use, and the achievement of high efficiency at all stages of education. Teaching using modern technologies allows students to independently acquire scientific and theoretical knowledge, to form knowledge, skills and qualifications, and on the basis of this, the scientific outlook ofstudents is formed, and their activity increases. The main goal of all innovative education is to develop a passion for learning in students and turn it into a skill. This educational process implies the active participation of the student in educational activities and the development of his creative abilities. Vocabulary has traditionally not received the attention it deserves, usually lumped together with other types of competence until the 1980s and 1990s, when researchers began to focus on it with greater interest. By the concept of lexical competence there was considered how lexical researchers conceptualize its dimensions, in particular, the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. There was also drawn attention to the data from ongoing cross-sectional research on lexical competence in the upper grades and discussion of different ways in which lexical competence can be measured.
Keywords: lexical competence, breadth of vocabulary, depth of vocabulary knowledge, receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary.
It is important to suggest that regardless of the richness of vocabulary, the teaching and learning of vocabulary has traditionally been underemphasized in second and foreign language curricula. As Richards and Renandia (2002, p. 255) argue, "a key component of language proficiency" is considered as "how well learners can speak, listen, read, and write, which largely provides the basis for understanding." Language pedagogy and vocabulary continued to play a secondary role even in the 1970s when communicative language teaching emerged.
Although communicative language teaching gradually led to a major rethinking of the role of vocabulary, people began to recognize the meaning potential of words and, therefore, their importance for second and foreign language learners (Syam Choudhury, 2010, p. 308). The change came in the late 1980s while pioneering developments in lexicography involved "extensive integration of spoken and written language and the development of sophisticated computer-based access tools" (Carter, 2001, p. 43). Later, vocabulary teaching gained momentum when Lewis (1993) proposed his "lexical approach" to developing learners' lexical competence. Not only did Lewis expand the concept of vocabulary to include "lexical items," that is, general groups of words or phrases, but language was not a "lexicalized grammar" but a "grammaticalized lexicon," lexical and lexical-linguistic competence should be taken into consideration. In order to understand what lexical competence is, it is important to try to understand what the word knowledge means. Richards (1976) was one of the first applied linguists to propose the concept of 'word awareness', which is knowledge of the extent to which a word is likely to occur in spoken or printed language.
It is not a secret that the function and state of the word, the syntactic behavior associated with the word, the constraints on its use by the base form of the word and its possible derivatives, the word and other languages in the network, the associations between words, the semantic value of the word and the various meanings associated with the word are changed. In essence, supporting this structure of lexical knowledge by Richards, Nation (1990) added pronunciation as an important component that makes pronunciation more complete. Moreover, Nation (1990) made a clear distinction between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge, arguing that production involves a higher level of vocabulary knowledge than reception. Later, Nation (2001) revised his original premise and stated that word knowledge, or in other words, lexical competence, involves three types of knowledge:
(i) knowledge of form (oral form, written form and parts of speech);
(ii) Knowledge of meaning (form and meaning, concept, referents and associations);
(iii) Knowledge of usage (grammatical functions, adverbs and restrictions on usage).
It should be suggested that Dale developed this scale for first language users. For second language learners, Paribakht and Wesche (1993) developed a vocabulary scale very similar to the scale developed by Dale, but with an additional step: "I can use this word in a sentence". Thus, the author concludes that lexical competence is conceptualized differently by different researchers depending on their views of what constitutes vocabulary knowledge. It is common to all views that the understanding lexical competence is multidimensional and that learning words is a complex and stepwise process. A common feature of lexicography is the view of lexical competence in terms of a number of easily measurable dimensions. One of the most common views of vocabulary acquisition is that vocabulary acquisition occurs in a developmental process. The basic idea is that verbal knowledge develops in some hierarchical order. In line with the continuum concept, Henriksen (1999) proposed a three-dimensional model of lexical competence:
(i) partial specialist knowledge;
(ii) depth of knowledge
(iii) sensitive to level of production.
Definitely, the first dimension, knowledge of individual parts, is mainly related to the breadth or size of vocabulary knowledge, since the learner goes through several stages of knowledge from simple word recognition to partial knowledge, which is conceptualized as a kind of journey to the stage of clear comprehension by expanding the knowledge base. However, the size of the vocabulary cannot be the only indicator that helps the author understand the lexical competence of the language user. In this context, the second and third dimensions of Henrikson's model are important. The second dimension, depth of knowledge, refers to the relationship of a word to other words in the vocabulary. The relationships can be paradigmatic (antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, others) or syntagmatic (collocation constraints). The third dimension, the receptive-productive dimension, refers to the extent to which the learner acquires vocabulary knowledge, which is manifested in comprehension and production skills. Receptive vocabulary is larger since it only concerns the ability to understand a lexical item. On the other hand, it refers to the ability to use a lexical item to build a productive vocabulary.
Moreover, vocabulary size is often defined as the breadth of a person's vocabulary, or the number of words that a person knows, and is one of the main indicators of lexical competence. Vocabulary breadth is closely related to three questions of interest:
i) How many words are there in the language in question?
(ii) How many words does a native speaker know?
(iii) How much vocabulary does a second language learner need?
Goulden, Nation, and Reed (1990) listed the number of phrases in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1963), one of the largest dictionaries of English language. After excluding entries such as proper names and alternate spellings, Goulden, Nation, and Reed (1990) found that the dictionary contained about 54,000-word groups. But this learning target is impossible for the second language learners and even for native speakers.
A recent study (Nation & Waring, 1997, p.7) found that the average native English speaker with a school education knows about 20,000 vocabulary words. Although there is considerable variation among individuals, this number is generally accepted, excluding proper names, compounds, and abbreviations, etc. Liu and Nation (1985, Beglar & Hunt, 2002) and Nation (1990) found that a second language learner must have a requisite knowledge of at least 3,000 words to achieve 95% coverage of all text. However, most second language researchers today recommend a core vocabulary of at least 3,000 word sets and, for more specialized needs, a working vocabulary of over 5,000-word sets (Nation, 1990). Another way to describe lexical competence is to show how well a word is known. There is no consensus among second language researchers as to what is meant by depth or quality. Meara (1996) considered depth of knowledge to be the interaction between individual words, and perceived depth to be the organization of words in a mental network. In his view, the depth of lexical knowledge, what he calls "organization", indicates the relationships a word may have with other words in the language. Based on a scale proposed by Meara (1996), Reed (1998) identified three types of word relationships: paradigmatic (synonymy, antonymy, hyponym, etc.), syntagmatic (association) and analytic. Students with high vocabularies have denser and more organized networks than students with low vocabularies. The question at present time arises as to how these parameters should be measured in order to make useful distinctions between students with different levels of second language proficiency. Samples of lexical competence in high school were controlled to substantiate the ideas.
Besides that, different measures have been developed to assess lexical competence. Initially, vocabulary was measured by two diametrically opposed methods: vocabulary sampling method frequency sampling method.
In the vocabulary sampling method, words are selected from a dictionary and then the individual's vocabulary size is estimated by multiplying the number of known word samples by the ratio of the total number of words in the dictionary.
For example, for a 20,000-word dictionary from which a sample of 100 words is selected, if an individual knows 20 words from the sample, his or her vocabulary size would be 4,000 words (20 x 20,000/100). However, this method has not been successful because the estimated vocabulary size was highly dependent on the size of the vocabulary and the definition of the word in the dictionary (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Lorge & Chall, 1963). As a result, vocabulary research has tended to use frequency sampling as an alternative method of selecting test items to measure vocabulary size. Anderson and Freebody (1981, p. 23) stated that "frequency is the characteristic of a word that is most closely related to the probability that the word will be known". That is, high-frequency words are learned relatively early, so that a learner's knowledge of words at a given frequency level reflects the overall size of his or her vocabulary.
Another important factor is the nature of the test format for measuring lexical competence. One of the formats used in checklist tests. This format allows for a large number of words to be tested in a short period of time. The target words were listed with one non-word item for every two real words. Learners were asked to check whether they knew them. If any of these non-words were ticked, this indicates that the learner had overestimated their knowledge or vocabulary. The results of the study discussed above showed that there was a significant difference in the lexical competence of B1 and B1+ students in overall competence. It can be assumed that these differences are mainly due to the different educational environments. The B1+ students were graduates of English language departments and therefore had more opportunities to learn a second language than the B1 students. In this study, the B1+ students spent an average of 3 hours learning a second language and most of the work they did was in English. On the other hand, the B1 students studied their second language for an average of two hours per week. Thus, the B1+ students had more opportunities to learn and use their second language than the B1 students, and this was certainly reflected in the test results.
By summarizing it should be recognized that since vocabulary acquisition is an ongoing process, cross-sectional studies such as the one that provided some of the data for this article can only measure students' lexical competence at a particular point in time that can give a brief description, where longitudinal studies provide a more complete description of what it means aimed at knowing words that could be more useful in production.
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