Vocabulary acquisition: process and instruction

Abstract

Building meaning from a written text does not depend solely on vocabulary knowledge. Nevertheless, research has shown that less fluent readers need to increase their vocabulary repertoire in order not to impair fluent reading. If the reader fails to bring word meaning to his/her working memory during the process of reading, global coherence may be affected as he/she cannot activate previous knowledge to interact with information from the text. In contexts of foreign language instruction, an intensive vocabulary building practice may help less fluent readers in the process of interpreting texts. In this sense, we bring up a discussion on some concepts related to meaning of “word”, lexical unit, mental lexicon, lexical entry in L1 and L2, lexical competency and automaticity of lexical recognition and production. As contribution to classroom practice, we propose a discussion on vocabulary knowledge and instruction, relating the topic to reading processing according to the Cognitive Psychology memory system.