1. Running head: VOCABULARY AS A SYSTEM OF LANGUAGE 1
Vocabulary as a system of Language according to
Paul Nation, Vivian Cook and John Read
Víctor A. González
and
Juan A. Rosales
Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción

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It is common knowledge that language is essential for our society because
it allows us to communicate with each other and understand different concepts and
intentions. This interaction would not be possible if it was not due to vocabulary.
This concept is one of the systems of language and could be defined as the
amount of words that a person uses in order to express something. Thus,
vocabulary presents vital importance because it allows learners to have a better
comprehension of the language skills.
In several situations people are quite keen to say something in an
appropriate way according to a specific context. However, the lack of information in
terms of vocabulary would be an obstacle to them. This would provoke that people
will not able to say anything at all.
The purpose of this paper is to present, analyze and develop the concept
of vocabulary as a system of language according to three authors. Their
perspectives are going to be analyzed in order to provide a complete idea and
foundations about what vocabulary comprehends, what are the principles to be
considered when teaching vocabulary, and how these principles can be
implemented inside a classroom.
First of all, Nation (2007) provides the time-on–task principle which is a
justification of the four strands. It basically expresses that everybody can show
improvement on a particular skill as long as they practice constantly. He also
declares that language skills are different from other kind of skills such as critical

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skills, so they have to be considered in a way that quantity of the tasks for these
skills is not confused with their quality.
Secondly, in his paper, Nation mentions four strands in the learning
process. The first strand is the meaning-focused input, which is learning through
listening and reading. This is related to the knowledge and understanding that
students acquire by using their receptive skills, which are reading and listening.
Some of the typical activities related to these skills are watching television, listen to
the radio, etc. The number of words that will be learnt is relatively low, and the
degree of learning will depend exclusively on the quality of the reading and
listening. Therefore, a lot of input is needed. Moreover, there are conditions that
need to be present in this strand in order to accomplish an effective. First, if the
reading is extensive, the learning will be highest. Second, the students must have
most of the knowledge related to the information they are receiving in order to
understand it. Third, it is required that learners really want to learn and understand
the given information. Fourth, learners must have a high percentage of knowledge
about the source. Furthermore, Nation and Wang (1999) stated that the learners
should read extensive texts at least once every two weeks in order to acquire a
significant amount vocabulary.
Furthermore, Read (2000) states some measures for this strand. He says
that is necessary to be concerned about the nature of the input. He proposes two
questions for the teachers so that they can confirm that; does the difficulty of the
input concords with the level of the learners? And does the input have
characteristics of authenticity? Moreover, according to Read, there are three

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possible errors that can occur in a listening. First, perceptual error, which indicates
that the learners are not able to hear certain sounds properly; Second, lexical error,
which means that the meaning is difficult to understand; and third, the syntactic
error, where the sentence structure is misinterpreted.
Thirdly, the second strand is the meaning-focused output, which is learning
through speaking and writing. In this strand is important that learners can improve
their vocabulary when they produce language. Some of the activities he proposes
to reach that objective are; having conversations, writing letters, keeping a diary,
etc. In addition, he states that, as in the receptive learning, there are conditions
that have to be present when learning by production of language. First, what the
learners produce must be largely related to their knowledge; their focus must be to
get their message across. Second, only a small amount of words have to be
unknown to them. Third, their previous input must be used to produce language.
Fourth, there must be several opportunities for them to use the language. In
addition, he states that within a spoken activity there could be a mixture between
input and output. For example, in a conversation one person produces the output
and the other learns that as input.
Moreover, Nation cites Swain´s out hypothesis and points out that
speaking or writing is part of the process of second language learning. Also, Swain
(1995) suggests three functions for the output hypothesis. The first function is the
noticing/triggering function, which occurs when students have difficulties for
expressing a message because they do not know how to do it. He explains that
this impairment takes place because productive learning implies not only looking

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for the meaning of a word, but also the production of the word. Furthermore, he
stated that according to Izumi (2002), when learners produce language they are
obliged to integrate a greater amount of items. This has to occur in a way that is
easier to be understood. He states that productive is not better than receptive.
However they are different from each other. The integration in the productive
learning is not the same as in receptive learning, so equal amount of times have to
be balanced for both productive and receptive within a lesson. In addition, he
declares that the complete effect of triggering/noticing function does not provoke
enough impact until learners have the knowledge that they did not have before.
That can happen in three ways. The first way is when learners notice a failure while
they produce language and, subsequently, they start paying attention to certain
items in the input that they had not noticed before. The second way is to
compensate the lack of knowledge through trials and error, or by using their first
language transfer. And the third way is to look for assistance from teachers or
other sources once they are aware of the gap in their production. The second
function proposed by swains is the hypothesis-testing function. Here the learners
perform trials and then they can whether maintain or modify those trials depending
on the success they achieve or the feedback they receive. The third function is the
metalinguistic (reflective) function. This implies the production of language with the
objective of solving problems by working in groups or teams. This kind of activity
combines meaning-focused output and language-focused learning because the
production makes the learners to pay attention on language features.

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Fourthly, Nation (2007) provides the language-focused learning strand.
This strand is known with many other names, such as focus on form, form-focused
instruction, deliberate teaching, etc. The principal or main aim of it, is to develop
and integrate the four skills of language which are reading, speaking, listening and
writing. Many activities are proposed in order to accomplish the development of the
four skills. Nation (2007) clarifies activities like substitution tables, labeling, drills,
memorization of dialogues, intensive reading, etc. a very important issue to
considerate, is that these activities are just a part of the entire teaching process. As
you know, a teaching process has to deal with as many alternatives as the teacher
can have in order to implement them in the classroom. Thus, all the students can
learn and acquire knowledge from the most variable perspectives, obtaining an
improvement in every side of the instruction.
For implementing this focus, nation provides five conditions. The first one
is that students give special and conscious attention to language features. When
they are developing an activity that must pay attention to them in order to learn and
acquire vocabulary through the activity. Here, language features do not pass
unnoticed. Students are asked to analyze and study the features in order to
complete the aim of any of the activities prescribed above. The second condition is
about the same as the previous one. Students must study and analyze in deep the
different aspects of language. They have to think about them and provide
meaningful relation and definition, thus they can acquire them by giving important
context to each one of them. Thirdly, teachers have to apply and provide the
students enough space and situations where they can work on their own and in a

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conscious way. The teacher also make special emphasis in the same features
previous analyzed, so the students can put all their attention and they do not feel
bombarded with too much information. Fourthly, Nation (2007) states that the
features, that are being object of study, must be as much simple as they can be, in
order to obtain the best attention from the students towards them. They also have
to be independent in term of cognitive developmental knowledge. With this,
features must be apart from such cognitive abilities that students may not have or
develop yet. To accomplish this condition, teachers have to be aware of the age of
the students and what cognitive abilities they have according to their age. Finally, it
is explained that the features used in this strand should be present in the other
three strands of vocabulary development. Thus it will be a development and they
will be attended from every side of its characteristics.
At the end of this strand for developing vocabulary, the author provides
four possible effects. The students can add to them implicit knowledge, they are
helped with the development of possible later learning, so it would be much more
easy for them to learn, be aware of the systematic aspects of language and it can
be useful to develop new strategies that can be used in studying and applicable for
the other three strands.
In the Fifth place, the last strand of the four named previously, is the
fluency development. The aspect of the last strand is that all the four skills are
integrated and should be attended in the same process. Here the students
suppose to use all the knowledge that have been acquiring during the process and
all what they know so far. Moreover, students have to provide and receive

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messages though the different skills that hey posses. But this strand can only be
applicable and possible to implement depending on four principles. The first of
them is that all they listen, read, speak or write has to be familiar to them; it must
have meaning to them. Unfamiliar or complex features are not allowed. In second
place the focus is the production and reception of meaningful stimulus. Thirdly, the
teacher has to encourage his/her students to perform as fast as they can, or much
faster than they normally do, due to the necessity to develop fluency in their skills,
which is also the aim of the strand. Finally it must be a large amount of input and
output activities.
However, there are certain conditions where students are not developing
fluency. For example, certain activities that involves unknown vocabulary or where
there is no push to the students to do the activities faster than usual.
Now, how can we integrate the four strands? Nation (2007) expresses that
in every moment of the class or the teaching process, each one of the activities will
lead to the other one. For example, if the teacher starts the lesson with an input
activity, he can later make the students to do an output activity and so on. There
are many ways and ideas for giving enough time for each one of the strands, but it
will depend on the students need and interests, in the different teacher’s
expectations of the students, the beliefs about language learning, etc.
In the Sixth place, Nation states a way of balancing the four strands.
During a course, each of the strands should have the same amount of time
because there must be a balance between reception and production of language.

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The teacher can verify whether there is a positive equilibrium by having a register
of the activities so that he can check them from time to time.
Moreover, Nation cites Ellis (2005) in order to provide a justification for the
equality of time for the four strands. Ellis states that students need to focus not only
on meaning, but also on form. He says that the four strands, except for the
language-focused learning, are meaning-focused strands. This means that three
quarters of the course are focused mainly on meaning and the other quarter is
focused on form. However, language-focused learning is more effective. This was
demonstrated by a study conducted by Waring and takaki (2003) in which students
learnt four words in fifty minutes in a meaning-focused reading, whereas other
studies indicated that learners were able to learn more than thirty words in sixty
minutes in a language-focused reading (Nation, 2001: 298; Thorndike, 1908;
webb,1962). Furthermore, Nation declares that the equal amount of time for each
strand is random and depends on the improvement and development of the
students.
In the Seventh place, Nation mentions ten principles that are intended to
give a guideline and advices to teachers about how to apply the strands correctly.
First, is essential to provide comprehensible input through listening and reading
activities such as extensive readings or spoken communication activities. Second,
it is necessary to add a deliberate element to stimulate the comprehensible input,
for example, by writing words on the board while they are being listened. Third,
encourage learners to produce output in a variety of genres in activities like role
plays or match writings. Fourth, is important for learners to have opportunities to

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produce output in collaborative assignments such as split information or expressing
opinion about a particular topic. Fifth, help learners to deliberately identify patterns
and features of language such as sounds or grammar and always provide them
feedback. The sixth principle explains that teacher should train his/her student’s
different strategies in order to have a better and productive learning process. It
could be strategies like use of dictionary, internet programs, different softwares,
word part analysis, etc. the seventh principle states that fluency activities have to
be implemented for the students, in order to the develop the four skills of language.
The eighth principle proposes an equal amount of time and dedication for all the
strands that should be present in a lesson. The ninth principle pushes teachers to
develop and cover the most common and useful items. The teacher must provide
simple tasks, information and materials and give the maximum of input to the
students, covering the four skills at the same level. Finally, the tenth principle
states that teachers should analyze, monitor and assess students, in order to give
feedback and help the students to develop their communicational needs.
In the eighth place, Cook (2001) provides three more strategies to develop
vocabulary. He points out that one thing is to be able to recognize or come up with
the meaning of words; another quite different thing is to remember the words and
their meaning in order to use it later on in the future. Cook defines three main
strategies for acquiring knowledge. First, students have to do repetition and rote
learning activities. The common idea of the most well-known method for teaching
vocabulary is to repeat over and over again the same word. Thus, the word will be
learned and stored in the long term memory. Yet the author states that this type of

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work might be in vain. However, the most important part in the process of acquiring
knowledge is the first encounter with that word. If it is meaningful and the students
are aware of the word and they are committed with its learning, the process will be
successful. Secondly, Cook exposes the organization process. The idea of this
strategy is to organize all the words that are being learned into groups in the
student’s mind. The foundations are that words are put into a “word map” or “sub-
groups”. It means that words are connected and organized following certain
patterns, such as words with suffixes like “-er” or prefixes such as “con-“. Another
way of organizing words is by connecting their morphology linked to their meaning.
Moreover, it is advisable to categorize general rules for certain affixes, so they can
convey the meaning by having in mind the different affixes and their corresponding
meanings. Finally, the most developed strategy by Cook is the linking to existing
knowledge. He explains that the commonest way of remembering words is by
linking them to preexisting information in our minds. Because learning a complete
new information will be probably harder. Other way of linking new information, is to
connect the word to a preestablished image or scheme that you posses. This
method will be much easier to do for our brains processes. So, students will
remember and recover the information faster than using another method. It will
also allow the students to store more than one item into a certain image, providing
the ability to convey more than one word just by remembering on scheme.
In conclusion, in this paper there were presented the four strands of
vocabulary proposed by Paul Nation, which are meaning-focused input, meaning-
focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. Also, he

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mentioned some advices for teachers when teaching vocabulary. He stated that
the four strands should be considered, balanced and integrated at the same level.
Later on, Nation (2007) proposes ten principles for teachers in order to be
considered and implemented in our classrooms. Within this principles, are
techniques to asses students. Read (2000) proposes two question that teacher
must ask themselves at the time of evaluations. Finally, three main strategies were
presented following Cook’s book. These strategies aimed to have, develop and
give the students enough tools for them. Thus students obtain all the help they
need in order to have a better vocabulary acquisition process. Strategies such as
link new information to previous schemes, organization of words that share the
same or similar patterns in groups are advisable for teaching vocabulary.

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REFERENCES
Cook, V. J. (1991). Second Language Learning and. Language Teaching. New
york: Cambridge University press.
Ellis, R. (2005) Principles of instructed language learning. System 33, 209-224.
Izumi, S. (2002) Output, input enhancement, and the noticing hypothesis: An
experimental study on ESL relativization. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition 24, 541-577.
Nation, P. (2007) Innovation in language and teaching. The four strands 1 (1) 1-10.
Read, J. (Ed). (2000). Assessing vocabulary. United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press.
Swain, M. (1995) Three functions of output in second language learning. In G.
Cook and B. Seidelhofer (eds) Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics:
Studies in Honour of H.G. Widdowson (pp. 125-144). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Thorndike, E.L. (1908) Memory for paired associates. Psychological Review 15,
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Waring, R. and Takaki, M. (2003) At what rate do learners learn and retain new
vocabulary from reading a graded reader? Reading in a Foreign Language
15 (2) 130-163.
Webb, W.B. (1962) The effects of prolonged learning on learning. Journal of Verbal
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