ABSTRACT
Until rather recently both foreign language teachers and researchers focused their efforts on grammar and phonology more than on vocabulary. Yet it is obvious that vocabulary is of crucial importance to the foreign language learner. From the viewpoint of the beginning learner it may even be considered the most crucial language component: The chances of getting one’s basic needs fulfilled in a foreign language environment are substantially better if the learner possesses some well-chosen basic vocabulary in the language concerned than when, instead, he or she masters the language’s grammar flawlessly. Any learner who has struggled to make himself understood in a foreign language environment will eagerly admit this statement to be true. In addition to such anecdotal evidence, experimental evidence also points at the pivotal contribution of vocabulary to effective foreign language use, such as the finding that the size of the foreign vocabulary is a good predictor of success of reading comprehension in the language involved
(e.g., Laufer, 1992, 1997; Nation, 1993). Furthermore, from a wealth of studies on monolingual language comprehension and production it is well known that sentence-building processes start off with information retrieved from word representations in memory, suggesting the central role of vocabulary in language processing in general.
