ABSTRACT
Throughout this book we claim that vocabulary study has been neglected by linguists, applied linguists and language teachers. We believe that we are justified in claiming this. Although interest has grown quite rapidly during the 1980s, there is certainly not much evidence of interest in vocabulary in the last twenty-five years taken as a whole, and relative to investigation at other linguistic levels. This opening chapter gives us an opportunity for qualifying this claim, or, at least, placing it in some kind of historical perspective. For taken over the last sixty years, the picture is rather different, because the 1930s witnessed the beginnings of what has come to be called the ‘vocabulary control movement’. There are a number of strands and offshoots to this movement both in Great Britain and in the United States, but we shall focus here on two particular developments: the work on Basic English of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards; and the work on definition vocabulary which led to the production by Michael West of A General Service List. A number of issues raised in this book, and a number of articles in Chapter 4, can be examined in relation to the aims and goals of these earlier pedagogically-inspired efforts at vocabulary control.
