ABSTRACT
The old proverb ‘what is new is not true and what is true is not new’ is particularly relevant to the history of vocabulary teaching. Linguists, philosophers and pedagogues have been interested in the problems raised by words and the understanding of them for centuries. The philosopher, John Locke, writing in 1690 on ‘Remedies of the Imperfection and Abuse of Words’, urged that concrete words were best described by pictures (‘little draughts and prints’) rather than by paraphrase or definition (Locke 1690/1975, pp. 522–3), which might be seen as a precursor of modern learners’ dictionaries or many present-day teaching materials. The Frenchman François Gouin, frustrated by his earlier failure to learn German vocabulary, in 1880 offered to the world a new system for the learning of vocabulary, that consisted of arranging words into sets corresponding to typical sequences of actions and processes, which strikes the reader as uncannily similar to present-day schema theory (Gouin 1880/1892). Many of us will remember our own school days and how the learning of vocabulary featured large in grammar-translation textbooks for learning foreign languages. In short, linguists and language-practitioners must beware of reinventing the wheel. Much of what is said nowadays on the teaching and learning of vocabulary has been around for a very long time; the history and development of vocabulary teaching is, therefore, not so much one of old insights leading to new; it is more a series of dominating ideologies or fashions that have succeeded one another and which sometimes come full circle. This is not to say there has been no progress; much refinement has taken place over the years and approaches to the teaching of vocabulary have drawn on advances in descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics and, recently, computational linguistics. It is thus possible to see two principal strands emerging over the last forty years or so: the debates that have taken vocabulary in and out of fashion as an aspect of language teaching, and the developments that have nudged forward the methods, techniques and materials of vocabulary teaching. This chapter will trace the debates and developments, firstly in relation to vocabulary teaching in general, and secondly with regard to the developments in lexicography that have led to the creation of learners’ dictionaries, and which are pushing the study of lexis into new territory.
