Survey Findings - further details:

At university level, it was generally assumed that students could expand their vocabulary stocks ‘incidentally’, merely by being exposed to reading and listening materials. Also highlighted was a general perception that the main obstacle to effective writing was the lack of adequate words and expression rather than grammar and content.

Some way to go

However, there is still some way to go as vocabulary remains an under exploited resource. Japanese research findings, based on the experiences of 1000 students in Kyoto and Osaka*, revealed that although their language study programmes recognised the importance of vocabulary study for L2 acquisition, more often than not, the way lexis was tackled involved learning by rote, with no systematic approach or well-defined learning strategies.

*English Vocabulary Recognition and Production: A Preliminary Survey Report, K.I. Shihara., T.Okada ,S. Matsui. 1997.

Equal Footing

Vocabulary, at long last, saw its importance placed on an equal footing with both grammar and phonology. The inception of COBUILD* in 1980 testified to this newfound status.


* i.e. Collins Birmingham University International Language Database – a project set up in 1980 that saw the creation of the world’s first electronically stored corpus of modern English (built up from authentic sources: books, magazines, newspapers, transcribed natural speech, etc.) and designed as a reference for language learners, teachers and linguists. The content is descriptive, not prescriptive and is a record of how the language is actually used, in all its richness. Both the research findings and the dictionaries that have emerged from the project have shed a great deal of light on such things as the relative frequency of different uses of language item; and not only have they caused a reappraisal of how vocabulary is tackled in teaching materials, but they have proved to be an invaluable resource for both teachers and language learners. The current corpus, known as Bank of English, runs to tens of millions of words.

The study of vocabulary gains momentum

A more practical approach to the development of receptive and productive skills emerged, with the study of vocabulary seen as integral to nurturing these - endorsing Wilkins’ dictum that ‘without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed’.


*2 D.A. Wilkins, Linguistics in Language Teaching – Edward Arnold, 1972.

Behaviourism's loosening Grip

This was due to innovations in classroom practice whose influences were no longer in thrall to the behaviourist doctrine that had previously held sway. Teachers now became concerned with promoting greater student mental engagement with the language, focusing on student needs and individual learning strategies, encouraging greater learner autonomy and self-reliance.

Vocabulary vs Grammar

It was some considerable time before vocabulary managed to establish itself as an area of language study in its own right. A succession of past methodologies ranging from the Grammar Translation Method of the 1920s-30s, the situational and structurally based Audio Lingual Method (1940s-50s) through to approaches arising from the functional and notional syllabuses(1), in vogue in the 70s, viewed the study of lexis from a narrow perspective, very much as a subordinate discipline to that of grammar. It was not until the mid 1980s that these constraints were swept aside.

Name check:

Credit for innovation must also go to the Cutting Edge series (S.Cunnigham/P.Moor, Pearson Education/Longman) which has a strong lexical strand running through it.