Vocabulary for communication : a guide to improve vocabulary

By Parvathi Nagasundaram

Reviewed by Dinali Fernando

Parvathi Nagasundaram recently launched what is perhaps the first ever locally produced book on teaching and learning vocabulary in English, Vocabulary for Communication. Former Head, Department of English, University of Sri Jayawardenepura, and one of the most respected English language teaching (ELT) experts in the country, Ms Nagasundaram, or Paru as she is known to her friends, has previously published two books on teaching and learning grammar. They flew off the shelves almost as soon as they were printed, and I have no doubt this book too will be equally popular.

Vocabulary is often considered the most essential skill when learning a language. But in our country, we are quite obsessed with learning grammar and ‘spoken English’ with little focus on developing vocabulary. This reflects trends in ELT in general. Often considered ‘incidental learning’, or learning on the go without much explicit focus on it, we assume that students acquire vocabulary through reading and listening. If at all, a teacher would provide a translation in Tamil or Sinhala, or students would depend on bilingual dictionaries.

This approach to learning is probably why most Sri Lankans have a fairly good passive vocabulary, ie we know and recognize many words, but we often have little training in actually using these words appropriately and productively in context. Paru’s book is an admirable attempt to address this gap by venturing into this relatively uncharted territory of local ELT resources.

One of the key strengths of this book is its ambitious scope that covers so many aspects of learning vocabulary, from word recognition to spelling, pronunciation, word formation processes, lexical categories, contextual meaning, and dictionary skills. All this is explained with the clarity and conciseness that Paru excels in. These areas of vocabulary are also accompanied by literally hundreds of exercises which makes the book a self-learning tool as well as a teaching resource.

The book progresses steadily from the form, function, and semantics of single words to multiple word units like phrasal verbs, binomials, idioms and proverbs. This reflects Paru’s expertise in vocabulary –it is not only vast but also contemporary, as she is guided by a theoretical understanding of words as meaning carrying units rather than single lexical items. Of special interest to me personally was the section on binomials, which I am ashamed to say I have never heard of before.

A special type of two-word idioms joined by a function word, binomials are lexical chunks like short and sweet, slowly but surely, and prim and proper, and bit by bit, that so frequently pepper the everyday speech of proficient speakers.

This brings me to another point, the book’s engagement with informal spoken and the formal written styles. All too often, very little information is given to the learner on this distinction. Much of the vocabulary in English is thankfully not as restricted in register as Tamil and Sinhala. But as learners progress, the need to distinguish between the formal and the informal becomes more and more important. So even though the book deals so comprehensively with form and meaning, Paru does not neglect appropriateness and pragmatic functions of words.

The most interesting sections for me are the ones that go beyond the single word, not just binomials, but also idioms and proverbs. Sometimes these are denigrated as hackneyed and clichétic. Especially South Asian speakers used to be ridiculed for ornamental and excessive turns of phrase like “May a thousand fragrant flowers bloom on your path to success”.

But many others are less excessive and are widely used in everyday speech and writing. These lexical chunks are a crucial part of meaning making in interaction. It’s Paru’s awareness of this distinction, coming from her nuanced understanding of vocabulary and our students’ needs, that makes her focus on the everyday and not on the excessive.

Contemporary ELT approaches now acknowledge the multilingualism in our teaching and learning contexts, encouraging teachers to draw from students’ own languages, departing from a largely monolingualist approaches that traditionally criminalized the appearance of other languages in the ELT classroom.

While the book does not overtly incorporate other languages in teaching vocabulary, the inclusion of multilingual proverbs can be considered Paru’s nod to multilingualism and intercultural communication in ELT. These proverbs, drawn from several languages, are an opportunity to springboard creative and critically engaging discussions in the classroom for the language teacher.

In a context where so much attention in language learning is paid to grammar, this book helps us to shift the focus to vocabulary, very much in line with the rather innovative teaching methodology called the lexical approach introduced by Michael Lewis in the early 1990s. So this is not just a book on vocabulary that merely assists language learning, it actually takes a lexical approach to language development. All too often we are used to thinking of the challenges of language learning as largely grammatical. Our teachers have been conditioned to spot grammar errors over lexical anomalies.

Even me — I don’t consider myself a grammarian, but when I saw an example of a vocabulary error, “Students are fear to speak English”, in page 102, my immediate reaction was that this is a purely grammatical error, not a lexical issue, so conditioned are we to seeing language through a grammar lens. Paru incorporates some of the core tenets of the lexical approach in her book, offering us grammar-obsessed Sri Lankan learners a novel way of looking at language development. This book will be of immense use to language learners and teachers in the country.

(Dinali Fernando is senior lecturer, Department of English, University of Kelaniya)