This volume is an anthology of papers originally presented at a conference convened in response to the influential report by the National Reading Panel in the United States in 2000, which highlighted the need for renewed research into vocabulary teaching and learning in American schools as one key component of a national strategy to boost literacy levels. The authors of the 12 chapters are some of the relatively small group of researchers who continued to undertake research on vocabulary during the past 20 years, when it has been strictly a minority activity within the first language (L1) reading research community in North America.
By contrast, the same two decades have seen second language (L2) vocabulary research emerge as a flourishing area of study within applied linguistics. It is surprising, then, to find how little reference is made to the L2 literature in this volume, with the exception of the chapter by Scott, which cites the work of Nation, Laufer, and others in a review of research on word learning through text. The fact is that the two groups of researchers share a common set of working principles. In his chapter, Nagy sets out the three main components of a good vocabulary teaching program: intensive study of individual words, exposure to rich oral and written language input, and the development of knowledge about vocabulary that can be transferred generatively to the learning of new words. He also emphasizes that vocabulary teaching needs to be sustained over an extended period of time if it is to be effective. These ideas are very much in accord with the thinking of L2 vocabulary specialists.
On the other hand, one obvious distinction between the L1 and L2 research is in the educational contexts in which they are conducted. Like SLA research in general, studies of L2 vocabulary acquisition typically involve college students and other adult learners. Hoever, in this volume, the focus is very much on elementary education or, more broadly, the years from preschool through eighth grade. In the elementary grades, a fundamental concern is whether children gain an adequate knowledge of written vocabulary as the basis not only for literacy but also for achievement across the curriculum. Several chapters in the volume address the issue of bridging the gap between children from poor backgrounds and children from advantaged social backgrounds.
Some of the most interesting work on this issue is found in the chapter by Biemiller. He argues that what really counts in vocabulary development is knowing the meaning of an adequate number of root words, measured by performance on an oral definition task. Corpus-based figures for word frequency are combined with vocabulary knowledge scores to produce evidence that words are acquired by children in a relatively fixed order—although at varying rates—through the elementary school years. The challenge for teachers in the early grades is to reduce the wide variation in English vocabulary knowledge—the result of various social background factors—among children when they enter school.
A related kind of gap in vocabulary knowledge exists between native speakers and English language learners. The particular needs of the latter group of students are recognized in two chapters, by Calderón et al. and Carlo et al., that review a small number of experimental studies that involve Spanish-English bilingual students. Here again, there is an acknowledgment that there is no quick-fix solution to the students' limited breadth and depth of English vocabulary once they need to make the transition to English-medium instruction. These studies involve some innovative approaches to exploiting the students' lexical knowledge in Spanish as the basis for expanding their English vocabulary.
Other chapters focus on particular aspects of L1 vocabulary learning and teaching, such as the importance of reading aloud to young children and encouraging older students to read extensively (Cunningham), how to enhance the vocabulary of preschool children from poor families (Schwanenflugel et al.), how to develop word-learning strategies among students in the middle grades (Baumann et al.), and how to choose words from reading texts for explicit instruction (Beck et al.).
For many years, an earlier volume edited by McKeown and Curtis (1987) served as an authoritative source of information on L1 vocabulary research. This new volume is in many ways a suitable successor to it as a stimulating account of current work. However, it would be nice to see more evidence of cross-fertilization of ideas between L1 and L2 researchers.
