Laufer's Lecture

I took part in the distinguished lecture by Dr. Batia Laufer about second language vocabulary acquisition. She speaks really fluent and energetic English as her second language. Since i am now taking Prof.Nation's class, what he taught is smoothly into my brain, maybe Nation's lecture works as a sort of backgroud knowledge.

Thinking about vocabulary is interesting, because students and teachers think it important to learn/teach, but how to measure the depth,strength,and size of a learner's lexical knowledge and lexical competance is hard! For example, she emphasize on the distingction of form/meaning,recall(retreival)/recognition, and receptive vocab/productive vocab. Each way to test a learner's vocab puts some focus on something among these demention. For instance, Nation's Vocabulary Level Test measures a leanrer's meaning/recognition/passive vocab, and Nation and Laufer(1995)'s Vocab level test(Productive test) measures her/his form/recall(retreival)/productive vocab.

Examining a variety of test form is crucial to think what aspect of a learner's vocab we intend to assess like Ms.Morimoto's research.