Kokand state pedagogical institute named after mukimi foreign language and literature

CHAPTER I. THEΟRITICAL PART
l.l. Lexical resources.
Now logically, you might think that your vocabulary is determined by how many words you know. When I was teaching your in China, my students would always tell me, “I know 8,000 words!” It sounds very impressive, but when I replied, “Wow, that’s great. How did you learn them all?” they would look very confused. They couldn’t understand what I was saying!

The problem for them was that they had focused entirely on learning long lists of vocabulary, but they couldn’t put these words together into sentences. If they saw an exercise in a textbook that asked them to produce 5 synonyms of the word “study,” they could do it no problem. They could write the word “health” on a piece of paper and then list 150 words related to health… but they couldn’t answer a simple question like “How are you feeling today?”

This is because in China they were taught that learning English is all about knowing lots of words. In India, however, people seem to believe that your English ability is determined by the obscurity of the words you know. Almost every essay I mark by an Indian student will contain three or four words that they have clearly picked from the middle of a dictionary. These are often words that fell out of use a hundred years ago, and 9 out of 10 times they are incorrectly used.

I want to be clear here: It is not the student’s fault, and I certainly do not intend to pick on China or India. This is a problem with your test teaching. All around the world, teachers, websites, textbooks, and courses perpetuate certain myths about your test, and chief among them are these crazy ideas about vocabulary. If you want proof of this, just take a look at YouTube. There is a video that has – as of recording almost 5 million views – in which a woman tells her followers that they must use 5 particular words to get a good score.

A lot of the problems that I have mentioned come from people misinterpreting the test marking rubrics. For the speaking and writing tests, there are guidelines that examiners must follow when assigning scores. The examiners are extremely well trained, so they know how to interpret the rubric and assign grades fairly and consistently, but most teachers are not able to fully understand what the rubric means, and this is why they spread such terrible advice.

This is quite understandable. When you look at the testmarking rubrics, they are fairly complicated. For someone who does not speak English perfectly or does not have much training in linguistics or related academic fields, it might seem hard to understand. The language used here can be cryptic and certain phrases could be interpreted in different ways.

The difference between a band 6 and a band 7 in the writing test means graduating from “an adequate range of vocabulary for the task” to “a sufficient range of vocabulary to allow some flexibility and precision.” To some people, this may seem like a distinction without a difference. However, to trained examiners and teachers, it is quite clear. At band 6, you have used words that are good enough to cover the topic, but at band 7 you have done so with greater control.

In fact, that’s essentially how the rubric works and how your grade is assigned. Each band score requires a slightly better control of the language than the one preceding it until, finally, at band 9, you have a “very natural and sophisticated” grasp of the language, with only the tiniest of mistakes. These are called “slips” and even native speakers might make them. This might be a typo, for example.

But let’s go back a moment to revisit the big mistakes that I previously discussed. These come from the criteria for band 7 and 8, which refer to “uncommon” and “less common lexical items.” What does this mean, exactly?

Certainly, it appears that the examiners expect you to use some unusual words, which is probably why so many tutors force their students to learn ridiculously obscure words that no native speaker uses anymore. But of course this is a misunderstanding. It simply means going beyond the very basic language required to cover a topic.

Think about it. Let’s say we are given an your writing task 2 essay question that asks us to write about crime. You would be expected to know words like “prison” and “criminal” and “punishment.” However, “less common” vocabulary would show a mastery over these same phrases and correct collocation of them: “prison” could be turned into the lesson common verb form “imprison.” An “uncommon” word related to this is “incarcerate.” You would be expected to know the difference between jail and prison, between suspect, criminal, and ex-convict, for example. You might also use vocabulary like “reform,” “the justice system,” or “behind bars.”

The latter is an example of “idiomatic language,” which is specified in the marking criteria for speaking but not for writing. That is because it is generally quite informal, whereas for the writing test you should only be using formal language. Again, knowledge of this is really important. One mistake that a lot of candidates make is mixing very formal and very informal vocabulary. Again, this is down to teachers and websites handing out bad advice based upon their own misunderstandings. Also, many of them use social media to teach idioms because it is really easy to copy and paste these from other websites, then gain hundreds of thousands of followers.