Word Knowledge and Vocabulary Instruction

1 David Perry, School of Technical Industrial Engineering, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. [email protected] 2 Penny MacDonald, School of Technical Agricultural Engineering, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. [email protected] Abstract—This paper first considers some of the practical and theoretical issues involved when teaching or learning vocabulary items in an ESP course, and discusses (briefly) the notion of what it means to know a word. Following that, it reports on the results of an experiment designed to test the usefulness of a slightly modified version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale developed by Paribakht and Wesche and how this has given us insights into our students’ knowledge of certain vocabulary items and their learning processes. Finally, it suggests a number of factors to bear in mind when teaching vocabulary. Although the L1 of the subjects involved in this research was Spanish and the target language English, we believe the general findings reported in this paper are applicable to speakers of other L1s learning other languages.