Vocabulary Deficiency - Tutor Hunt Blog

Vocabulary Deficiency Vocabulary Deficiency Vocabulary DeficiencySchoolsStudents afflicted by a `Vocabulary deficiency` say UK teachers A report commissioned by the Oxford University Press has found that many schoolchildren possess a severely deficient vocabulary. These findings have been confirmed by teachers in both primary and secondary schools, who report that many pupils are afflicted with a `vocabulary deficiency.` The report questioned 1300 primary and secondary teachers across the UK, and found that more than 60% had noticed a substandard vocabulary in pupils of varied ages. The teachers were concerned that this linguistic deficit will restrict their overall education and social skills, and will impact their self-esteem, and even fuel negative behaviour. At secondary schools the vocabulary deficiency was `stubbornly high,` according to the report - with teachers saying that they were unfortunately lacking both the time and resources to adequately deal with the problem. While there are an abundance of studies concerning the importance of language stimulation in young children - especially those under 3 years of age - there is a relative paucity of research regarding the significance language development for adolescents. The report made this point: `This is significant because while language development is a key focus in early years education, relatively little research has been conducted into language deficit as children progress through secondary education.` Many teachers have pointed out that a poor vocabulary has a negative impact across a broad range of subjects; not just in English, but also geography and history, where pupils will be required to read large amounts of literature. It is certainly possible that a student with a poor vocabulary might struggle with exams, not through lack of knowledge, but by being unable to fully comprehend the questions being asked of them. I have always considered a wide vocabulary to be of paramount importance - a well populated lexicon can lead to wider ranging, more nuanced thoughts. George Orwell was well aware of this when he wrote his despotic masterpiece 1984, which has a totalitarian government systematically thinning out the dictionaries every year, reducing words from circulation, with the intention to reduce the range of thought (and thereby sedition) amongst the population. The famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that an individual`s thoughts and actions are both constrained and facilitated by the language (or languages) that individual is able to speak. Without a complex language with a substantial vocabulary, there are thoughts that an individual simply cannot have. An example of this would be the language of the Aborigines, which contains a multitude of geocentric navigational terms, themselves concerning such things as the position of certain stars in the sky. This feature of their language enables them to navigate, and think, in an extremely precise and efficient way, and thereby traverse the plains of central Australia. Our language has ego centric navigational terms: left and right, and is ill suited for complex navigational reasoning. A more prosaic example might be to imagine two people engaged in a civilised debate - one possesses a rich and abundant vocabulary, while the other`s is meagre by comparison. The speaker with the larger vocabulary will certainly be able deliver their points with greater clarity, while deconstructing their opponent`s with more incisive counterarguments and barbed wit. It seems perhaps too easy to place the blame of a shrinking adolescent vocabulary to the ubiquity of smartphones. These devices (useful though they may be) are a pet hate of mine - and knowing what counts for messages these days - the skeletal, laconic nature of `text speak` with its lol`s and lmao`s - I find it hard to believe that that this new technology is not having a negative impact on students` literacy. Reading habits must of course be mentioned here - the current generation, in my opinion, does not spend as much time reading for pleasure as did previous generations. The classics are rarely taught in schools anymore, being considered too long, too dated, and too difficult. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon I`ll just mention that television, movies, and other mainstream media forms, in my opinion, have also contributed to the decline of literacy. Kate Nation, professor of experimental psychology at Oxford university, has cautioned anyone positing a single cause to the complex issue of differing language abilities amongst children: `Regardless of the causes, low levels of vocabulary set limits on literacy, understanding, learning the curriculum and can create a downward spiral of poor language which begins to affect all aspects of life.` The problem is certainly a serious one, and it doesn`t just have academic implications - more than 80% of teachers questioned in the report said that those children possessing a deficient vocabulary were very likely to suffer from lower self-esteem. So much to do with linguistic ability seems to be correlated to those early years in life - the so called `critical window`, which closes off at about the age of 6. Children below this age can pick up new languages simply by hearing them spoken by those around the home. How this happens is a complete mystery, despite extensive work by Noam Chomsky, and other leading linguists. After a certain age though, it is incredibly difficult to acquire a foreign tongue - something every adult who has struggled to lean another language knows. The same may very well be true of vocabulary - If you don`t acquire a broad range of synonyms (and antonyms) by a certain age, it may be incredibly difficult to do so later on. 22 months ago0Add a Comment