Learning vocabulary in the primary languages classroom: What corpus analysis can tell us

The national curriculum for primary schools in England now includes foreign language learning for children aged 7–11. However, organised instructional time is very limited, and must be used as effectively as possible, taking account of children’s characteristics as learners to develop and consolidate their target language knowledge. This chapter draws on evidence from the ESRC-funded study “Learning French from Ages 5, 7 and 11”, (Myles et al. 2012, Myles 2017) regarding the development of vocabulary knowledge by early learners over a year’s instruction in French. Data include video recordings and transcriptions of all lessons, as well as receptive vocabulary tests sampling systematically the vocabulary actually taught. We examine the influence on vocabulary development of factors including word frequency and word functions in classroom talk, the status of lexical items as cognates/ non-cognates, the provision of multimodal support for new vocabulary, activity types in which new words were encountered and practised, and the relationship between spoken and written input. We further examine briefly how far variation in vocabulary learning is due to individual learner characteristics. We draw tentative conclusions regarding the rate of progress in vocabulary learning which can be expected in a constrained classroom context, and highlight the factors which seem to promote development most consistently