Vocabulary matrix: understanding, learning, teaching

Abstract

This book leads the reader through the life story of a word. We bring you from the basics of word formation and on through how words have meanings. We look at how words form relationships with other words, how they inter-relate with grammar, how they attract one another and gather in groups (collocations, multi-word units and idioms), how they operate in spoken and written texts, how we learn them, how we teach them and how we use them, change them and recreate them in society. Our discussion is backed up by evidence from a large corpus (a computerised database of hundreds of millions of words of spoken and written English texts which we can search and analyse to see how the language is really used), as well as real data from the classroom.