ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#106 | December 5 | ISSN 0975-3036

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source: teachingenglish.org.uk

This article discusses how much attention language teachers should pay to vocabulary acquisition research, particularly with regard to repeated encounters with lexical items.

Introduction

Sometime in the middle of the last century, Benjamin Whorf, famous for his contention that language shapes thought, made a controversial statement about the Eskimo language having seven words for snow. Frequently quoted or, rather misquoted overtime, Whorf’s number of snow words was inflated to nine, twenty, fifty, and even one hundred. A similar snowball effect seems to be taking place with the contentious issue of how many exposures a vocabulary item needs for its retention. (more…)