AbstractWhile there has been broad consensus in L2 research regarding the importance
of learning L2 vocabulary, and that high-frequency vocabulary should be
the primary focus of that learning at the outset of L2 development, both priorities
are strikingly absent from current L2 textbooks on the market. This is
true both in terms of the vocabulary items presented (which bear astonishingly
little resemblance to the ranked frequency lists now available), and the ways
that the textbooks provide (or fail to provide) focused study and systematic
review of vocabulary in general. This chapter describes a collaborative project
that was designed to address this problem. It narrates the development of a lexically
focused curriculum for Beginning German at the college and university
level that bases its core (i.e., active) vocabulary on a recently published frequency
list of German (Jones & Tschirner, 2006) and describes how the presentation
and review mechanisms were designed to reflect recent research on vocabulary
acquisition and retention. The intention is not to argue that this particular curriculum
should serve as a model, but rather to provide a window into the process
of integrating research and instructional praxis in a relatively neglected domain
of foreign language curriculum development.
Works published here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.