Using English Words

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • David Corson

   Pages 1-9

3. The Place of Words in Discourse and in Education

   • David Corson

   Pages 11-22

4. A Multidisciplinary Review: Words, Culture, Education, and Society

   • David Corson

   Pages 23-58

5. The Historical Development of the Lexical Bar

   • David Corson

   Pages 59-80

6. Factors Reinforcing the Bar in the Present Day

   • David Corson

   Pages 81-95

7. The Research Studies

   • David Corson

   Pages 97-124

8. Using Words in Educational Performance and for Sociocultural Reproduction

   • David Corson

   Pages 125-150

9. Morphology and the Mental Lexicon

   • David Corson

   Pages 151-169

10. Difficulty in Lexical Access: The Lexical Bar

    • David Corson

    Pages 171-184

11. Changing Practices: Further Research, Equity Matters, and Other Lexical Bars

    • David Corson

    Pages 185-201

12. Back Matter

    Pages 203-226

    PDF

Using English Words examines the impact that the life histories of people have on their vocabulary. Its starting point is the taken-for-granted fact that the vocabulary of English falls into two very different sections. Randolph Quirk mentions this striking incompatibility between the Anglo­ Saxon and the Latinate elements in English: "the familiar homely-sounding and typically very short words" that we learn very early in life and use for most everyday purposes; and "the more learned, foreign-sounding and characteristically rather long words" (1974, p. 138). It is mainly the second type of word that native speakers start learning relatively late in their use of English, usually in the adolescent years of education, and keep on learning. It is mainly the one type of word, rather than the other, that ESL/ EFL students have more difficulty with, depending on their language background. This book shows how discursive relations, outside education, 'position' people through their vocabularies. Some are prepared for easy entry into lifetime prospects of relative privilege and educational success, while others are denied entry. In writing this book, I share an aim with other writers who observe the many discontinuities that exist between discursive practices in communities outside schools, and the discursive demands that schools make (e. g. Hamilton et a1. [19931, Heath [1983], Luke [19941, Philips [1983], Romaine [1984], Scollon & Scollon [1981]).

• English
• native speaker
• philosophy
• psycholinguistics
• psychology

• The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada

  David Corson

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