Paul Nation

Paul Nation is a leading language teaching methodology and vocabulary acquisition linguist researcher, mainly for English as a Foreign Language. He has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland, and Japan. He is a professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand [1]. Key concepts of his works are frequency vocabulary lists as guidelines to vocabulary acquisition, the learning burden of a word, the need to teach learning strategies to students in order to increase their autonomy in vocabulary expansion for low frequency items, support to extensive reading of accessible texts (≥95-98% of known words), the usefulness of L2→L1 tools (dictionaries, word cards) for their clarity. After the communicative approach of the 80's, his works have been instrumental for second language courses design and current teaching methods, relying mainly on a quick vocabulary acquisition of frequent words.[2] Together with Batia Laufer, James Coady, Norbert Schmitt, Paul Meara, Rebecca Oxford, Michael Swan, his position is linked to Stephen Krashen's Natural approach (emphasis on frequent grammatical and lexical items first) and to the proposed Lexical approach (emphasis on vocabulary) of language teaching.[3]

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References

  1. ^ Victory University. School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. Staff Directory. [1]
  2. ^ (Horst 2010, pp. 161)
  3. ^ (Coady 1997, pp. 1–17)

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