The Future of Education

Language teaching curricula are normally designed following a sequential, staircase-like gradual approach where linguistic contents are introduced progressively, hierarchically sequenced, and reduced to a limited range of exercises and activities (Zamel, 1987: 700). This approach nonetheless presents a major drawback for it presupposes that linguistic encoding and successful retrieving are a sequential, staircase-like gradual process, blatantly denying the structural randomness of language acquisition (Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann, 1981). Words are neither stored nor accessed through a ladder of difficulty established by evaluation companies, and even though there seems to be a well outlined set of criteria to guide this sequential approach in word selection —i.e. semantic coverage, frequency of use, and pertinence to the field (Bartol Hernández, 2010, Rodríguez Muñoz y Muñoz Hernández, 2009)— curriculum designers end up making decisions from the external and general usage derived from linguistic corpora. This study explores an alternative way to make lexical decisions by focusing on the amount of lexical innovation (non repeated words) during semi spontaneous word production in order to propose a learner-centred curriculum. For this research native adult non-impaired Spanish speakers (n = 8) were asked the same question 8 times with an interval of one day each. Participants were also given specific instructions to avoid conscious verbal monitoring to evade or emphasise word repetition. Their responses were not time controlled, and condition, as well as topic, were independent variables. Quantitative word analysis reveals all subjects have recourse to an increased percentage (< 71 %) of lexical recycling (vocabulary repetition), idiomatic and phraseology recurrence, as well as a limited percentage (> 29%) of lexical innovation. These findings are of interest to foreign language acquisition research, lexical availability, and curricula design because they suggest that thematic-bound unities of thought elicited in word production are stable and comprise a major portion of all verbal content. These results may call into question the pertinence and efficacy of traditional syllabi focusing on general vocabulary from language corpora which neglect the role of learners’ lexical recycling. Special consideration will be given to the feasibility of implementing this proposal in course design; likewise useful recommendations will be addressed to practitioners interested in developing strategies harnessing lexical recycling.