| Vocabulary Studies |

BEd(EL) & BA/BEd

ENG1245: Vocabulary Studies

Sample Final Examination

Name: ____________ Participant number: ____________

Instructions: This examination is in three parts.

l Part A and Part B: Answer ALL questions in these two parts on this question paper.

l Part C: Answer the compulsory question (Question I), and choose EITHER ONE of the questions in Question II to answer. Answer the questions on the answer book provided.

The time allowed for the whole examination is 120minutes.

Part A (25 marks)

Question 1: (10 marks)

Although a language makes use of a large number of words, not all of these words are equally useful. One measure of usefulness is word frequency, that is, how often the word occurs in normal use of the language. From the point of view of frequency, the word the is a very useful word in English. It occurs so frequently that about 7 per cent of the words on a page of written English and the same proportion of the words in a conversation are repetitions of the word the. Look back over this paragraph and you will find an occurrence of the in almost every line.

Use examples from the above paragraph to show that you understand the following terms/concepts, and justify your examples:

1. Synonymy

2. Hyponymy

3. Word family

4. Word classes

5. Derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes.

Question 2 From Text 1 below on this page, find appropriate examples and justify your examples. (5 marks)

	Examples	Justification
Three words with inflectional morphemes
Words of hyponymy
Co-hyponyms
Words of collocation
A compound word with an inflectional morpheme

Text 1:

Source: Wilson, A., & Clarke, K. (2005a). Primary Longman Express 2A. Hong Kong: Pearson Education Asia Limited.

Question 3 (5 marks) Use terms from the list below to describe the main word formation processes involved in the new words or senses listed below. Note that some of the terms may not be used.

coinage borrowing compounding blending clipping

backformation conversion acronym alphabetism derivation

multiple processes

	New word	Meaning	Process(es)
1.	Pinyin	The standard system of Romanized spelling for transliterating the Chinese language based on the pronunciation of the Peking (now Beijing) dialect of Mandarin Chinese.
2	emoticon	A symbol, usually found in e-mail messages, made up of punctuation marks that resemble a human expression.
3	thumbnail	Reduced-size versions of pictures, used to make it easier to scan and recognize them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words.
4	scuba	Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
5	flower	To develop completely and become obvious, e.g., Her talent flowered during her later years.

Question 4 (5 marks) Use terms related to lexical semantics to fill in the blanks in the statements below.

1. ____________ is a lexical relation where one form (written or spoken) has two or more unrelated meanings. Words of this type are called ____________. For example, race (contest of speed) and race (ethnic group).

2. ____________ is a lexical relation where one form (written or spoken) has multiple meanings that are all related by extension. An example is the word run (person does, water does, colors do).

3. Two words are ____________ if they occur together with more than chance frequency, such that, when we see one, we can make a fairly safe bet that the other is in the neighbourhood.

4. The concept of a ____________ is usually interpreted as the ‘clearest example’ or the ‘exemplar’ of certain words.

5. wide and narrow are ____________ antonyms while married and single are ____________ antonyms.

Part B Short questions (5 marks)

1. Identify the most appropriate label in lexical semantics to describe the underlined expressions below. The first one has been given as an example. (2 marks)

	appropriate label
Example: The world is a stage.	metaphor
1) Less is more. (Advertisement for FANCL products)
2) Good coffee is like friendship: rich and warm and strong.

2. What is the difference between loan translations and transliterations as far as lexical borrowing is concerned? (3 marks)

_________________________________________________________________________

Part C Short essay questions (20 marks)

I. Write a short essay of about 150-200 words, based on the following instructions and the text. (10 marks)

‘The King’s Wishes’ is a text from ‘My Pals are Here! English for Hong Kong, 4 A’. Imagine that you are using the text with a primary 4 class with an average English proficiency. Please select and justify what words you are going to teach, and how you are going to teach them, with reference to vocabulary learning strategies and teaching principles and the Hong Kong primary school context.

II. Choose EITHER ONE of the following questions and then write a short essay of about 150-200 words. (10 marks)

1. The module ‘Lexis, Morphology and Semantics’ covers vocabulary knowledge, morphology, semantics and vocabulary learning, teaching and assessment. To what extent is the module relevant to your English learning and/or teaching in the Hong Kong context?

2. There is not a right or the best way to teach vocabulary, because the best practice in any situation will depend on the type of student, the words that are targeted, the school system and curriculum, and many other factors. To what extent do you agree or disagree to the statement as far as the Hong Kong context is concerned?

~ End of paper ~

There are two assessment tasks for this module. One of these tasks will be completed in the middle of the module, in order to give your tutor the chance to give feedback on your work before the final test.

· A small-scale investigative project based on the topics covered in Lectures 1-4. 50% (to be submitted in tutorial sessions, 16-20 October)

· An in-class test covering key concepts introduced in Lectures 5-10. 50% (11 December).

There are two options for this project. You should choose only one option. In order to complete the project well, you should not begin writing until you have finished the tutorial for Lecture 4. For both options, you should report any results that you have using tables and write 500-600 words of commentary.

Option 1. Use Paul Nation’s Vocabulary Levels Tests (online or paper versions), to estimate your own vocabulary size and the vocabulary size of some of your friends or relatives. Report your results and comment on them. Your project is likely to more interesting if your subjects are of different ages and/or education levels.

Option 2. Use Paul Nation’s Vocabulary Profiler software to produce lexical frequency profiles of several texts. Report your results and comment on them. Your project is likely to be more interesting if you use texts of different types, which are likely to be read by English language learners.

The final test will be based on material from Lectures 5-10. Questions will be in a similar format to those used in tutorial activities. The sample test paper contains examples of the kinds of questions that will be included. Do not expect the actual examination to include exactly the same question types or the same questions.
　

In order to address the above issues, it may pay to start at the beginning, and to attempt to define what exactly a word is. Here is a sentence that, at first glance, consists of twenty of them:

I like looking for bits and pieces like old second-hand record players and doing them up to look like new.

Of course, there are not twenty different words in that sentence. At least two of those twenty words are repeated: and is repeated once, like three times: I like looking for bits and pieces like ... look like new. On the other hand, the first like is a verb, and the other two are prepositions - so is this really a case of the same word being repeated? And then there’s looking and look: are these two different words? Or two different forms of the same word? Then there’s second-hand: two words joined to make one…. It gets worse. What about bits and pieces? Isn’t this a self-contained unit? After all, we don’t say pieces and bits…. And looking for: my dictionary has an entry for look, another for look for and another for look after. Three different meanings - three different words?

Please help to sort out some of these problems by filling in the blanks with appropriate linguistic terms!

4. Like, second-hand, bits and pieces and look for are four different _____________.

5. Second-hand, bits and pieces and look for are called _____________________, because they each contain more than one word.

6. Second-hand is a _____________ , look for is a _____________ , and bits and pieces is a _____________. (Use three different terms!)

7. Look and looking are different _____________ within the same _____________, which also includes looked.

Analyse the words given following the example below. Note that in Row 3 you should give the meaning or function of the morpheme as appropriate. Note also that the number of column you use will depend on the number of morphemes in the word.

Use terms from the list below to describe the main word-formation processes involved in the new words listed below. Note that some of the terms may be used more than once and some may not be used at all.

coinage, compounding; clipping; derivation; conversion; borrowing; blending; acronym

Use terms related to semantics to fill in the blanks in the statements below

1. Words with several senses, such as fair and foot are called ____________ words.

2. The process that leads from the literal sense of heart (=a part of the body) to the sense in the heart of the city (=the centre of something) is called ____________ .

3. The process that leads from store (=a large collection of things) to store (=a place for keeping things) and then store (=shop) is called ____________ .

Write a paragraph commenting on the processes of lexical change involved in the words related to man discussed in the passage below. Your comments may include related words that are not mentioned in the passage.

Farewell metrosexuals, with your gelled hair, moisturised skin and impeccable clothing. Hello real men: macho, carnivorous, hanging- out-with-your-mates, beer-swilling, sexist. It's the menaissance. It's the backlash. American newspapers, quick to spot a trendette, have pounced on a series of recent US television advertisements that pander to one's inner caveman, and on books like The Alphabet of Manliness by George Ouzounian (alias Maddox), I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max, and Real Men Don't Apologize by Jim Belushi.

In various ways, all preach a return to a pre-modernist old-style masculinity. Another term for the unreconstructed (or reconstituted) male that pops up in some articles is "retrosexual". Thoughtful commentators point to the male sex's struggle to adjust to a world of sexual equality as the main driver for the backlash. Professor Harvey Mansfield's recent book Manliness argues that men need to recapture some virtues of manliness - such as decisiveness and assertiveness - and not be afraid to display them.

Write a paragraph analyzing the semantic and word-formation processes involved in the OALD dictionary entry below.