A rich view of lexical competence

Abstract

In this article I begin by examining some features of the negotiation of meaning between learners and teachers, where the goal of the interaction is to convey the meaning of a technical word from the teacher to a learner. I suggest that this examination leads us to distinguish between the declarative knowledge that' words have particular meanings, and the procedures we typically employ for realizing or 'achieving' this declarative knowledge. These procedures form part of our 'procedural' knowledge of 'how' to negotiate. A communicative view of the interactive nature of lexical negotiation requires that we focus as much on procedures as we do on the more narrowly defined declarative meanings which specialist words have. I then argue that this requires us to take a 'richer' view of what is involved in lexical competence than that which many vocabulary learning materials seem to be based on. My own proposal is to adopt Canale and Swain's (1980) checklist of the dimensions of communicative competence, and I present exercise types which exemplify how these dimensions could be covered lexically.