Which grammatical categories are most relevant for advanced learners' vocabulary

For advanced learners of a second language, the grammatical categories most relevant for vocabulary development include primarily nouns and verbs, but also significant attention to other parts of speech such as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and function words.

Key points from research and expert insights are:

• Nouns and Verbs: These are central grammatical categories for conceptual and lexical representation. Advanced learners tend to process verbs as more semantically related and relevant than nouns, indicating their importance in vocabulary acquisition and lexical knowledge at advanced levels. ²

• Function Words and Prepositions: Advanced learners’ mastery of prepositional phrases and the syntactic roles they play is crucial but often partial. Research on advanced Chinese learners of English shows they may partially represent complex phrase structures such as noun phrase-internal prepositional phrases, affecting their grammatical accuracy and nuance. ⁸

• Grammatical Accuracy and Error Awareness: Among advanced learners, studies find that most fossilized errors concern grammatical categories. Awareness of these grammatical structures and errors is essential to refine advanced vocabulary use and communicative competence. ⁹

• Morphosyntactic Categories: Advanced vocabulary learning involves an understanding of morphosyntactic grammatical categories, which constrain how words fit into grammatical patterns and express aspects like tense or voice, essential for forming sophisticated vocabulary and expressions. ¹³

• Expanded Lexical Knowledge: Advanced learners benefit from exercises targeting lexical expansions across registers and genres, including literary and academic English, where grammatical categories like modality, tense, aspect, and voice play significant roles in vocabulary use. ^{5, 14}

• Practical Vocabulary Choice: Vocabulary selection for advanced learners also tends to focus on words that operate within complex grammatical structures, indicating that vocabulary learning is closely linked with understanding and using advanced grammar patterns. ¹⁸

In sum, advanced learners’ vocabulary development hinges on nouns and verbs as core content words, while also requiring mastery of function words, prepositions, and morphosyntactic grammatical categories that enable nuanced and accurate language use at higher proficiency levels. Lexical expansion at advanced stages necessarily involves integration with complex grammatical patterns and structural knowledge.

This integration supports communicative competence especially in formal, academic, or sophisticated contexts.

References:

• Lee (2013) on lexical representation emphasizing nouns and verbs ²
• Research on prepositional phrase processing by advanced learners ⁸
• Fossilization and grammatical error awareness in advanced learners ⁹
• Morphosyntactic grammatical categories in vocabulary learning ¹³
• Classroom and corpus-based vocabulary exercises for advanced learners ^{14, 5, 18}

References

• La naturaleza gramatical del léxico disponible en diferentes niveles lingüísticos en español como lengua extranjera

• Grammatical category and L2 lexical representation

• THE ROUTLEDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Peter Robinson (Ed.) . New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 756.

• Grammatical Categories in Linguistic Resources vs. English Course-books for Advanced Learners

• Classroom Diversions: Exercises, Games and Writing Tips for Advanced English Language Learners

• Using Technologised Computational Corpus-Driven Linguistics Study on the Vocabulary Uses Among Advanced Malaysian Upper Primary School English as a Second Language Learners (ESL) in Northern Region

• The impact of sociocultural theory-informed instruction on learners’ IELTS writing: task response, grammar, vocabulary, coherence and cohesion

• Does interlanguage grammar project intermediate categories? Evidence of partial representation from one‐substitution by Chinese learners of English

• Interface between Linguistic Noticing and Fossilization of Grammatical, Lexical, and Cohesive Features among Advanced EFL Learners

• Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension Ability of an Intermediate and an Advanced Class of Learners of Japanese: Focusing on Vocabulary Knowledge, Grammatical Knowledge, Problem Solving Ability, and Capacity of Working Memory

• A1–B2 vocabulary: insights and issues arising from the English Profile Wordlists project

• From shared contexts to syntactic categories: The role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes

• Usage-based learning of grammatical categories

• Completing the English Vocabulary Profile : C1 and C2 vocabulary

• Revisiting Classification Taxonomy for Grammatical Errors

• Vocabulary: Common or Basic?

• Talking Terms : Choosing and Using Terminology for EFL Classrooms

• The Communicative Approaches Revisited and the Relevance of Teaching Grammar