Potential Problems of Isolated Word Instructions to Juvenile English Learners in the Beginner Period

It has been suggested in a lot of studies that words should be taught using strings of words. In Korea at least, however, the word-in-chunk instruction seems to have been regarded just as a suggestion or an option, not as what should be done; isolated word instructions are still commonly found. This paper discusses serious problems with isolated word instructions to beginner-level English learners. Discussions are made in terms of three aspects that have been rarely stated explicitly in the previous studies on vocabulary instruction using chunks: (1) the capacity of the short-term memory restricts language processing, hence fluency development eventually (2) isolated words characteristically give little information about how to construct sentences, (3) Korean and English differs very much from each other in the way to assemble chunks or phrases in a sentence, and therefore learners should develop the sense of phrase order from the outset.