Learners of English can greatly expand their vocabularies by learning its word-building patterns -- how words are formed by adding an affix (e.g. '-able) to a root (e.g. learn). Thus Sakai's book focuses on the largely overlooked but hugely important derivational affixes of English, as well as some classic word roots.
English word building is generally not taught in Japan. Thus high school and university students have poor knowledge of, for instance, suffixes (Schmitt & Meara, 1997). Moreover, individuals' mastery of affixes varies, and just as supposedly familiar derivations are not universally familiar, the assumed unfamiliar derivations (e.g. recycle) are not always unknown, with the presence or lack of loanword cognates (e.g. risaikuru) likely playing a role (Mochizuki & Aizawa, 2000). As some 12.8 percent of any given text consists of derivations (Nagy & Anderson, 1984), lack of affix knowledge is a serious handicap.
This situation also impacts corpus studies, where a word family means a headword (e.g. win), its inflected forms (e.g. won) and a small number of reasonably regular derivations (winner). While high-frequency English promises great coverage with a limited number of word families (e.g. Nation & Waring, 1997), and nearly half of the 3000 most-frequent word families correspond to loanword cognates in Japanese (Daulton, 2008;
Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-Based Loanwords
), in both cases, unlocking the promised lexical riches requires derivational affixes.
Which is why English Word-formation at Work may be a very useful book. While there are few books published on this subject in Japan, this is actually Sakai's eighth and most extensive offering. Her philosophy is that learners will learn by 'thumbing through' the book. Its large font and intuitive organization do invite random exploration. Even native speakers will be surprised by what they find -- for instance, pandemic and democracy are linked by the common root demos (people), as confide and fidelity are linked by fidere (faith). Word geeks will find the book infinitely fascinating.
English affixes and Japanese kanji perform roughly the same function as word-building blocks of their respective languages. Rather than expecting the Japanese to learn English affixes as native speakers do -- by osmosis -- we should consider having them learn affixes in the way they learned kanji -- by explicit instruction. A reasonable start might be to have students thumb through "English Word-formation at Work."
References
Daulton, F. (2008). Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords. Clevedon & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Mochizuki, M. and Aizawa, K. (2000). An affix acquisition order for EFL learners: an exploratory study. System, 23(1), 291-304.
Nagy, W. E., Anderson, R. C., Schommer, A., and Stallman, A. (1989). “Morphological
families in the internal lexicon.” Reading Research Quarterly 24(3), 263-282.
Nation, P. and Waring, R. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists. In N. Schmitt and M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy (pp. 6-19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, N. and Meara, P. (1997). Researching vocabulary through a word knowledge framework. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 17-36.
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