Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Lexical properties
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Collocations. We know many more or less set expressions in which the word
‘man’ conventionally goes with other words, such as ‘my good man’, ‘man in
the street’, ‘man to man’, ‘Man of God’, ‘to separate the men from the boys’, ‘my
man Jeeves’, and many others.
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Appropriateness. ‘my man’ may be used as a form of address ‘Hi my man’. The
prime minister might be surprised at being greeted with ‘Hi my man’, a pop star
might not. We have to know when and to whom it is appropriate to use a word.
Meaning
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General meanings. We know general properties about the meaning of ‘man’, such
as ‘male’, ‘adult’, ‘human being’, ‘concrete’, ‘animate’. These aspects of meaning,
called ‘semantic features’ or ‘components of meaning’, are shared with many
other words in the language.
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Specific meanings. We know a range of specific senses for ‘man’. The OED has 17
main entries for ‘man’ as a noun, ranging from ‘A human being (irrespective of
sex or age)’ to ‘One of the pieces used in chess’.
Acquiring a word is not just linking a form with a translated meaning ‘man
l’uomo, il signore’, as in the Ci Siamo wordlist. It is acquiring a complex range of
information about its spoken and written form, the ways it is used in grammatical
structures and word combinations, and diverse aspects of meaning. Knowing that
‘man’ equals ‘l’uomo’ is only one small part of the total knowledge necessary for
using it. Of course, nobody completely knows every aspect of a word. I may know
how to read something but not how to say it; for years I assumed ‘dugout’ was pro-
nounced /
dut/ rather than /da t/ by analogy with ‘mahout’. Nor does any
individual speaker possess all the dictionary meanings for a word. The OED mean-
ing for ‘man’ of ‘a cairn or pile of stones marking a summit or prominent point of
a mountain’ would not be known by many people outside Cumbria.
Hence the message for language teaching is that vocabulary is everywhere. It
connects to the systems of phonology and orthography through the actual forms
of the words, to the systems of morphology and grammar through the ways that
the word enters into grammatical structures and through grammatical changes to
the word’s form, and to the systems of meaning through its range of general and
specific meanings and uses. To quote Noam Chomsky (1995: 131), ‘language
acquisition is in essence a matter of determining lexical idiosyncrasies’. Effective
acquisition of vocabulary can never be just the learning of individual words and
their meanings in isolation. The pre-intermediate course International Express
Knowledge of words 51

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