Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

3.3 One word-store or two in the L2 user’s mind?
Learning and teaching vocabulary
52
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When you learn a new word in a second language, do you try to keep it sep-
arate from your first language words?
●
When you teach a new word do you try to link it to words in the first lan-
guage, say, by translation, or do you keep it separate?
Focusing questions
Box 3.3 Knowing a word
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Knowing a word means its spoken and written forms, its grammatical and
lexical properties and its meaning.
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Vocabulary impinges on all areas of language acquisition and is not just
learning sets of words and meanings.
The fundamental question in SLA vocabulary research is how the words of the two
languages are stored in the mind. The various alternatives are set out below.
1 Separate stores. The vocabulary of the second language is kept entirely separate
from that of the first: an English person who learns the word ‘libre’ in French
keeps it separate from the English word ‘free’.
2 L2 store dependent on L1 store. The two word-stores are tightly linked so that L2
words are always related to L1 words; to think of the French word ‘libre’ means
thinking first of the English word ‘free’.
3 Overlapping stores. There is an overlapping system so that some words are
shared, some not; ‘libre’ in French might be associated with English ‘free’, ‘lib-
erty’ or ‘liberal’.
4 Single store. There is a single overall word-store for both languages; French
‘libre’ and English ‘free’ are stored together.
At the moment it is far from certain which of these possibilities is correct. People
with two languages are still aware of the words of one language when the other is
not being used. Using a word like ‘coin’ with a different meaning in English (money)
and French (corner), bilinguals were shown to have access to both meanings rather
(Taylor, 1996) admirably has a section in the very first unit entitled ‘Learning
vocabulary’, which encourages students to organize words in topics, word groups
and word maps, and gets them to keep a vocabulary notebook for recording
meaning and pronunciation. Later units have sections on ‘word-power’, mostly
treating vocabulary in topic groups such as ‘food’, or word families such as ‘busi-
ness headlines’. As in most coursebooks, the main emphasis here is on learning
vocabulary as meaning, organized in a systematic, logical fashion, rather than on
the other aspects mentioned above, which are usually dealt with incidentally in
the texts and dialogues rather than in specific vocabulary work.

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than just to the one specific to the language being used; one language is not totally
deactivated when you are speaking the other (Beauvillain and Grainger, 1987). So it
seems unlikely that there are entirely separate stores. People take about the same
time to say whether a ‘table’ is ‘furniture’ in their first language as in their second
language (Caramazza and Brones, 1980). On the other hand, speed of mental access
to a word is helped by hearing another word in the same language rather than a
word in the speaker’s other language (Kirsner et al., 1980), suggesting the two stores
are separate in the mind. So the question of one dictionary or two is unanswerable
at the moment. What seems clear is that the extreme models (‘separate’ versus ‘sin-
gle store’) are unlikely to be true; and that there is overlap at many points.
Types of meaning 53
Separate L1 and L2
stores
L2 store dependent
on L1 store 
Overlapping
L1 and L2 stores
Single L1 and L2
stores
libre
L2
free
L1
libre
free
L2
L1
libre
free
L2
 L1
libre
L2
free
L1
Figure 3.1 Different ways of storing the vocabulary of two languages in the mind