Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Strategies for acquiring words
It is one thing to be able to work out the meaning of a word on one occasion; it is
another to remember the word so that it can be used on future occasions. Some of the
strategies that learners use are set out below.
Repetition and rote learning
The commonest approach is perhaps sheer practice: repeat the word again and
again until you know it by heart. Typically this is done by memorizing lists of
words or by testing yourself repeatedly on piles of flashcards, eliminating the ones
you know until none are left. However, much of this work may be in vain. Harry
Learning and teaching vocabulary
60

---

Bahrick (1984) has shown that the most important thing in learning a word is the
first encounter; he found effects of this eight years later. Practice may not be able
to make up for a disastrous first encounter.
Organizing words in the mind
Much teaching of vocabulary implies that the effective way of learning vocabulary
is to organize the words into groups in our mind. Hence we saw coursebooks using
vocabulary sets even when Rosch’s work suggests this is not the normal way of
learning. Touchstone (McCarthy et al., 2005) tells the students in Lesson 2, ‘Here are
some things students take to class’, and then lists ‘umbrella’, ‘pencil’, and so on –
that is, reversing Rosch’s sequence by starting with a superordinate category.
Organizing may consist of putting related words in a ‘word map’. International
Express (Taylor, 1996) gets students to fill in empty bubbles in a diagram that links
‘Air travel’ to ‘Luggage’, ‘Documents’, and so on. Or it may mean thinking about
aspects of the word form, say word endings such as ‘-er’ or prefixes such as ‘con-’.
Organizing words in groups by common morphology linked to meaning may be a
useful way of remembering them. Tapestry 1 Listening and Speaking (Benz and
Dworak, 2000), for instance, asks students to characterize nouns for professions
both as ‘-or’ (actor), ‘-ist’ (typist), or ‘-ian’ (musician) and then as different types of
career (medical careers, entertainers, public service, and so on). The book does not,
however, point out that ‘driver’ has now made the transition from human being to
machine that many ‘-er’ words take, such as ‘computer’, ‘typewriter’ and ‘reader’.