Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Teaching the complexity of words
L2 learning of vocabulary is not just learning a word once and for all, but learning
the range of information that goes with it. It is unlikely that everything about a
word is learnt simultaneously; we might not know its spelling; we might be miss-
ing some of the components of its meaning; we certainly will not know all the
word combinations in which it can occur. The problems associated with going
from the first language to the second are not just the transfer of the actual words,
but also the relationships and overtones they carry in the L1. As an English speaker,
I cannot conceive how ‘postpone’ and ‘reject’ could be the same word in another
language, as they are in Hebrew ‘lidchot’ (Levenston, 1979). Most uses of vocabu-
lary in textbooks imply that words have single meanings: books that have vocabu-
lary lists usually give single-word translations. The German course English for You
(Graf, 1983), for instance, lists one translation for ‘bar’ (Bar) and one for ‘write’
(schreiben), where many might be necessary.
An aspect of vocabulary that has become important in recent years is how the
word fits in to the structure of the sentence. Partly this is the argument structure of
the verb described earlier, which for example, forces the verb ‘faint’ to have a gram-
matical subject ‘Martin fainted’, but never an object ‘Martin fainted John’, and
requires the verb ‘meet’ to have an object ‘He met John’, not ‘He met’. In addition,
some verbs are followed by subordinate clauses, ‘I hoped Mary would go’ rather
than grammatical objects ‘I hoped Mary’. A speaker of English knows not only
what a word means and how it is pronounced, but also how it fits into sentences.
Teaching cannot ignore that the student has to learn not just the meaning and
pronunciation of each word, but how to use it. One simple way of doing this is the
traditional task of getting the students to make up sentences using particular
words. For example, in Just Right (Harmer, 2004), students have to say which
words in a word list, ‘absolutely . . . pirate . . . water tank’, they already know and
then to ‘Write some sentences using them’.
Words are multifaceted; we do not know a word properly until we have learnt its
forms, its different types of meaning and the ways in which it is used in sentences.
Vocabulary teaching has been diminished by being considered the provision of a
Vocabulary and teaching 63

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