Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Fitting in with students’ strategies
The third major implication is how teaching can fit in with the students’ ways of
learning vocabulary. For example, teachers implicitly draw on many of the strate-
gies we have just outlined when they introduce new vocabulary. Showing a pic-
ture of a train may allow the students to guess what ‘train’ means from the
context. Miming the action of flying may demonstrate the meaning of ‘fly’. The
teacher’s attempts to explain a word through examples or definitions are similar
to providing a human dictionary. Getting the students to sort vocabulary into sets
relies on the strategy for organizing things in their minds.
Whose vocabulary is the learner acquiring?
Finally, as usual there is the issue not of what vocabulary the learner should be
acquiring, but whose vocabulary? If students want to be like native speakers, we have
to define which native speakers. Vocabulary differs from one country to another;
what North Americans call an ‘elevator’ is a ‘lift’ to the rest of the world; Indian
speakers use ‘peon’ to mean an office clerk, where English people mean a kind of
peasant, and ‘flower bed’ where others would say ‘marriage bed’. Vocabulary varies
from region to region within a country; an alleyway is a ‘chare’ in Newcastle, a ‘folly’
in Colchester, and a ‘lane’ in the Isle of Wight; ‘gravy’ seems to be made with milk in
Texas and with meat juice in the rest of the USA. Even if the variation in vocabulary
is not extensive, language teaching still has to consider which native speaker is most
appropriate.
But what if the student’s aim is not to be a native speaker, but an efficient user of
English as a second language – an L2 user? The words they need may be those that
are understood by fellow L2 users, not by native speakers. Much of the Far East seems
to use ‘cider’ for any fizzy drink rather than one made of apple; perhaps it is more use-
ful for the student to acquire the general term rather than the specifically native
usage. Some things we have hitherto considered mistakes may in fact be useful – if
other L2 users all make the same ‘mistake’. For example, I have spent a lifetime query-
ing students who claim, ‘I was very interesting in the class’, by pointing out that this
Learning and teaching vocabulary