Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 3.4 Words in the L2 user’s mind
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The L1 and the L2 sets of vocabulary in the L2 user’s mind may be related in
various ways, ranging from completely separate to completely integrated.
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Research suggests that in many cases the two vocabulary stores are closely
linked.
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What do you mean by meaning?
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What nouns can you remember learning first in your first language? In your
second?
Focusing questions
components of meaning: general aspects of meaning which are shared by
many words; ‘boy’ has the components ‘male’, ‘human’, ‘young’, and so on
prototype theory: words have whole meanings divided into basic level (‘car’),
subordinate level (‘Ford’) and superordinate level (‘vehicle’)
Keywords
3.4 Types of meaning

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It seems easy enough to say what a word means. To an English speaker ‘plane’
means 
, ‘dog’ means 
; indeed many SLA researchers are content to explore how
this type of meaning is acquired in a second language, that is, how ‘avion’ comes to
mean 
and ‘chien’ 
for the English person who knows French. Linguists have
spent at least a century exploring the different types of meaning that words can
have. Here we look at three types that have been linked to L2 acquisition.
Components of meaning
Often the meaning of a word can be broken up into smaller components. Thus the
meaning of ‘girl’ is made up of ‘female’, ‘human’ and ‘non-adult’. The meaning of
‘apple’ is made up of ‘fruit’, ‘edible’, ‘round’, and so on. The components view of
meaning was used to study the development of words such as ‘before’ and ‘big’ in
English children. At one stage they know one component of the meaning but not
the other. They know ‘big’ and ‘small’ share a meaning component to do with
size, but think they both mean ‘big’; or they know that ‘before’ and ‘after’ are to
do with ‘time’ but do not know which one means ‘prior’ (Clark, 1971). Indeed, L2
beginners in English found it much easier to understand ‘Mary talks before Susan
shouts’ than ‘Caroline sings after Sally dances’ (Cook, 1977); they had not
acquired the component ‘prior’. Paul Nation (1990) describes learners of Samoan
who confuse ‘umi’ (long) with ‘puupuu’ (short) because they have acquired the
component ‘length’ for both but have not sorted out which is which.
Students are learning components of meaning for a word, not necessarily all of
the word’s meaning at once. An informal version of this components approach can
be found in coursebooks such as The Words You Need (Rudzka et al., 1981). Students
look at a series of ‘Word study’ displays showing the different meaning components
of words. For example, a chart gives words that share the meaning ‘look at/over’
such as ‘check’, ‘examine’, ‘inspect’, ‘scan’ and ‘scrutinise’. It shows which have the
component of meaning ‘detect errors’, which ‘determine that rules are observed’,
and so on. Students are encouraged to use the meaning components to build up
their vocabulary while reading texts.