Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

3.5 Strategies for understanding and learning
vocabulary
Strategies for understanding and learning vocabulary 57
Box 3.5 Ways of meaning
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Words have many different kinds of meaning, whether sharing general
components, linked in lexical relations or related to prototypes and levels.
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While some aspects of meaning are universal, there are differences between
languages in how they express concepts of colour, and so on, which may
affect the thinking of L2 users.
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If you meet a new word, how do you go about finding out its meaning and
remembering it?
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How do you use a dictionary in your second language? In your first?
Focusing questions
false friends: words that are more or less the same in two languages but have
different meanings
mnemnotechnics: ways of remembering new information by deliberately
organizing it and linking it to existing information in the mind
Keywords
called linguistic relativity; is the world seen differently from different points of view?
Since the late 1990s a fair amount of research has shown that differences in thinking
go with differences in language. Most human languages talk about a speaker’s loca-
tion in terms of ‘front/back’ and ‘left/right’; the whiteboard is behind me, the stu-
dents are in front of me, the door is on my left, the window is on my right. Speakers
of Australian Aboriginal languages talk about location as ‘north/south’ and
‘east/west’. Now the whiteboard is in the east, the students in the west, the door on
the north, the window on the south. Does this make a difference to people’s think-
ing? Try blindfolding two speakers of Aboriginal and English and abandoning them
in the middle of a forest; who would you think finds their way out first?
If you know two languages, what happens to your thinking? Will you always
think like speakers of the L1 or will you shift to thinking like speakers of the L2,
or will you think like neither of them? SLA research has been investigating this
issue in controlled experiments in recent years. Greeks who know English separate
the two blues differently from Greeks who do not know English (Athanasopoulos,
2001). Japanese who know English tend to categorise things more as ‘shapes’ in an
English way than as ‘substances’ in a Japanese way (Cook et al., 2006). Hence
learning another language can have more far-reaching effects on the learner than
anybody imagined; you may think in a slightly different way if you know another
language.

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Students are often acutely aware of their ignorance of vocabulary in a way they are
unaware of their ignorance of grammar and phonology. When you want to say
something in a second language, it is the words that you feel you struggle for
rather than the grammar or pronunciation. Hence L2 users have devised strategies
to compensate for words they do not know, discussed in Chapter 6. Here we shall
look at some of the vocabulary strategies students use, with or without their
teacher’s approval. First test yourself on the task in Box 3.6.