Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 3.6 Vocabulary learning task
Here are some German words for you to learn. Spend three minutes on this and
then do the test at the end of the chapter on page 66.

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weather advisory’ and ‘a layer of regolith’; none of the three nouns, ‘baulk’, ‘advi-
sory’ and ‘regolith’, are part of my vocabulary and yet I had not noticed this while
reading. I had presumably deduced enough from the context not to interfere with
reading: ‘baulk’ must be a pile of some kind, ‘advisory’ must be an advice-notice
(according to the OED this is North American usage) and ‘regolith’ must be some
geological term for a layer of stone.
Guessing is a much-used strategy in a second language. But of course it can go
wrong. On the one hand, we may come to quite the wrong conclusion: one of my
postgraduate students gave a seminar talk in which she distinguished ‘schema’ the-
ory from ‘schemata’ theory, having deduced these were different words rather than
the singular and plural of the same word. On the other hand, much language is
unpredictable from the situation; in a German supermarket the only remark that
was addressed to me was, ‘Könnten Sie bitte das Preisschildchen für mich lesen da
ich meine Brille zu Hause gelassen habe?’ (Could you read this label to me as I have
left my glasses at home?)
Use a dictionary
The most popular way of getting the meaning of a new word like ‘posto’ is to look it
up in a dictionary, according to Norbert Schmitt’s survey of students (Schmitt, 1997).
The use of dictionaries in language teaching has always been controversial to some
extent. There is inevitably a question of choosing which type of dictionary to use:
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monolingual dictionaries versus translation dictionaries. If you believe that the
word-stores of the two languages must be kept distinct in the mind, you will go for
monolingual L2 dictionaries. If you believe that the words for the two languages
are effectively kept in one joint store, you will prefer translation dictionaries.
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