Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Make deductions from the word form
Another way of discovering the meaning of a word is to try to deduce it from its
actual form; 69 per cent of students in Schmitt’s survey found this a useful strategy.
The Italian word ‘posto’ may not be very helpful in this respect, as it provides few
clues to its structure. The English example ‘regolith’ is more useful. I have encoun-
tered other words with the morpheme ‘lith’ before, such as ‘megalith’, which I
understand to be a big stone, and ‘Neolithic’, which I understand to mean ‘stone
age’; hence I guess that ‘lith’ is something to do with stone. ‘rego’ provides no help –
in fact if I had simply related it to the English word ‘rug’ I wouldn’t have been far
out according to the OED, which claims it was indeed a mistaken interpretation of
the Greek for ‘blanket’. Again, it is easy to go wrong in making these deductions;
my interpretation of ‘regolith’ as ‘layer of stone’ gave me sufficient understanding
to read a novel but would hardly impress a geologist. International Express (Taylor,
1996) practises word forms by getting the students to do the reverse operation of
adding prefixes such as ‘un-’ or ‘in-’ to words such as ‘efficient’ and ‘sociable’.
Link to cognates
One more way is to resort to a language that one already knows, popular with 40
per cent of Schmitt’s students. Many languages have words that are similar in
form, particularly if the languages are closely related, English ‘chair’ versus French
‘chaise’ or English ‘day’ versus German ‘Tag’. Students often seem to avoid such
cognates (Lightbown and Libben, 1984), perhaps to keep the two languages sepa-
rate in their minds. Hakan Ringbom (1982) found that Finnish learners of English
in fact preferred words from Swedish rather than from Finnish: ‘I can play pingis’
for ‘table tennis’ or ‘This is a very beautiful stad’ for ‘town’. Given the relation-
ships between many European languages and the amount of word-borrowing that
affects modern languages everywhere, there may well be some links between the
L2 word and something in the second language. With ‘posto’ there may be few
clues; there are some meanings of ‘post’ such as ‘leave your post’ which suggest a
fixed location such as a seat, but most of the meanings are more to do with the
mail or with fence-posts. With other words a reasonable guessing strategy may
nevertheless be to try to relate them to the L1, provided of course there is a rela-
tionship between the two languages – it does not work for English speakers trying
to read street signs in Hungary. In the past, language teachers have often put stu-
dents on their guard against ‘false friends’ – to the neglect of ‘true friends’ whose
resemblance is not accidental, which are utilized in methods such as the new con-
current approach described in Chapter 13.