Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

3.6 Vocabulary and teaching
Learning and teaching vocabulary
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Box 3.7 Vocabulary strategies
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To understand an unfamiliar L2 word, people make use of a variety of strate-
gies, such as guessing, using dictionaries, deducing meaning from the
word’s form and relating it to cognates.
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To acquire new L2 words, people use strategies such as repetition, organiz-
ing them in the mind, and linking them to existing knowledge.
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How would you teach a new word such as ‘trombone’ to a student?
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Do you use any ‘local’ words in your first language or in your second that
people from other areas do not understand?
Focusing questions
What we have been saying impinges on teaching in at least four main ways.
Demonstrating meaning
One of the central issues of language teaching is how to get the meaning of a new
word across to the student. This depends on what we believe meaning to be and
on the nature of the particular word. Audio-visual teaching thought that you con-
veyed new meaning by providing students with a picture: ‘der Mann’ 
 .
an elephant eating a bun or an elephant inside the bun. And so on for nine other
items. Things remembered in this way can be quickly recovered from memory,
even out of sequence. Elaborate schemes exist for handling more items at a time.
There are still other ways of making the links, such as the psychology-inspired
‘mnemotechnics’ techniques. In one, students acquire L2 words by associating
them with incongruous images or sounds in the L1. The French ‘hérisson’ (hedge-
hog) is remembered through an image of the English sound-alike ‘hairy son’
(Gruneberg, 1987). The original keyword approach described by Atkinson (1975)
suggests that, to learn the Spanish word ‘pato’ (duck), you might invent the image
of a duck wearing a pot on its head. When you think of the English word ‘duck’,
this brings to mind the pot-wearing duck, which in turn causes the Spanish word
‘pato’ to be produced. One consequence is the fantasy word-store created in the L2
user’s mind, inhabited by hairy sons and eccentric ducks, quite unlike the word-
store of a monolingual native speaker. This complicated chain of associations may
prove difficult to use in actual speech. Indeed, these strategies treat a word as
being paired with a single meaning and thus ignore not only all the depth of
meaning of the word but also all the other aspects outlined earlier. They amount
to a sophisticated form of list learning. It may also depend on the target language
having a reasonable phonological similarity to the first language, as Ernesto
Macaro (2006) points out: the Polish word ‘szalenstwo’ (madness) may have little
recognizable for an English speaker to cling on to.

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Traditional language teaching thought you provided it by means of a translation:
‘der Mann’ 
 ‘the man’. Communicative language teaching and task-based learn-
ing provide no techniques for demonstrating meaning at all; the meaning of ‘der
Mann’ is built up out of hearing it in different interactional contexts over time.
All these techniques assume that getting meaning is simply associating a word
with a unique meaning. But a single ‘word’ may have many meanings; we have to
pair ‘man’ with ‘human being’, with ‘a piece in chess’ and with the other 15
meanings found in the OED; the number of pairs between words and meanings in
a language vastly exceeds the number of actual words.
Moreover, if you treat words as discrete coins in this manner, you overlook the
many aspects of meaning they share, such as ‘animate’; and the many relation-
ships they have with other words such as ‘woman’ and ‘boy’; and the other
aspects of meaning discussed above such as collocations like ‘a man-to-man talk’.
The links between ‘der Mann’ and or ‘man’ are only the first stage in getting the
word. My People and Places (Cook, 1980) tried to teach meaning by getting the stu-
dents to use the word actively almost immediately; just after hearing ‘beautiful’
for the first time, the students had to decide whether Paul Newman, Barbra
Streisand and Stan Laurel are beautiful.