Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 6; November 03

Last month I did a presentation at a local TESOL conference on learning words. The question of how we learn words is one that is very much with me as I teach developmental reading to community college students whose reading and vocabulary skills are well below college level. (A community college in the United States is a two year, post-secondary school that offers vocational courses and academic courses. Students often transfer to a university after completing two years of community college study.) I took stock of what I knew about teaching words and this is what I found for myself to be true. The fundamental circumstance that we find ourselves in as learners is that in our first language we learn words as part of our general oral language development and we learn words as we learn to read. Most of our reading vocabulary in our first language we learn through an iterative process whereby we meet the same word in numerous contexts and apply our logic to its possible meanings. In this way, we develop our passive vocabulary. This method of contextual guessing while reading sometimes leads to using a new word actively, that is, in speech or writing. This guessing process is not as focused and conscious as it becomes when we try to learn words in a second language. So how do we go about learning new words in a second language?

Many years ago, when he was working on his book, Memory, Meaning, and Method, Earl Stevick came to the MAT Program at The School for International Training, where I was a student. He talked to us about learning and memory. He began by telling us his license plate number and asked us not to write it down, but rather to remember it. Then he continued his discussion of learning and memory, reflecting much of the content of his soon-to-be-published book. At the end of the discussion, Earl asked us to tell him his license plate number. As I recall, no one could. This served to underscore his points about long term and short term memory and the need for practice to store information in the long term memory. This is certainly true. Every methodology employed in language teaching uses practice to help students retain language. The differences among methods is often how that practice is construed and carried out. When I came to the issue of learning words, I thought about memory. It is my belief that as human civilization has begun to store its history and imagination in books and then in computers, human memory has weakened. Ivan Illich tells us that the Greek poets would recite from memory for days at a time. We know that Matteo Ricci found favor at the court of the Chinese emperor, Kublai Khan, by dint of his prodigious memory, a memory he had learned to use through Jesuit teaching techniques. So, the big problem for learning words becomes how to remember them. Here's how I proceeded in my conference workshop.

First I had participants study a list of words that I had taken out of Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach in a section entitled “The Teacher's Fearful Heart.” The words were in fact not in a list, but written in different styles and different sizes all over the paper. There were about fifteen words, all germane to the reading. I had students study the words for about 30 seconds, then turn their papers over, and write as many words as they could on the back of the paper. I continued this two more times. Some of the participants got nearly all the words. Most got the majority of the words. Then, I created groups in order to have students work together. Next, I asked them to categorize the words based upon any criterion that they wanted to use. Among such criteria are alphabetization, word stress, semantic relationships, and number of syllables. I had them compare their categories with each other and guess as to how their group-mates had categorized. Following this, I had the groups define each word as best they could. Finally, I asked the workshop participants to read the passage I had taken the words from. I asked them to pay special attention when they encountered the words that I had given them, especially noting how they found the words were used in comparison to how they defined them. At that point, the exercise was finished and a discussion ensued. What did I think I had done?

First, I think I created a way to force students to focus on the words. In this case, I chose unexpected sizes and shapes. I could also have chosen to attach the words to actions, music, drawing, or numbers because I believe that learners react differently to different mnemonic tools. In any case, I wanted to cause students to actively focus on the words. Secondly, I wanted a way to have them both practice the words and attach them to existing mental schema. Hence, the categorization exercise (which is one I learned from Caleb Gattegno). Thirdly, I wanted students to discuss word meanings so that they could negotiate a common understanding of a word. This is important because I do believe that the language is negotiated when we communicate meaningfully. Diane Larsen-Freeman, the applied linguist, has said that each time a person uses a word, that word changes its meaning ever so slightly. An aside here. When workshop students were talking about meaning, I told a story about James Murray's work on the first version of what has come to be known as the Oxford English Dictionary. After reading Caught in the Web of Words, an account of his struggles, I became convinced that a thought I had was not only correct, but so obvious that I had missed it because it was always there. The thought was that dictionaries are like novels. The difference is that dictionaries are written by individuals whose creative imagination took them down the path of compiling the meanings of words rather than inventing fictitious lives and events. Murray and his team of word workers compiled English words via citation from literature after the middle of the twelfth century. Presently, corpus linguistics crunches large numbers of texts to find word meaning by contextual frequency, but uses more varied sources and computers instead of philologists. In both cases, words are said to mean a certain thing, one on the basis of literary usage and the other on the basis of frequency in texts of a certain type. Neither method accounts for the negotiation of meaning by the millions of speakers using English.

Back to the workshop activities. When students came to the reading of the text, I had, I hoped, accomplished a few things as far as retaining words was concerned. I had gotten them to focus on words, practice them, and discuss them in preparation for a reading about a subject in which all of them had interest: teaching. The text came a bit more alive than it would ordinarily because students were actively looking for the words with which they had worked. They were comparing their meanings, negotiated through group discussion, with how they found the words used in the context of the text.

When Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean, he was telling a kind of inevitable truth about language. We each use words with an understanding of their meaning, no matter how closely or distantly that use mirrors a word's dictionary definition. We have intentionality. For second language students, their ability to have control over words colors the understanding of their intentionality to a great extent. Because the process of learning words differs from first to second language learning for reasons having to do with the nature and context of both, I believe that second language students need to bring focus to bear on learning words, process those words in ways which attach them to existing mental schema, discuss meaning in a social context, and finally, find those words used in meaningful texts.

References

Gattegno, Caleb. (1971) Worksheets for Silent Way Pictures, Educational Solutions.

Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. (1988) ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. North Point Press.

Larsen-Freeman, Diane (1998) personal communication

Murray, K.M. Elisabeth, and R.W. Birchfield. (2001) Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, Yale University Press.

Palmer, Parker. (1997) The Courage to Teach, Jossey-Bass.

Spence, Jonathan. (1997) The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Viking Press.