The Heart of the Matter: Another Look at Learning Words

Lou Spaventa

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT.
E-mail: spaventa@cox.net

By now, it's pretty much linguistic lore - the notion that the average person associates learning a language with learning words. You cannot refute this truism, no matter to which theoretical perspective you subscribe because people do learn words when they learn a language - languages are composed of words. Whether words are learned as a result of a genetic predisposition to encounter them in certain syntactical relationships, whether they are learned as a result of synaptic firing in patterns, or whether they are learned through social intercourse, they remain words. Yet for quite a long time in 20th century applied linguistics, words were viewed as uninteresting phenomena, interchangeable from one language to the next or of minor importance compared to grammar. Over the last quarter century or so, there has been a renewed interest in vocabulary learning, beginning with definitions of a lexicon, not to be identified with a vocabulary list (See for example Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999). Whichever way we cut it, words are important, both to the instructor and to the learner.

We store words listed and defined to the extent possible in electronic and paper texts: corpora and dictionaries. Both these storage methods bring with them different implications for the learning of words. Consider dictionaries.

Definition of "woman"

In these languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish and Korean, there is clearly some drift of meaning. Dictionaries, to me, are like novels, not like the periodic table. That is to say, they are works of the imagination, collective or otherwise and not works of science. And bilingual dictionaries are even more like this. So, how do such dictionaries help the English learner? We see that translated words drift in meaning.

We also know that over time words in a language drift in meaning. More than half of Latin derived words in English have changed meaning. "Nice' once meant stupid and foolish. By Chaucer's time it had become lascivious and wanton. In the next 400 years, it became extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and finally in 1769, pleasant and agreeable. Even 19th century writers used words in ways not quite thinkable today in mixed company. Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge wrote of the "unattractive exterior of Farfrae's erection," and Dickens in Bleak House, "Sir Leceister leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates" (The preceding information comes from Bill Bryson's delightful Mother Tongue, 1991). The point I am getting at is that definitional learning of words and using a bilingual dictionary are problematic at best for the English learner.

The field hand died from ingesting a pesticide.

Paradigms don't work for context. Try to substitute fratricide, regicide, matricide or infanticide in the sentence above.

Another thing about learning words is that learning to define a function is more consistent and transparent than learning to describe what one sees as attributes of the physical world. As an exercise with a group of teachers, I handed out blank strips of paper upon which they were to write down what five things did or were used for: a coffee maker, a salt cellar, a tray, a pot, and a small table decoration. They had pictures of each thing. The teachers consulted with each other and found that they had come up with similar definitions of each item, although the miniature owl pine cone table decoration was a little hard, I'll admit. Before that, I had asked them to describe five faces of which they had pictures. Here, the descriptions were varied. There was not all that much agreement on how physical features are described. What this might imply for English language learners is that functional words are consistent enough from person to person to be very valuable things to learn right from the start, while descriptive words, though necessary, are somehow more slippery because they depend a great deal upon individual interpretation.

To return to our dictionary for a bit, in dictionaries based upon corpora, the lexicographers are able to give the learner an idea of how frequently the word is used, what type of word it is within a broad category, and what contexts one is apt to see the word in. For example, in the Collins Co-Build Dictionary of English, I found "A woman is an adult female human being." Note that it is a full sentence, something students often do not find in "regular" dictionaries. I also found that woman was a five diamond word, indicating its importance and frequent use. I found that it was a count noun. This approach seemed much more pragmatic and functional to me than the fairly abstract listings of a regular dictionary.

One other observation about learning words - it helps to learn words in a community of learners. To the same group of teachers mentioned above, I gave out a list of words and asked them to work with each other to define the words. Then I gave them each an article in which the words could be found. I asked them to compare the words with their definitions before reading and then to discuss how those definitions might have changed after reading. What I was trying to get at was the negotiation of meaning that takes place in a learning community. Rather than have solitary individuals recording meaning in their notebooks all the time, wouldn't it often be better to have students work with one another to get at the meaning of words? I think it would.

My latest thoughts about learning words then come down to these: paradigmatic learning, list learning that is, has its place, but is clearly a task of memory. Syntagmatic learning, learning in context, has more power for the individual because it is a task of negotiating meaning and recognizing words, not memorizing them. Remember that we all tend to have larger passive, reading vocabularies than we do active, speaking ones. Most dictionaries are versions of lists while corpora-based dictionaries hold the promise of contextual, functional learning to some degree. Because word learning is a continuing process for people, it is best done in a learning community where negotiation of meaning is actively pursued. All of these contentions could well be challenged as opinion masked as a sort of action research, but I believe there is truth in each of them. And that's my last word on the subject.

References

Bryson, Bill (1991) The Mother Tongue, Penguin
Celce-Murica, Marianne and Diane Larsen-Freeman (1999) The Grammar Book, Heinle & Heinle
Sinclair, John (Ed). (1990) Collins Co-Build Student's Dictionary

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