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"Learning Vocabulary, Strategies at Work"

By Ana Robles, Fraga (Spain)

Whenever we do something, we do it in a certain way and using a certain procedure and not others. If I want to pull down a brick wall I can hit it with my hands, or butt it with my head repeatedly, or can I get a hammer and hammer until the bricks break, or can ask for help, or go and get myself a drilling machine, or find any other way of doing it.

The strategy I choose will certainly affect the results. The time needed to pull down the brick wall will vary depending on whether I decide to use a drill or my own head. My own well being will also be affected.

The same applies to learning a language (or to any other learning). How quickly and how well the language is learnt will depend to a high degree on the set of strategies I use. The aim of this article is to examine some of the strategies that affect vocabulary learning. As teachers very often we plan our lessons only in terms of the language we want our students to learn (the content), and we don't plan in terms of the strategy the student needs to use to absorb that content.

In my experience when I don't teach strategies some students will be able to discover efficient strategies on their own, but some will get stuck and fail. Also I have often met students that were very good at some area of the language, for example, writing, and failed miserably in other areas, like pronunciation. In many of these cases the students were using the same strategies to do very different things.

One of the challenges learning a foreign language presents is that languages are by their own nature so complex and multi-faceted that using one procedure is not enough. To tackle the challenge of mastering a new language effectively a student needs an array of very different strategies for the different areas of the language. And then he needs to know when to use which.

As teachers we can help our students to develop efficient strategies that foster learning. To do so we need to:

1.	Identify the strategy or range of strategies more efficient for each task.
2.	Identify and make our students aware of the strategies they are using at the present.
3.	Present alternative strategies and explain advantages and disadvantages.
4.	Provide opportunities and activities for them to explore and practise alternative strategies.

Let's take vocabulary learning. Learning a language means learning words, lots of words. Learning vocabulary is usually considered the easiest task, much easier than, for example, learning to write a composition. Even so it is not equally easy for everybody.

But what is the difference that makes the difference? What do good vocabulary learners do that is different from what other students do? In other words, what strategies are there for learning words? And which ones are more efficient?

Learning a word implies doing several tasks and, in order to identify the most efficient strategies, we need to be clear about exactly what we want to learn.

•	First, a word is a group of letters and learning a word entails learning how those letters are grouped together. We have to learn the spelling and mistakes are not appreciated. Water is not whatter.

When you are writing, if you have doubts about the spelling of a given word, what do you do? Do you say the word to yourself to hear it out? Do you write the word, either on a paper or your mind's blackboard and chose the one that feels right? Do you use any other strategy? Good spellers usually 'see' the words written in their minds whereas bad spellers 'hear' the words. The thing is hearing a word like 'necessary' is not going to give me any information about the number of 'C's' it includes. If a student makes spelling mistakes because he is using an auditory strategy to check spelling, just giving him the right spelling won't help him much. Next time he is writing he will resort to sounding the word again and will make the same mistakes.

On the other hand, teaching him to think about the letters will help. Something as simple as asking that student, whenever he is in doubt about a word's spelling, to stop and scribble down a list with all the spelling combinations he can think of and then read them and choose the most likely one, will help him to develop a 'seeing' strategy.

•	A word is also a sequence of sounds and learning a word entails learning to recognise and produce these sounds. So when I learn a new word I need to learn its pronunciation, (unless I am aiming only to learn the written language).

Seeing the word written in your mind is a good strategy to avoid spelling mistakes but won't help you to understand an English speaker.

Learning how a word sounds implies using an auditory strategy: saying it both aloud and in your head, paying attention to how it sounds when said by a native and then when said by oneself. Recording oneself and then listening to the tape is the sort of activity that can help to develop auditory strategies in those students used to thinking of words only in terms of what they see.

•	Then a word is a label for a shared meaning. The word 'water' is a label for a certain type of liquid, not to be confused with, let's say, wine. But a label is not the same thing as the concept it labels.

When I learn 'water' I can link this group of letters and sounds to the equivalent label in my mother toungue, and through it to the internal image I have for that concept, or I can link the label 'water' directly to that internal image.

Visual information like photographs and drawings help the students to link the new word to that internal image. And we can also explain to them the importance of linking the new words to the idea they represent, for instance by visualising the concepts the words represent as they learn the spelling or pronunciation.

When I link the word in the foreign language to the word in my language I gain quick access to the concept behind the word in the mother tongue, and that's good, but I am also adding a step between the concept and the word in the new language, which is not so good.

Linking words in the foreign language to the equivalent word in the mother tongue can also be confusing when the same word is linked to a set of concepts that are represented by different labels in the mother tongue.  A table has legs and a person has legs. I can walk the first leg of a journey or I can be on my last legs, and all those 'legs' have different labels in my mother tongue, which can be very confusing if you are used to equating the label to the meaning.

Sometimes I ask my students to imagine, for example, a table's leg and to attach to that mental image two imaginary adhesive pieces of paper, one with the word in the mother tongue and the other with the word in English. And then to do the same with a person's leg. The idea is for them to learn the strategy of focusing on the concept and also, to help them to make the distinction between label and concept.

Examples of more activities are asking them to write the new word and image the object behind. Or imagine a place they are familiar with and fill it with labels in English with the names of all the different objects and places.

•	Last but not least, a word is a trigger for all the personal internal experiences I link to that word. When I say 'water' you and I are sharing the common idea of a liquid which is not wine, but behind that I have all my personal experiences of that is what comes to my mind when I hear that word. Water for me is blue, cool, refreshing, and smells of the sea.

I know I have really learnt a word when seeing it or hearing it triggers that inner world. And the same goes for my students. When they make the words their own, then they really know them.

Learning a word is then much more than just memorising the spelling, it becomes a process of adding learning on learning, going from the outer shell of the word (the letters and the sounds) towards its core to transform it and make it mine. And that process is done in stages. Learning is a spiral of construction. So the in-depth learning of a word is also a matter of time, of reprocessing it and using it in many ways.

Which means that vocabulary has to be recycled and used many times, but it also means that there is a time in my students' learning process when I will have to provide them with the space to make the words their own. So that the outer shell of letters and sounds becomes a trigger for their map of the terrain.

Humanistic language learning activities aim to provide the space in which that learning can happen, by providing the students with a frame to link the foreign language to their inner world.

An example of simple activity would be asking the students to choose a word they particularly like and create a gesture or shape with their hands to represent what they like about that word.

Learning a word entails learning different 'pieces' of content, meaning, spelling, pronunciation, and personal interpretation. Each of those 'pieces' has it's own requirements in terms of strategies. Using the same strategy for pronunciation and spelling is as effective as butting the brick wall with your head.

When I ask my students how they learn vocabulary, what I find most of the time is that they have a favoured strategy they apply for all the content areas. Some of them repeat the new words orally in their head, others create a visual image, others write them down and make lists of words in English with their translation into mother tongue and so on. The number of students using more than one strategy is very small.

Therefore, my main task as teacher is to expand their awareness both of the different techniques available, and of their effectiveness and weaknesses, so that they can choose those that they need for each particular situation.

That awareness is expanded just by talking in the class about how each of them learns and studies. The next step is to explore with them the different strategies. First, by presenting them with activities in which they can learn to use specific strategies and, then, by discussing with them the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy.

The knowledge that there are more ways than one of learning, and that how you learn affects what you learn is in itself a source of generative learning. Once a student realises that there are many ways of doing the same task he will often start his own search for those strategies that fits his needs better.