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Peter Sipes Vocabulary Acquisition

Learning words fast: my own journey

Introduction
Learning vocabulary is different from other language tasks: there seems to be no limit on your ability to learn new words. If you extend the definition of vocabulary to include formulaic speech, there is no telling how many words a person might know. As an exploration of this word-learning ability, I have turned myself into a guinea pig and taken on learning 160 words in six weeks: 100 in my native English and 60 in non-native Persian, listed at http://bit.ly/14aIxGZ.

Native Vocabulary

As a native English speaker, my list of 100 words to learn came from English. At the

outset of the project, I thought it would be genuinely impossible. I know a lot of words. To further aid in the difficulty of the project, I attempted to avoid linguistic terminology. So I tackled this with a mix of hubris and have come out the other side fully humbled.

Non-native Vocabulary
For this project, I picked Persian as my non-native language to learn 60 new words. This choice was a mistake. Really useful resources for Persian are tricky to find, never mind that dictionaries can be tricky to use too. To help with the problem of a weak starting point with Persian, I decided to search for Persian sayings online. (Ive got a book of sayings, but typing in and transliterating the sayings is enough of a task that I sought out online help.) Why use this approach? First, it is a (more-or-less) authentic use of the language that gives all the context needed in one sentence. Second, with careful selection of sayings, I can recycle a small vocabulary base into a larger-than-expected base of sayings. Third, the sayings themselves are formulaic speech. E.g. When in Rome, do as the Romans. An English speaker may get your meaning with just When in Rome, but it is opaque to a non-native speaker unfamiliar with the saying. Since I did not want my work to go to waste, I tossed my efforts into

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a blog (http://farsivocab.blogspot.com/). (Though I did break down and cheat with a Swadesh list. Looking up verbs is a nightmare for beginners.)

Similarities

The processes of finding the words were not too different. Read and listen until you get

new words. Look the word up in a dictionary. And that was where the similarity ended. With English, I had the luxury of native knowledgemore than a few words were compositionally transparent (e.g. survivorship is easily broken down into survivor and -ship, an affix which gives predictable meaning to survivor, which I already knew). There is no doubt I missed a lot of new words that fell into this group, simply because they are so transparent. How do I know if I know them? How many of these do we make up on the fly? In other cases the word was one I already knew, but somehow different (e.g. bolster, which I knew as a verb, was new as a noun). These words added depth to my pre-existing vocabulary. The last group of English words shared more in common with the Persian words: I neither knew them nor had any good morphological handle to grasp (e.g. comedo). These words will probably be the trickiest to keep in receptive use.

Differences

The biggest difference in learning native from non-native vocabulary, in my experience

for this paper, is the lack of help from cognatesthough this problem will not be the case for all language pairs, nor was there a total lack of cognates. In any case, each word was much closer to a truly new item to learn than the English words. As a result, I had to put a lot more effort into learning each word. Even with the context given by the sayings, I had to learn each part of the saying. In other words, work. On the flip side of these difficulties was the ease of finding new words. Even with a language I am more familiar with (say Latin), there are always words that crop up that are

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unknown to me. And there is something about unknown words in a non-native language that make them stick out. A lot. This salience does not seem to happen in English. For example, I had seen the word postern in the past. Given the context, I knew that it was some sort of door, so I left it at that. This sort of close-enough-from-context does not (seem to) work in a non-native languageparticularly at beginner levels.

Basis in theory

To make things easier, I tried to ground my work in what research has uncovered as

effective. Schmitts 1997 paper gave a list of what groups of students perceived as helpful. So what were those things? Here is a list of reported helpful tactics: Bilingual dictionary (95%) Say new word aloud (91%) Written repetition (91%) Connect word with synonyms/antonyms (88%) Continue over time ((87%) Study spelling (87%) As teacher for paraphrase/synonym (86%) Take notes in class (84%) Analyse pictures/gestures (84%) Verbal repetition (84%) (Schmitt, 1997). The great thing about this list is that a lot of the tasks are easy, even if you are doing selfstudy. With the advent of the internet, sites like wordreference.com or wiktionary.com have made bilingual dicitonaries (for larger languages) thorough and free. Wiki-based dictionaries have the added advantage of allowing native speakers to give input to meaning. Other tasks on the list seem quite obvious: say the word out loud. Words are (usually) spoken things, so it would only make sense to start working on that aspect immediately. Likewise with writing down the word: many second language learners are in classroom settings where written language may trump spoken languagein some aspects. Since my list of English words looked like it was in trouble, I resorted to a secondlanguage tactic: explicit vocabulary learning in the context of reading. Using a concordancer, I

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treated Stevensons Jekyll and Hyde to a frequency analysis (results here: http://bit.ly/148GXoV). I scrutinized the wordsin truth typesthat only occurred once, since I figured that those were likely to be words I did not know. I noted and learned some of the words I did not know before reading. I did this because Schmitt (2010) suggested that Krashen and Mason were wrong about the efficiency of pre-teaching vocabulary. While the pre-study of vocabulary definitely helped while reading, I cannot say that it improved my retention in all cases. I remember bartizan, but not avidity (though it is compositionally transparent). In terms of anecdote, I cannot say whether it is better for a native language to do pre-reading study or look up unknown words as they occur or rely only on context.

Whats likely to be retained?

This question is sticky. Given the speedy nature of the task, long-term retention

productive or receptiveis not certain. Schmitt says, lexical items cannot be fully learned from only a single exposure (2010). Given the time frame, the number of exposures to any individual word is likely to be encountered very few times. Also, what constitutes single exposure? I heard the word progymnasmata several times, but those repetitions only occurred in one conference session, which was only memorable because of this project. On the other hand, I heard paresthesia once, but I have managed to find situations where I could use it now and then. In any case, with English words adult vocabulary growth feels slow and organic. For one, there is a strong web of associations available for the new word to be plugged into. Postern can be associated with castle and door. English words are also likely to fit nicely into knowledge from other words. Such facets of word knowledge like spoken form, written form and grammatical patterns (Schmitt, 2010) are well established. Given that I know anathesia is pronounced, I can make predictions about paresthesia in terms of stress pattern. I can also make predictions that it has to do with pain/sensation since I know that the words have related

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morphology (though it may not be accessible to word formation). Since there is a semimorphological cue embedded, I also have a good chance to guess at proper grammatical use. Retention with the Persian words is another story. While I have been repeating them, both alone and in the context of sayings, I do not have a web of associations with each word. How could I? My Persian vocabulary is quite limited. Schmitt (p. 58 ff.) suggests that it is these associations which makes it possible to use words properly. I also have a weaker grasp on Persian phonology, so even words that seem related in transcription feel more independent than they might otherwise be (e.g. pasl [last year] and sl [year]). Lacking the ability to use the words, will I retain them? I hesitate to say no as I have learned a couple hundred words so far, but at the same time retention is no certain matter.

Conclusion
It turns out that this task is very hard in such a short timespan. Although I tried to focus my efforts in English on words I found in meaningful contexts (reading, radio, conversation), I was forced to resort to second-language techniques (picture dictionaries, explicit vocabulary learning) to make up the gap between what I ran across naturally and the goal of 100. Likewise, finding 60 items in a second language proved more difficult than I had originally imagined. Nevertheless, I did not find the memory load of adding 160 words to my vocabulary to be insurmountable. In truth, it felt natural to learn words in my native English.

References

Schmitt, Norbert. 1997. Vocabulary learning strategies. Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy, ed. by Norbert Schmitt and Michael McCarthy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199-227. Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching vocabulary: A vocabulary research manual. Palgrave Macmillan.