Beginning to Learn Foreign Vocabulary: A Review of the Research

Abstract

The article is an attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the experimental findings on foreign vocabulary learning. Almost all the research has been carried out on learning word pairs made up of a foreign word paired with its mothertongue translation. The first section of the review compares direct and indirect vocabulary learning. The second section reviews the evidence on how much vocabulary can be learned in a given time, how many repetitions are required for learning to occur, and why some words are more difficult to learn than others.

Incidental and Intentional Learning

“…Retention over all groups and texts consistently favored the bilingual condition (with an average retention score of 18.6, over an average of 14.7 in the monolingual condition, out of a maximum of 35). Studies addressing the latter issue, context or no context (Grace, 1998;Lawson & Hogben, 1996;Mondria & Wit-de Boer, 1991;Prince, 1996;Qian, 1996;Seibert, 1930), have obtained mixed results, probably due to the fact that, as Nation (1982) and Nagy (1997) have pointed out, context is a multifaceted construct. Tinkham (1993), Waring (1998), and Schneider, Healy and Bourne (1998) investigated whether it is good practice, as dictated by most L2 teaching materials, to have learners study lists of semantically related items (such as words for clothes) or whether it is better to have students learn lists of unrelated words.…”

Phonetic Matching, Semanticized Phonetic Matching and Phono-Semantic Matching as Techniques in Keyword Selection

“…Ever since antiquity, mnemonics as memory aids have drawn the attention of philosophers, educators, psychologists, language practitioners, teachers and students, etc. As the memorization of foreign language vocabulary has remained a primary task for learners of that foreign language, mnemonics for memorizing new vocabulary items have been developed, experimented, and investigated extensively in the past and there has been a considerable amount of empirical researches into the effects of mnemonic methods in foreign language vocabulary learning (e.g., Atkinson 1975;Nation, 1982Nation, , 1990Hulstijn, 1997;Worthen & Hunt, 2011;Esposito, 2016). Among the most widely researched mnemonics is the keyword method, which was originally conceived by Atkinson (1975).…”

Dealing with Unknown Words in L2 Reading: Vocabulary and Lexical Inferencing Strategies

“…Vocabulary learning, according to Meara (1996) and Nation (1982), is, of course, anything but a static process. Attitudes on vocabulary learning, according to research such as that conducted by Watkins and Biggs (1996), differ from one civilization to another, while the same strategy may be implemented in a different way.…”