Vocabulary Acquisition: Personal Experience

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how students of a language learn new words. 26 Letters has had some nice articles on this lately including this one, which started me on this quest to learn more. Personally I’ve always leaned toward the theory that language is best learned in context both as a teacher and as a student. It just seems to make more sense to me that words that have something to do with each other are easier to learn. Or words that relate to some kind of emotion or interesting situation.

So I’ve started reflecting back on my experience to see if I have evidence to support this theory. Here are a few anecdotes as a teacher and a student learning languages.

10 years ago when my classmates and I were preparing for the SAT, one of my friends had a book that promised to teach you SAT words by relating them to a funny picture that illustrated the meaning. My English teacher saw this book and started mocking my classmate. He read the following entry from the book out loud: vestiges sounds like “vest itches” So picture a guy wearing a wool vest and then taking it off and saying, “Wow this vest still itches.” So vestiges are something that remains after the source or cause has been removed. Now I already knew what the word vestiges meant at that time, but 10 years later I remember the mnemonic very well. In fact, I saw the book about 2 years ago in a library and flipped straight to V, confirming that I had pretty much kept the memory perfectly preserved. So it’s a weird case of context learning, associating a word with something funny and silly, actually worked. But we might also wonder if our students are going to remember the mnemonic so well, and if that is what we really want them to do.

I also have stories of simply learning lists of unrelated words working to some extent. I still remember that the word hoplite in Greek means a heavily armored soldier. I learned that from flashcards drawn from words in a reading. However, I also have since that time read quite a bit of Greek philosophy and history and the word hoplite does come up from time to time. I really don’t remember any other words except logos, another term that comes up in philosophy and kratocracy, I think. Is that the word for “rule by force”? At the time however, learning those lists was very useful. I believe I did pretty well on my final exam in ancient Greek. So learning by lists without context doesn’t seem to do much for me in the long term. Most significantly when I try to remember Greek words, I strongly remember my Greek professor meeting with me in his office to tell me I wasn’t doing well and that perhaps flashcards would help, I remember what the flashcards looked like. I remember carrying them with me everywhere.

My wife, on the other hand, was born and raised in Kazakhstan where the education system tends to be quite memorization-heavy. She generally has a better memory than I do, especially for names, faces, dates, places and other details. At some point when she was learning English, she took the dictionary and started at aardvark. She made it quite a ways and she retains a lot of the vocab. Also interestingly, the other day I used the word abysmal, and she couldn’t remember what it meant but she remembered that she used to know. Which sort of reminds me of my memories of learning Greek.

So I wonder if 1) how we learn vocab (and other aspects of language) is determined by culture and the education system we are raised in; 2) if context learning can lead to our students remembering a lot more than we intend them to remember; 3) if so, how we can either mitigate this or use it? Can we make the context something that we also want them to remember?

I’d love to hear from teachers, students, any one.