The weekly column

Article 93, March 2002

How good are you at learning foreign words?

By Rolf Palmberg
Department of Teacher Education, Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland

Most people presumably have their favourite way/s of learning foreign words. Some prefer traditional rote learning, whereas others divide the foreign words into parts or components and concentrate on these instead. Some look for similarities between the foreign words and words in their mother tongue or other languages they may know. Some people find mnemonic devices helpful, at least occasionally, while others have adopted different types of accelerated learning techniques and use them on a more or less permanent basis. One such technique, introduced by Atkinson in the 1970's as the keyword method, requires the learner to make a mental picture for the foreign word s/he wants to remember, another picture for the meaning of the word, and then to link the two pictures together. One would therefore expect this method to be particularly popular among visual-spatial learners and the links between the words to be even more effective when created on the basis of the learners' individual memory codes.

Assuming that learners' predominant intelligence types do in fact have a major influence on the way/s in which learners try to assign meaning to foreign vocabulary, one could, as suggested in Tornberg (1997), expect predominantly verbal-linguistic learners to create bilingual word cards or sentences that contain the new words, predominantly mathematical-logical learners to compare word stems and derivations and produce systematic word lists, predominantly visual-spatial learners to use both words and images to create mental associations, predominantly musical-rhythmic learners to create melodies that contain both rhyme and rhythm, predominantly bodily-kinesthetic learners to associate the new words with body movements and dramatisation, etc.

So what about you? Are you good at learning and remembering foreign words? Have you got any favourite learning techniques that work especially well for you? Do you find that some words are more difficult to memorise and assign meanings to than others? Does the learning task get much more difficult when you are required to learn and remember foreign words under special circumstances, say, for example, when you are not allowed to study the new words for as long as you want or when you don't have a chance to write the words down?

WORD INTAKE is a computer program (click here to download) designed to test your ability to learn and remember foreign words under quite difficult circumstances. When you start the program, you will see twenty English words relating to geography, together with their foreign-language counterparts. Each pair of words will be visible for a period of five seconds. Next, the English words will be displayed on the computer screen in random order, and your task is to select for each word its foreign-language counterpart from a list of four words, one of which is the correct one. The program stops when you have correctly selected the foreign-language counterpart for each English word, twice. This is to check that you have in fact recognised the words and not just selected them randomly.

When an English word has been selected correctly twice, it does not reappear. All foreign-language words, however, will be used as multiple-choice alternatives throughout the program. To put it differently, the more words you have identified correctly, the easier for you to figure out the correct foreign-language word for each remaining English word - provided, of course, that you are a good language learner who can use the information given by the multiple-choice alternatives and remember the words stored in your short-term memory.

Please note that the program doesn't test your knowledge of foreign vocabulary, and you should therefore select a language that you are unfamiliar with (you can choose between Finnish, Spanish, and Malay). Nor does the program tell you what to do in order to improve your vocabulary learning skills. It only gives you an idea of how good you are at learning and remembering foreign words in the learning environment created by the program.

Reference
Tornberg, U. 1997. Språkdidaktik. Malmö: Gleerups.

About the Author
Rolf Palmberg has been training FL teachers for twenty years at Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland. His publications include two Swedish-language books (a book containing communicative activities for learners of Swedish as a second language - co-written with Olav Palmqvist - and an introduction to CALL), about 50 articles in international journals and magazines, and about 50 CALL programs. He has given presentations at conferences in Finland, Sweden, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Australia, Singapore, Greece, the Soviet Union (Estonia), Hongkong, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. For more information on Rolf please click here

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