Here are notes from Monica Flores’ thesis. One thing I found particularly noteworthy is in bold.

The author describes several key ways she consciously learns new words when she hears on spoken (or sees it written) and doesn’t understand it.

• Noticing
• Repetition
• Identifying collocations
• Conscious decision to use newly noticed words
• Comparing it to L1 construction (e.g. with collocations and phrasal verbs) to notice the difference
• Use a dictionary for meaning and pronunciation
• Practice in discussion
• Understand context for proper usage

It is interesting that her methodology goes against the grain of old-fashioned vocabulary lists generated by a teacher or textbook. She’s learning her vocabulary based on her specific needs in the contexts in which she finds herself. It all begins with noticing, rather than externally imposed order. It’s important to note that she is an advanced learner, and this methodology probably couldn’t be used alone for newer users of a language; some external structure and scaffolding is likely to be necessary.

Another interesting point, while not surprising, is that she has found motivation to be key in her desire to create connections between new words she hears and their meanings. “Multiple encounters and motivation” are important.

A few other things: how we sometimes store a word without its definition in our native language. “Aubergine” is a word I keep forgetting the English equivalent of.

She talks about Weinstein and Mayer’s four-stage encoding process, and we can infer how it relates to her experience:

• Selection (which she experiences as noticing what word she doesn’t understand or needs)
• Acquisition (in her version, she does this a number of ways, e.g. by repeating, collocating, etc.)
• Construction (internal connections; she learned how to use it by practicing and identifying correct context)
• Integration (when it has become truly part of her verbal toolbox, without need for overt translation; the word can be retrieved from long-term memory)

The area of most concern for me as a learner is the process of getting something from short-term to long-term memory. I don’t know how to get a word to “stick” long enough for it to progress through other stages of acquisition.

In summary she talks about vocabulary learning having to do with what a person does with a list of words, and that it’s not limited to words in isolation but as lexical units, which leads to a more context-based acquisition.

But wait. There’s more. Another way of staying what she said before is the following. It’s her synthesis of strategies she used for learning vocabulary, which repeats what I wrote about but has some additional things:

• Translation (its L1 meaning)
• Note-taking (writing the L2 word)
• Repetition (practice)
• Contextualization (identifying meaning from context)
• Resourcing (looking it up)
• Transfer (generalizing a suffix to other uses)
• Get clarification (ask friends)

O’Malley and Chamot call the above “cognitive and social mediation” which are part of the Vocabulary Awareness Model. It is a dynamic process.

My question relates to other modes of or strategies for learning vocabulary. Where do things like mnemonic devices fall? Is that part of a different theory of vocabulary learning? It is considered valid, or too cognitively demanding and artificial? Or does it matter: whatever works? It’s distinct from but possibly concurrent with repetition. And what about the role of peripheral learning. Much of my vocabulary learning falls into this category: when I listen, walk away for a day, come back and listen again, maybe stick a word up on the wall and glance at it as I go by: that is an effective technique for me. Is it part of a different model, or how does it relate to this one.

In other words: her phase of “repetition” seems to telescope a rich and varied  panorama of experience.