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Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

A Rationale for Pedagogy

Edited by James Coady, Thomas Huckin

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Chapter

Chapter 4 - Vocabulary and comprehension: Two portraits pp. 55-68

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524643.007

Cambridge University Press

A Vocabulary and comprehensionTwo portraits

Kate Parry

Many colleges and universities in the United States admit large numbersof international or immigrant students whose proficiency in English isquite limited. Such students are usually required to take a language test,and if they do not do well, they have to enroll in courses in English as asecond language (ESL). Only after passing these are they allowed, inmany colleges, to proceed with regular courses and complete theirdegrees. By this time, they are, presumably, at an advanced stage oflanguage learning: They have control of the main grammatical structuresof English, and they know a good deal of vocabulary. But as they embarkon courses designed for native speakers, they are bound to come acrossmany words that are new to them, both the specialized terms of particularacademic fields and the enormous numbers of nonspecialized but none-theless infrequent words that characterize English academic prose (Hof-land & Johansson, 1982; Kucera & Francis, 1967). These words are nottaught in language classes - as Nation (1990) points out, it is neitherpracticable nor productive to try to teach them - and the nonspecializedones are not taught in content classes either; so the students must dealwith them on their own. The question is, How do they do this? And canlanguage teachers help them, before they leave ESL classes, to developmore appropriate strategies?

My approach to these questions has been through case studies of indi-vidual students who had been through the ESL sequence at Hunter Col-lege of the City University of New York, and who were, at the time Istudied them, enrolled in Introductory Anthropology, one of the college's

The research on which this article is based was supported by grant number 668415from the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program of the City University of New York,and material was first presented in 1991 at the 25th Annual TESOL Convention as partof a colloquium titled "Research Issues in L2 Vocabulary." I am grateful to TESOL forthe opportunities its conventions have provided for presenting my ideas on vocabularyacquisition, and to the editors of this volume for encouraging me to develop theseideas. I would also like to thank Dimitri and Ae Young, without whose cooperation theresearch would have been impossible; Agathi Raptu and Joo-Eun Ju for their help intranslating the Greek and Korean data; Franklyn Horowitz for making an independentassessment of the students' glosses; and my colleagues at Hunter College, in both theEnglish and the Anthropology Departments, for their help in carrying out the project.

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56 Kate Parry

distribution requirement courses. The two students whose portraits aredrawn here are a Greek Cypriot man called Dimitri and a Korean womancalled Ae Young (the names are fictitious). Both took the anthropologycourse in the fall of 1988, having successfully completed the highest of thecollege's ESL courses the previous spring; and, before coming to Hunter,both had completed a high school education in their own country. Thislatter point is important, because I wanted students for this study whowould have a sufficiently wide vocabulary in their first language todemonstrate, by translation, the accuracy of their understanding of theEnglish words with which they were now dealing.

Once I had identified the students and secured their agreement toparticipate in the project, my method was to give them, first, a standardvocabulary test (I used the vocabulary section of the Michigan Test ofEnglish Language Proficiency) and then to ask them to keep lists of anywords that they encountered in their anthropology textbook that causedthem "difficulty." (The textbook in question was Cultural Anthropology:A Contemporary Perspective by Roger M. Keesing [1981].) The entry foreach word included the page reference (so that I could identify the con-text), the student's guess as to the word's meaning, and a record of thedictionary definition if the student chose to look it up. Then, after thestudents had been making these lists for about 6 weeks, each made asimilar one, based on another anthropology text (it was an extract froman article entitled "African and Afro-American Family Structure" byNiara Sudarkasa [1982], thinking aloud as they did so. Two weeks aftermaking these think-aloud protocols, the students translated into Greek orKorean, respectively, two paragraphs of the text on which the protocolshad been based. Finally, at the end of the term, by which time the studentshad completed several more lists on their own, each of them did a testbased on his or her own lists. This test consisted of every fifth word thatthe student in question had recorded, and it was presented in two stages:First, the words were shown in isolation, and the student was asked towrite down the meanings of any that he or she could remember; then eachword was shown in the context of the single sentence in which the studenthad first noted it, and, again, the student was asked to write down whateach word meant. Throughout, the students were invited to use their firstlanguages for the expression of meaning; and then all the first languageglosses, as well as the translations, were put back into English by infor-mants who were native speakers of Greek and Korean, respectively, andwho were also extremely proficient speakers of English.

This procedure provided, first, a broad, though necessarily incomplete,view of each student's vocabulary and of its development through theanthropology course and, second, a detailed, though also incomplete,picture of the students' strategies as they dealt with the new vocabularyand of the accuracy with which they were thereby interpreting the text.

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Vocabulary and comprehension: Two portraits 57

TABLE I . COMPARISON OF DATA PRODUCED BY TWO STUDENTS

1. PretestScore2. Work based on textbookWords readWords listed

# "relatively frequent"Words glossed

"Correct""Partly correct""Incorrect"

3. PosttestStage 2: # glosses givenStage 2: # glosses given

"Correct""Partly correct""Incorrect"

Dimitri

58%

72,000?91 (0.1%?)

8 (9%)83 (91%)*20 (22%)*35 (39%)*27 (30%)*

1/19 (5%)18/19 (95%)2/19(11%)3/19 (17%)

13/19 (68%)

Ae Young

63%

7,500?119(1.6%?)36 (31%)

116(97%)*14 (12%)*44 (37%)*58 (49%)*

7/24 (29%)19/24 (79%)6/24 (25%)9/24 (38%)4/24(17%)

* Percentages are of total number of words listed.

The broad view is summed up in Table 1, which shows how the studentsdid, first, on the pretest, second, on the lists that they made on the basis ofthe textbook, and, third, on the posttest.

There are obvious difficulties in reducing this kind of information tofigures, as is suggested here by the use of question marks and quotationmarks. To begin with, I cannot be sure of the total number of words readby each student: The figures given here are an estimate based on thenumber of pages they claimed to have covered, but there is no certaintythat they read everything that was on each page. Second, the assessmentof the glosses is necessarily subjective, being based on my own judgmentafter discussion with my informants (see Parry, 1993b for how the deci-sions were reached); thus the figures can be taken only as a generalindication, and only the broadest differences can be consideredsignificant.1

Nevertheless, the figures are useful for purposes of comparison, andthey suggest a contrast that is indeed striking. Although the two studentswere putatively at the same level, in terms of both their status in relationto the college's English language program and the scores they obtained onthe Michigan vocabulary test, they seem, by all the other indicators, to

1 I did, however, have a colleague assess the glosses (or their back-translations)independently, and we reached 77% agreement on Dimitri's and 84% on Ae Young's.I should add that my colleague's classifications were consistently less stringent thanmine (see Parry, 1991).



58 Kate Parry

differ greatly in proficiency. To judge from his lists, Dimitri is by far thestronger of the two: He read much more, he found fewer words to bedifficult, only a small proportion of those words were "relativelyfrequent" - which I defined as appearing ten or more times in the fre-quency counts of both Kucera and Francis (1967) and Hofland andJohansson (1982) - and he was relatively successful in guessing the mean-ings of the words he did not know. Ae Young, by contrast, read very little(much less, indeed, than any of the four students that I have studied) andclaimed she had difficulty with a much higher percentage of the words; ofthese a larger proportion were "relatively frequent," and her guesses as tothe meanings of the difficult words were "incorrect" nearly half of thetime.

When we look at the posttest scores, however, the position is reversed:Ae Young seemed to have quite a good memory for the words she hadrecorded, recognizing nearly a third (29%) of those sampled when shesaw them in isolation, and defining more than half (25% plus 38%) withsome degree of accuracy when she saw them in their original single-sentence context. Dimitri's performance, by contrast, was abysmal: heapparently only recognized one of the nineteen words that he was givenin isolation, and, when he was given the single-sentence context for each,he was still able to produce only five definitions (28%) that were evenpartly correct. We are thus presented with a conundrum: Dimitri wouldseem, from his lists, to have a wider vocabulary than Ae Young, but howcould he have acquired it if his memory for what he learns is so bad? AeYoung would seem, from her posttest, to be relatively good at learningnew words, but if so, why does she not do better on her lists? The answersuggested by their protocols and translations is that they employed quitedifferent strategies, which are effective in different ways and for differentkinds of comprehension.

Now let us look at the detailed picture that is given us by the protocols.Figures 1 and 2 show the words the students listed when they read theprotocol passage, together with their glosses (the glosses that have beentranslated back from Greek or Korean are in italics). Also shown are myown classifications of these glosses in terms of accuracy. When these listsare analyzed in the same way as those made by the students when theywere reading the textbook on their own, they produce comparable re-sults. The figures are given in Table 2.

Ae Young recorded much the same proportion of the total number ofwords read as she did when working on her own (1.4% as compared to1.6%). Dimitri recorded a rather higher proportion (0.6% as comparedto 0.1%) - a difference that can probably be accounted for by the factthat my observing him made him self-conscious - but he still recordedmany fewer words than did Ae Young. As for the accuracy of the glosses,while the numbers are too small and the classifications too uncertain for



Original word

matrilineage

uterinepaternallydeitiessolelyconsanguinealreckonedbilaterallyperpetuitydomiciled

indigenous


Gloss Classification

males and females have common female partly correctancestorhalf-brother or sister partly correctfrom the father race partly correct

only, exclusively correct

it is common between the two groupping incorrectby both parents partly correctexists one upon the other incorrectthe family whose sister and daughters after incorrectmariage ar movinging to their husbandscompoundsthe lineage betweeen males ad femals or incorrecthusbands ad wives was strict

Figure 1 Dimitri's glosses for protocol text.

Original word

uterinesiredpaternityprecolonial

entityallocationdeitiesmandatealliancecustomaryrudimentarysiblingfiliationbilaterallydiscreteoverlappingmaritaltransresidentialperpetuityaffiliationlabyrinthinedomiciledseveranceindigenousanalogous

Gloss

cousins whos mothers are sisterbornstandard examplebefore whole city separated into manypiecesfixed propertysomething givenroll or functionaccomplishhelpcustomopposite elementarybrothers and sisters

—through both parentseach other do not open their mindscare about too muchabout marriagemovable residensepermenante periodascendantextendedwihout wives

—not opensomething to opposite

Classification

correctcorrectincorrectpartly correct

incorrectpartly correctincorrectincorrectpartly correctpartly correctincorrectcorrect

partly correctincorrectincorrectcorrectpartly correctcorrectincorrectpartly correctincorrect

—incorrectincorrect

Figure 2 Ae Young's glosses for protocol text.



60 Kate Parry

TABLE 2. PERFORMANCE OF TWO STUDENTS ON PROTOCOL TEXT

Words readWords listedWords glossed

"Correct""Partly correct"

"Incorrect"

Dimitri

c. 1,80011 (0.6%)9 (82%)*1 (9%)*4 (36%)*4 (36%)*

Ae Young

c. 1,80025 (1.4%)23 (92%)*

5 (20%)*7 (28%)*

11 (44%)*

* Percentages are of total number of words listed.

the percentages given here to carry much weight, there are two interestingpoints to note: First, on the protocol passage, as on the textbook, bothstudents produced more glosses that were at least "partly correct" thanones that were clearly "incorrect," and, second, Ae Young producedsignificantly more "incorrect" ones than did Dimitri.

What I want to emphasize here, however, is not so much the relativeaccuracy of the students' guesses as the different ways in which theyarrived at them. Simply by looking at the lists, we can see a significantdifference in the two students' styles: when Dimitri glosses a word, hetends not to isolate it, but to interpret the larger unit in which it appears,whereas Ae Young is more likely to give as a gloss a single word or phrasethat could be substituted for the one in question. For example, the wordindigenous appears in this context:

Divorce was not common in indigenous African societies.

Dimitri, in glossing it as "the lineage between males ad femals or hus-bands ad wives was strict," seems to have paraphrased the whole sen-tence, as he understood it; and his glosses for matrilineage, reckoned,perpetuity, and domiciled share this characteristic. Ae Young, by con-trast, in glossing indigenous as "not open," seems to have been thinkingof the word on its own and even to have analyzed its constituent parts (in-as "not" and -digenous as "open"); and there is evidence from her pro-tocol that she did the same thing with pre-colonial, bi-laterally, dis-crete,over-lapping, and trans-residential. Only in the case of uterine, for whichshe guessed "cousins whos mothers are sister," do we see reflected in hergloss her interpretation of the whole phrase in which the word appears(the phrase is "children of uterine sisters," so, as an interpretation of thewhole, her gloss is quite accurate).

It may therefore be possible to characterize Dimitri's style as "holistic,"in contrast to Ae Young's, which is "analytic" (Van Daalen-Kapteijns &CElshout-Mohr, 1981); or, alternatively, they can be thought of as "top-down" and "bottom-up" (see Parry, 1993a). This impression is con-




firmed by the general strategies shown by the two students in the think-aloud protocol. Dimitri, when asked to read the passage and gloss thedifficult words in the same way as he usually did when making his lists,read the whole text straight through, marking the words as he went, butspending little time thinking about them. Then he read through the pas-sage again, this time stopping to write each word down and work out itsmeaning; after a minute or two of thought, he wrote down his gloss(except in the cases of deities and consanguineal) and proceeded to lookthe word up in the dictionary. This last step took him a surprisingly longtime - he seemed not to be sure of alphabetical order, and on at least twooccasions wasted time by scanning the wrong pages - but once he hadfound the word he worked quickly: He looked at the definitions offered,selected the one he thought most appropriate, wrote it down, and wentstraight on with reading the passage. Ae Young, by contrast, read thepassage only once, stopping and working on each word as she came to it.In each case she spent a long time trying to work out the word's meaning,and then, when she had written her gloss, she turned to the dictionary.She was much more efficient than Dimitri at finding the word, but onceshe had recorded the definition, she did not go straight on; instead, shewent back to the context, reconstructing her interpretation in the light ofthe definition she had found.

These differences between the two students can best be illustrated bycomparing what they said about a couple of the words that they bothfound difficult. One of these was deities, which appears in this context:

Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all the functions oflineages in African societies, suffice it to say that where they existed inprecolonial times, they were landholding corporate entities charged with theallocation of land, titles, and other properties among their members. Invirtually all cases, lineages were identified with particular ancestral homelands;in some instances, they had special deities as well. Although there have beensome changes in the function of lineages in contemporary Africa, where theyexist they are still a vital part of the social structure. Ultimately, because of theactual and fictive links that connect the living members to the foundingancestor, lineages were and are the kin groups that signify and symbolizesocial continuity in African societies.

On his first reading of the passage Dimitri stopped at deities and markedit, repeating it once as he did so. He commented that he did not know itand then went on reading. The second time around he stopped againwhen he came to the word, commented briefly "that word," and rereadthe sentence in which it appeared. He did not, however, come up with anyguess as to its meaning, but simply said "I'll have to look that word," andbegan looking through the dictionary. When he found it, he read the firstdefinition, making a miscue at first, but correcting himself: " 'The state ofbeing good - the state of being god.'" He paused and then suggested an



62 Kate Parry

interpretation: "Which means something that is special to them." But heseemed not to be happy with this, for he read over the sentence again,substituting the words state of being god for deities. "No," he said, "Ithink - it doesn't look right, this one," and, reading from the dictionaryagain, " 'the state of being god, divine, natural, a god of - or goddess -deity," but he left the definition, state of being god, written down andwent on with the passage.

When Ae Young came to the same point - which took her a long time,for she had to stop and work on precolonial, entities, and allocation aswell - she repeated the word, as had Dimitri, and then said, writing as shedid so, "They had special deities. Deities as well. Mm." Then she rereadthe sentence and went on reading to the end of the paragraph. At thatpoint she stopped: "OK, then. Deities. They had special - I think it'srelated to the word homeland. So, urn." She read the sentence again, andrejected this hypothesis - "No, it's not about homeland" - and, havingread the sentence yet again, came up with another: "It means - they hadspecial deities - is it like - identification?" She read the sentence oncemore, and then went back to the beginning of the paragraph, reading onesentence beyond the problematic word. This generated yet another hy-pothesis: "I think it's like - um - something they have to do, I mean,some - some respons - some responsibility for - 1 mean, some role, role?Function?" And this was what she wrote down. Of course, when shelooked it up, she found something quite different, and registered hersurprise: "The rank or nature of a god or a - special? OK - supremebeing, god?' Oh? OK," and she looked at the context in which she hadfound the word again. It took her a little time to work it out, but then shesaw what it meant: "OK, so it means they are own god like special homegod. Or - supreme beings. Something they delivering - like, oh, OK. Itmeans so they have their special - gods as well as ancestral homelands."At that point she wrote down the definition.

It is hardly fair to Dimitri to illustrate his strategy only with a word onwhich he did not even attempt a guess. So let us consider what he did withdomiciled, a word both students glossed, but neither of them correctly. Itappears in this context:

Although African extended families tend to be large, labyrinthine groupings,for illustrative purposes an extended family occupying a single compound in apatrilineal society . . . might be diagrammed as a group of brothers, theirwives, their adult sons and grandsons and their wives, and any unmarriedchildren in the group. . . . The married daughters and sisters of the adultmales would be resident in the compounds of their husbands. Thus, theconsanguineal core of the domiciled extended family consists of the adultmales and their unmarried children.

On his first reading, Dimitri commented only briefly on the word:"Domiciled - that kind of family? I think domiciled, that's the con-




sanguineal core of that kind of family - of that family." Then he went onreading. The second time around he gave it a bit more attention, firstgoing back to the beginning of the previous sentence and rereading from"The married daughters" to "their unmarried children," and then quitequickly coming up with a hypothesis: "Domiciled extended families - thefamilies whose - oh - daughters and sisters are when they get marriedthey are moving to their husband's compound." The guess is not correct,of course, but it is clearly motivated by the text, and also, probably, bywhat he had been taught in anthropology about patrilocal as opposed tomatrilocal societies. So he wrote the guess down and went straight to thedictionary. There (after much flipping through pages) he found "Custom-ary dwelling place, home residence, law one's fixed place of dwellingwhere one tends to reside more or less permanently," and it is evidentfrom the fact that he both read and wrote down the word law as acontinuous part of the dictionary definition that not only was he unawareof the conventions by which dictionaries indicate specialist terms, but hewas not really using the information that he had looked up. On thecontrary, he just went on, making no apparent attempt to incorporate thedefinition into his interpretation of the text.

Ae Young, however, with domiciled as with deities, showed a muchmore thorough processing of the word. First she went back, as hadDimitri, to the beginning of the previous sentence and read down to"their unmarried children." Then she repeated again, "'Domiciled ex-tended family consists of the adult males and their unmarried children'"and commented: "Adult males. Just males. Not females. So, domiciled.Oh - domiciled. It's, um, means - oh. It means without wives? Like,domiciled - Consangui - it means the blood, right? Blood relatives.Only - males and their unmarried children. . . . if they do have theirwives, then they will have their - no, if they marry, then they are livingout. Domiciled extended family. Why no wives? Without wives? [shewrote the gloss down at this point] I don't - 1 - I don't think so." At thispoint she looked in the dictionary, and, as with deities, found quite adifferent interpretation: "OK. No. No. It's just a dwelling place, home.Domiciled. Do-mi-ciled. OK, so it's not about the wives. It's about - OK,if it's just a home, then, that mean Thus the consanguineal core of thedomici - ' Oh, the core, so it's the - it's because of the blood, OK 'of theadult males and their unmarried children.' OK."

The patterns shown in these two examples were repeated throughoutthe two protocols. Dimitri stopped for 11 words, and he spent an averageof 193 seconds working on each; but over half of that time was spentlooking at the dictionary, and only 90 seconds (47%) were spent workingout his own interpretation of the word in the context. Ae Young, on theother hand, stopped for 25 words, and spent an average of 183 secondsworking on each one; of this time, only 37 seconds (20%) were spent



64 Kate Parry

looking in the dictionary, while 146 seconds (80%) were spent eithertrying to guess the word's meaning or reconstructing her interpretation ofthe text once she had looked it up. Moreover, in working with each word,Ae Young repeated it, on average, no fewer than fifteen times, in contrastto Dimitri, whose repetitions of his "difficult" words (including his sec-ond reading of the whole text) averaged only eight.

This analysis of the protocol goes a long way toward explaining thefigures presented earlier. Dimitri's holistic, or top-down, approach is ob-viously much faster than Ae Young's analytic, more bottom-up, one, andthis would explain why he read so much more through the term than shedid.2 It also explains why he recorded fewer words as "difficult": if heconsistently reads a lot more than she does, he is indeed likely to knowmore words, simply from having been exposed to them, and this must beparticularly true of relatively frequent ones. Ae Young's analytic ap-proach, on the other hand, makes her reading painfully slow; conse-quently, she does not read much, and so she encounters fewer wordsaltogether, and the more frequent ones less often, than does Dimitri.Those words that she does encounter, however, she works over so thor-oughly that she has a relatively good chance of remembering them whenshe is tested on them within a period of a few weeks. As for the "incor-rect" glosses, Ae Young's relatively high proportion of these can be ex-plained partly by her willingness to write down guesses that she reallythought might be wrong - as we have seen in the case of "without wives"for domiciled; thus the misinterpretation that such a guess represents mayoften be only provisional, and the fact that she reconstructs her interpre-tation after finding the dictionary definition suggests that any misin-terpretation she does make is soon corrected.

Indeed, when we look at the translations that the students both did, wecan see that Ae Young's strategy produced, at least in this case, signifi-cantly more accurate comprehension than Dimitri's. The two paragraphsused for this task were taken from the protocol text and outlined thedifferences between the lineage and the extended family. The first sen-tence reads like this:

It is important to understand the differences between the lineage and theextended family in African kinship, for although the two groupings are closelyrelated, they are not the same.

Dimitri's translation, translated back into English, is this:

It is important to understand the differences among the two types of familiesexisting on African land; however the two categories are very closely relatedbut they are not exactly the same.

2 There is also the fact that Ae Young had, apparently, to spend a great deal of timeworking in her family's store.




So far, so good, it seems; only note that he has expressed kinship as"land," and he has made no terminological distinction between lineageand extended family, subsuming them instead under the general phrase"two kinds of family." Ae Young's translation of the sentence reads lesswell:

It is important to understand the difference of human relationship betweenblood ties and extended family in Africa. Because two groups are not same,even though they are closely related.

But she has included the notion of "kinship" as "relationship," and shedoes employ separate terms for lineage and extended family - althoughthe expression translated back as "blood ties" is not an exact equivalentfor the former.

The second sentence of the translation passage constitutes an explica-tion of the point made in the first one:

From what I have said so far, it should be apparent first of all that extendedfamilies are based on marriage and descent, whereas lineages are based solelyon descent.

Dimitri's translation, as with the previous sentence, begins with remark-able accuracy - but then something goes badly wrong:

From what I have said so far it is possible to understand that the two familycategories are based on the institution of marriage and on the classificationfrom which they come from, with which I mean from which family the twopersons are from.

Again, the distinction between lineage and extended family is lost, sub-sumed in the more general "two family categories," and the final clause,which presents a distinctive feature of the lineage as a social construct, iscompletely misinterpreted. Contrast Ae Young's translation of this sen-tence, which, though increasingly peculiar, does show a grasp of the basicdistinction:

My saying so far represents that while preferentially extended family is basedon marriage and offsprings, blood tie is based on offsprings only.

In the next sentence, both students seem to get lost. It reads like this:

It is important to realize also that the living adult members of a lineage formthe core of consanguineal ("blood") relatives around whom the extendedfamily is built.

Dimitri again loses the distinction between lineage and extended family,and apparently makes up for his loss of comprehension by producinganother explanatory clause that is pure invention:

It is very essential to understand that men from one family are connected tothe institution which depends on the blood type with this I mean that allindividuals coming from one family, their blood has something common.



66 Kate Parry

Ae Young, by contrast, keeps the distinction, and recognizes all the otherlexical elements in the sentence; but she seems to have little understand-ing of how they fit together:

It is also important to recognize that extended family is composed of liveadults of blood ties centering blood relatives.

Finally, in the last sentence of the paragraph, Dimitri demonstrateshow fundamental his failure to understand lineage is. The sentence is asfollows:

Furthermore, as Uchendu notes, even in those African societies wherecorporate lineages are absent or exist only in rudimentary form, the extendedfamilies are still based around consanguineal cores, that is, persons linked byparent-child and/or sibling ties.

Dimitri's translation of this sentence suggests that he is at this pointthinking of lineage as "marriage":

Also, as Uchendu has written, these African societies in which the institutionof marriage is not so strong, if is existing only the very light type, thesefamilies rely on the institution of blood connection and that individuals areconnected, for example like a father and son.

Perhaps what has happened here is a case of what Huckin and Bloch call"mistaken ID" (1993); Dimitri could be confusing lineage with linkage,an interpretation also suggested by his gloss for indigenous (see Figure 1).Be that as it may, the problem is a serious one: Lineage is a key word inthis text, and Dimitri obviously does not know it. Worse still, he does notknow that he does not know it, so that he does not even develop ahypothesis as to its meaning in the various sentences in which it appears.Thus, despite his holistic approach to text, he totally misses the mainpoint. Ae Young, on the other hand, does get the main point, though herexpression of it is very peculiar (my Korean informant assures me that itis quite as peculiar in Korean as it is in English). Her translation of the lastsentence of the paragraph is this:

Moreover, as Wenchedoo mentioned, even in African society in whichcooperative blood tie does not exist or exist in fundamental forms, extendedfamily is still based on the relationship between parents and offsprings ofblood relatives.

If we remember that she is using "blood tie" for lineage, her translationdoes bear some resemblance to the intended sense.

For the remaining four sentences of the translation, the story is thesame: Dimitri alternates between interpreting lineage as a "category" offamily, or as an "institution" (though he does not again suggest specifi-cally "marriage"); Ae Young keeps her interpretation of the word as"blood tie" stable, and maintains the distinction between it and extendedfamily. The consequence is that while Ae Young keeps more or less on




track, Dimitri goes badly off it, so much so that his translation makeslittle sense at all.

Dimitri got a C for his anthropology course, and if his performance inthe protocol and translation tasks is typical, this C is not surprising. Yethe must have been surprised by it, and disappointed too. After all, he didall the reading for the course and attended most of the lectures, as well asdoing all the additional work for me, and, judging from the fluency withwhich he read the protocol passage and wrote the translation, he seemedto have little sense that anything was wrong. Indeed, in the earlier stagesof learning the language, when he was dealing with texts that were sim-pler in content and used less infrequent vocabulary, I suspect that nothingvery much was wrong: At that stage his holistic strategy would have paidoff, for he was, as we have seen, successful at guessing word meaningsfrom context, and vocabulary items that are encountered quite frequentlyare probably best learned in this way (cf. Saragi, Nation, & Meister,1978). But specialized academic terms have to be understood with someprecision, and so do many of the nonspecialized but infrequent wordsthat are used to explain them: Dimitri's strategy of looking for a broadgeneral picture, and being satisfied with interpretation at the level ofsentence or phrase rather than of individual words, is simply not exactenough for these purposes. Dimitri needs to learn something from AeYoung, it seems, about how to isolate problematic words and to analyzetheir contribution to the context.

On the other hand, Ae Young did not do so well either. She got a B, buther instructor said it was a weak one, her average score on her examsfalling only just above the boundary between B and C. Moreover, she readvery little of the text, which means that she never encountered many ofthose words that are used only once in it, and, still more serious, she didnot encounter as many times the words that are used more frequently. Ifthis was how she was reading throughout her ESL courses, it is notsurprising that she completed the last one with an apparently rathernarrow vocabulary. She would have done better, when reading simplertexts, to follow a strategy more like Dimitri's, and, indeed, such a strategywould probably help her to speed up even on texts as difficult as this.

Unfortunately, Dimitri and Ae Young have both completed their lan-guage courses, so it is unlikely that anyone will help them to develop newstrategies: Dimitri may well continue to get Cs without knowing why, andAe Young may continue to find the assigned reading for her courses anintolerable burden. The students who are at present in our classes may,however, benefit from Dimitri's and Ae Young's experience. These twoportraits show a marked difference between holistic and analytic ap-proaches to vocabulary, and demonstrate that both approaches are neces-sary but that neither is appropriate at all times. The implication is thatstudents need to develop flexibility. This should be the focus of vocabu-



68 Kate Parry

lary teaching at the higher levels of language learning: We need to discussstrategies in our classes and to devise exercises that will help students notonly to learn specific words but also to approach vocabulary in differentways. It is vital, above all, that students find out, and show us, what kindof learners they are; with that information we can advise them appropri-ately, and, still more important, they will be better able to helpthemselves.

References

Hofland, K., & Johansson, S. (1982). Word frequencies in British and AmericanEnglish. Harlow, England: Longmans.

Huckin, T., & Bloch, J. (1993). Strategies for inferring word-meanings in con-text: A cognitive model. In T. Huckin, M. Haynes, & J. Coady (Eds.),Second language reading and vocabulary acquisition (pp. 153-180). Nor-wood, NJ: Ablex.

Keesing, R. M. (1981). Cultural anthropology: A contemporary perspective.New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Kucera, H., & Francis, W. N. (1967). Computational analysis of present-dayAmerican English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.

Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning new vocabulary. New York: New-bury House.

Parry, K. J. (1991). Building a vocabulary through academic reading. TESOLQuarterly 25(4), 629-653.

(1993a). The social construction of reading strategies: New directions forresearch. Journal of Research in Reading, 16(2), 148-158.

(1993b). Too many words: Learning the vocabulary of an academic subject. InT. Huckin, M. Haynes, &c J. Coady (Eds.), Second language reading andvocabulary acquisition (pp. 109-129). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Saragi, T., Nation, I. S. P., & Meister, G. F. (1978). Vocabulary learning andreading. System, 6(2), 72-78.

Sudarkasa, N. (1982). African and Afro-American family structure. In J. B. Cole(Ed.), Anthropology for the eighties (pp. 132-160). New York: Free Press.

Van Daalen-Kapteijns, N., & Elshout-Mohr, M. (1981). The acquisition of wordmeaning as a cognitive learning process. Journal of Verbal Learning andVerbal Behavior, 20, 386-399.



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