Ways in which we store and retrieve vocabulary

Ngā mihi nui

Recently I was asked about learning and teaching vocabulary which led to a discussion about the ways in which we store and retrieve vocabulary. For the purpose of this discussion we accept that vocabulary is taken to mean both single words and chunks of words which combine to communicate a meaning. For example, a single word might be something like bicycle, and a chunk might be something like raining cats and dogs, or falling rain.

The difficulty in thinking about vocabulary is that words only rarely have a single meaning. A bicycle is always a bicycle, but a dog is not always a four legs and a tail dog.

Consider these phrases:

• Raining cats and dogs
• My car is a real dog
• She keeps on dogging my footsteps
• She is a dogged competitor
• Dirty Dogs (sunglasses)

All of these have some idea which links the different uses of dog but the meaning communicated is dependent on the context and the surrounding words.

When we store the word dog we create a schema, a web of interrelated meanings and experiences related to dog. The schema diagram might look like this:

Recent research is indicating that these sorts of webs of meaning
are the way in which we store vocabulary, and when we come
across a new item we will plug it in to the appropriate web.
However these webs do not exist independently of each other
but are linked to other webs. The web for dog is linked to webs
for cars, other animals, weather etc.

And so on

As parents and teachers we need to keep in mind the way in which we store vocabulary and help our students to create the webs for themselves, remembering also that for our bilingual students the webs will contain words from both languages.

Kia ora ra,

Chris.