The serendipity of lexis learning [AL]

The term Serendipity refers to the fact of something nice and unexpected happening by chance.

Learning new words or, more generally, lexemes can be a tricky business. The typical student will have plenty of recorded words and expressions he or she would love to use but never really gets to use and hardly ever comes across again anyway, so the whole chore of collecting and organising them ends up being, to a very large extent, a bit of a waste.

There are a few tricks students can use to make some use of their notebooks and all the untapped potential, but perhaps I will talk about this in a different post: what I am concerned with now is what we, as teachers, can do in our lessons to help our students memorise new lexis.

I have found that in order to learn new lexis students need two things: repetition and meaningful context, or rather cotext (i.e. other words that words occur with). What I mean by repetition is clear: students need to see words not just a couple of times but several, and the more often they see them the more likely they are to remember them; but if you just drill them over and over again the learning value of each repetition progressively lowers. What they need along with repetition is meaninful context. And meaningul context, in short, is provided by unexpectedness, the exact opposite of drilling. Here's where the concept of serendipity kicks in.

We can have our students make serendipitous encounters of lexis, or rather sneakily use words that we know they are going to come across in future lessons and make it all seem serendipitous.

Here's how we can do it:

Before teaching a lesson or, better yet, before starting a new course, you skip ahead to following units and make a note of all the interesting lexis you come across, especially words and lexemes that you know you could spontaneously use in class. Next step, of course, is use them, so that when you reach the following units and your students see them for the second time they will be more likely to remember them because you've providided them with meaningful context.

An example of how I used this in class is the word swap. I noticed it was going to turn up in one of the reading texts in the very following unit so what I did was, I used the word during a lesson to give instructions for a speaking activity.