Based on 'How to teach vocabulary' by Scott Thurnburry,this presentation tries to answer, briefly, two questions.First, it provides a description of how words are organized in our minds. Second, it makes a comparison between how vocabulary is learned by L 1 and L2 learners.

1. 3. How is our word
knowledge organised?
4. How is vocabulary acquired?
 Presented by : Mohamed Ez-zghari

2. How is our word
knowledge organised?
• The way words are stored in the mind resembles less a
dictionary than a kind of network or web . . . . The mind
seems to store words neither randomly nor in the form of
a list, but in a highly organized interconnected fashion—
the mental lexicon.

3.  Sometimes, we want to say a word, but we end
up saying another one.
Why?

4. • Words are organized in the mind according to
categories: fruits, clothes, animals…and once we have
access to a word in a category, this word allows us to
know other words within the same category.

5. • The mental lexicon organizes words by double
entries—Meaning & form. These entries are
linked to other words that share the same
characteristics.
Meaning: ( manga/ papaya)
Form: ( tangi/ tango)
• It is more that. When you activate a word, it activates
with it general knowledge and experience because every
body has a different representation of the word meaning
in his brain and different experiences related to that
word, differently from others.

6. • Knowing a word is a sum total of all these
connections— semantic, syntactic, phonological,
morphological, cognitive, and cultural

7. How is vocabulary
acquired?
• The difference between how children acquire
vocabulary in their first language and adult in
learning a second language

8. • In learning their first language, the first words that
children learn are those used for labelling—that is
mapping words into concepts ; for example, the concept
“dog” has a name ‘dog’ or ‘doggie’.
• Then, the child has to learn how to classify the words
he/she learns into categories ( fruit, animal…)

9. • How is building vocabulary in first language different
form that of second language?

10. • Adult learners already have a language. They already
have a conceptual system that links words to what they
refer to.
• Learning a second language, they need to make a new
conceptual system and vocabulary network. adult
learners have a privilege that they already know “ things”
in their fist language, so they resort to it.

11. • yet this practice might become a matter of confusion and
errors.
• Some words might be thought of to have the same
equivalents in the Target language, but sometimes they
don’t.( actually, chef—in French—do not mean the
same in English )

12. • words having the
same equivalents
in the target
language: (table
in French &
English)
Real
friends
• words having
different
equivalents in the
target language: (
traduction in
French/
translation in
English)
False
friends
• words having no
equivalents in the
target language:
supposedly (
privacy,
community have
no equivalents in
Chinese)
Strangers

13. Thank you