II - CASE STUDIES

Summary

Case studies can be helpful in “bringing to life” some of the complexity and individual variation involved in vocabulary learning. Part II presents detailed portraits of four adult second language learners struggling to build up their word knowledge in English, Hebrew, and Portuguese. Of special interest is the fact that two of the studies are “self-portraits,” with the authors describing their own efforts to build their second language vocabulary. If any objectivity is sacrificed in this effort, it is more than compensated for by the unusually high level of self-awareness provided by the investigators.

The first chapter in Part II, Kate Parry's “Vocabulary and comprehension: Two portraits,” presents two case studies of advanced ESL students handling the vocabulary encountered in introductory anthropology texts. The students made lists of the words they found difficult, tried to guess the meaning of these words, recorded think-aloud protocols while reading a passage, and translated a portion of this passage into their first languages (Greek and Korean, respectively). These data are analyzed and the differences between the two students are discussed. Parry suggests that the two students used quite different reading strategies with the Greek speaker adopting the holistic approach and the Korean speaker an analytic one. Since neither approach was fully satisfactory, she concludes that ESL teachers should spend more class time on metacognition, discussing pros and cons of different vocabulary-learning strategies according to particular circumstances and purposes.