Introduction

I would like to begin this chapter with a personal experience, one that will probably be recognized by many readers as familiar. English is a foreign language for me. (Throughout this chapter, I will use the abbreviation L2 both for second and for foreign language.) I consider myself an advanced learner of that language. I receive great amounts of input in written form (professional literature) and oral form (radio, TV), but almost every day I read or hear some unfamiliar words. When I deem a new word important, I first make an attempt to infer its meaning from the context, I then look it up in my dictionary in order to check my inference, and finally I write the word down in a notebook, together with its context. Yet, I tend to forget the meaning of most of the words thus processed soon afterward. The next time I come across one of them, I remember having seen it and looked it up, I sometimes remember the context in which it originally appeared, but I cannot retrieve its meaning. I feel very annoyed, consult my dictionary once again, but take no further measures in order to better anchor the word in memory.

Why is it that I couldn't remember the word's meaning the second time? What was wrong with my infer + look up + write down strategy? The most likely answer to these questions is that I might have done enough for immediate comprehension but not enough for retention over time. More precisely, I had not done enough to firmly link the word's form with its meaning.