System 28 (2000) 271289

www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Learners' independent records of vocabulary

Philip Leeke a, Philip Shaw b,*
b a Language Centre, University of Durham, Durham, UK Department of English, Aarhus School of Business, Fuglesangs Alle, 8210 Aarhus, Denmark

Received 12 February 1999; received in revised form 12 May 1999; accepted 16 June 1999

Abstract Handbooks recommend a variety of quite complicated procedures for learning and remembering vocabulary, but most learners only engage in very simple procedures. The aim of this project was to establish a basis for identifying optimal vocabulary recording procedures by nding out what learners currently do. We administered a questionnaire, interviewed learners who said that they kept vocabulary records of some kind and examined their records. Two-thirds had given up making vocabulary lists on entering the L2 environment and/or starting to read extensively, but several made interesting lists of various kinds, which diered according to the linguistic attitudes of their makers and the purpose for which they were made. Narrowly focused lists intended for help with production tended to include many multi-word items and few translations, while lists intended broadly for language improvement tended to be bilingual and single-word focused. The optimal listing procedures are those which represent a compromise between linguistically and psychologically eective practices and the amount of investment learners are actually prepared to put in. It is important to distinguish records made in class, which should be as linguistically eective as possible, from those made independently by learners, which should be tailored to their purpose and the time available. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Vocabulary; Language acquisition; Independent learning

1. Background When people study in a foreign language and are no longer receiving instruction in that language, their vocabulary needs depend on the subject of study, and quite likely on the individual learner, and so self-tuition or self-directed learning are
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +45-8948-6688; fax: +45-8615-7727. E-mail address: phs@asb.dk (P. Shaw). 0346-251X/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0346-251X(00)00012-9

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essential. This means that learners need acquisition skills as well as performance skills or linguistic knowledge. In most cases instruction is given on `learning how to learn' that is on good practice in monitoring and directing one's own learning, and we usually base it on knowledge of the strategies of good language learners. In many countries most language learners are required to keep vocabulary notebooks at school. Vocabulary continues to be a major area for language learning into higher education, and therefore it is important that learners have eective strategies for improvement in this area. There are a wide range of prescriptive recommendations for such strategies but we have little empirical information on the practices of typical adult learners, especially in an L2 (second/foreign language) environment. In this paper we therefore focus on adult learners of English at a British university and on a situation dened by Lawson and Hogben (1996): foreign-language learners, they say: F F Ffrequently encounter unknown words in text material and need to learn and retain the meanings of some of these words for later use. In this situationF F F students are likely to adopt some deliberate procedure designed to facilitate long-term retention of word meaning. F F Fthey might write the word's meaning in the margin of the text; or they might add the word to a personal word list; or perhaps they enter the word and its meanings into a card systemF F F We would like to know whether learners in an L2 environment, specically overseas postgraduate students at British universities, follow these or other recording strategies and what factors determine their choice of strategy. We are less concerned with the records students make under more or less direct teacher control, than with what they do by themselves, because knowledge of actual practices seems a prerequisite for useful advice on self-instruction practices. 2. Wordlists and the vocabulary acquisition/retention literature Several issues in the literature on second-language vocabulary acquisition seem relevant. First is the value of consciousness-raising in relation to vocabulary items as against reliance on exposure to comprehensible input. Krashen (e.g. Mason and Krashen, 1997) argues strongly for exposure, and Grabe and Stoller (1997) show that exposure alone can lead to substantial vocabulary improvement. On the other hand the consensus seems to be (Coady, 1997; Paribakht and Wesche, 1997) that consciousness-raising and direct teaching will produce even greater gains. This implies that vocabulary records are likely to be useful because they lead the maker to a focus on form and increase awareness. However, making a note of unknown words alone is often not enough (Hulstijn, 1997). The key insight in memorisation of vocabulary is Craik and Lockhart's (1972) nding that what matters in retention of memorised material (often word pairs) is neither intention to remember nor frequency of repetition, but depth (and variety) of processing. Hence, decontextualised L1 (rst language)L2 pairs are not easy to remember if they are not processed in some way. Lawson and Hogben (1996)

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show that repetition is a frequent processing strategy and a reasonably eective one, but the more dierent kinds of processing learners do, the better they remember. Many practices have been suggested. One, the Keyword Method (Morgan and Rinvolucri, 1987, p. 118, Hulstijn, 1997) involves, for example, remembering that Danish snakke means `talk' by imagining a snake (or a snack?) talking. Another technique is to `place' words in a mental representation of one's at (cited in Morgan and Rinvolucri, 1987, p. 114, from Luria, 1975). Such techniques are eective and psychologically justied because they lead the learner to process the items to be learnt and to set them in a rich matrix of associations. Related to the question of mnemonics, but not necessarily leading to the same conclusions for vocabulary notebooks, are various applications of linguistic ndings about lexis. Linguistically oriented writers tend to be dismissive of the impoverished kind of meaning acquired by learning L1L2 word pairs and suggest that there is much more that should be recorded and learnt. They thus recommend studying and learning word-elds, example sentences, matrices, L2 synonyms, phonemic transcriptions, register distinctions, etc. Gairns and Redman (1986) are typical. They criticise traditional lists of vocabulary items ``as they were learnt in chronological order'' with a L1 translation and a part-of-speech indication, saying that they are one-dimensional and inexible, do not give the pronunciation, and encourage the assumption that there are one-to-one equivalences. So it would be better to give a L2 denition (or a translation, they concede in parentheses) plus an example. Learners are recommended to arrange their vocabulary records in ``personal category sheets'' by topic areas or situations in a ring binder or on cards. They could draw wordelds or trees, anything that represents the variety and complexity of meaning. Fortunately, this demand for richer representation of our knowledge of words seems likely to provide deeper processing and thus satisfy the psychological requirement as well. However, other things being equal, it is easier to memorise simple L1L2 word pairs than, for example, L2 denitions (Nation, 1982), presumably because the L1 word has a rich net of associations while the L2 denition has none at all. We will see below that this is an important factor. More recently applied linguists have started to stress that vocabulary items are not all single words. Very many consist of a number of words in more or less xed combinations. Writers like Lewis (1993) describe many elaborate devices mindmaps, collocation boxes, pattern displays, discourse structures for recording lexical items. In the context they are mainly intended for teacher-managed classroom learning such devices must develop a much greater awareness of the complexity of word and phrase meaning and usage. Autonomous adult learners, especially if in an L2 environment, are faced with a vast number of new items. Eective strategies must therefore include the ability to select words one is likely to need, and that in turn implies awareness of a realistic purpose for one's learning. However, there is little discussion of actual autonomous listing practices in the literature, which is mostly concerned with applications of linguistic analyses of meaning and ways for teachers to enrich the associations of the words taught (Carter, 1987; Morgan and Rinvolucri, 1987; Kang, 1995). McCarthy (1990, p. 128129) recommends teachers to look at their learners' word lists and

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gives apparently authentic examples of subject-based and random lists. McCarthy discusses a lexical/linguistic factor the correct procedure depends on how easily the L2 word is conceptualised in the learners L1-cultural experience and a mnemonic/ psychological one self-chosen words are much better learnt than dictated lists. 3. Aim Our aim in this project was to investigate some learners' actual vocabulary recording practices in relation to their beliefs, personal characteristics, and learning situations. Since there has been little previous research, our aims were exploratory. The research is based only on a sample in one particular situation, and its results can only show the kinds of variety one might expect and the kinds of factors that might be operating. The literature discussed above led us to investigate the following aspects of wordlist use: 1. How far do learners continue to keep records when released from teacher pressure to do so. On the other hand, how far do they rely on exposure to ``comprehensible input?'' This was operationalised as ``What proportion of overseas postgraduates at British universities make word lists?'' 2. Why do they give up, why do they continue? What individual factors inuence listing behaviour? How far is listing behaviour related to the stage of language acquisition or the study process? How far is it due to personal learning style or beliefs? 3. What mnemonic devices seem to be maintained or spontaneously adopted? This was operationalised as ``What is recorded along with the head word and how are the lists ordered?'' 4. Where lists are kept, what register (and what medium) do the items come from and how does this relate to the intended use of the lists? Here we distinguished between technical, semitechnical, and everyday vocabulary (comparable to ``specialised academic'', ``nonspecialised but infrequent'' and ``frequent'' in Parry, 1997). 5. To what extent do learners working autonomously record multiword units, and what sorts do they record? How does this relate to the purpose of the list? 4. Method As a rst step towards answering some of these questions we administered a multiple-choice questionnaire (Appendix A) to 121 overseas postgraduates at Newcastle University (assembled to take a course in dissertation writing). The subjects lled in their answers in class and we oered explanations and help, but the results of such a survey can only give a very broad outline. Consequently in the following year we carried out semi-structured interviews with 54 dierent graduate students in various elds. We led them through a series of questions (Appendix B), followed up

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any side-issues that emerged, and photocopied extracts from their vocabulary records, if any. Our selection of interviewees was not systematically random, so what we have is a series of case studies rather than a valid sample. 5. Results 5.1. What proportion of overseas postgraduates at British universities make word lists? In the questionnaire survey, 81 of the 121 subjects said that they did keep or (in two cases) had recently kept some kind of record of new vocabulary and 40 said they did not. However, from the interviews (which were carried out with a separate group, as noted above) it appeared that only 19 of our 54 interviewees were currently making lists and 35 were not at least only 19 produced lists for us to inspect. (These lists are referred to below by the codes A to S.) The reason for the discrepancy between the two-thirds in the questionnaire and the one-third in the interviews is partly that it is easier to claim to have a record in a questionnaire than to produce the record. But a major factor seems to be a dierent understanding in the two situations of what constitutes a vocabulary record: questionnaire subjects appeared to include denitions of technical terms in content notes, whereas these were excluded in the interviews. The 19 interview subjects classied as list makers, i.e. those whose largely linguistic lists we saw, were speakers of 10 dierent languages and from 15 dierent territories (Table 1). The sample is too small and diverse to allow any generalisations about patterns of behaviour deriving from particular education systems or `cultures'. The physical records we copied were all lists in notebooks, on scraps of paper stapled together, or, in two cases, attached to photocopies of the articles on which they were based. Strategies for recording and retaining words or lexical phrases are not conned to list making. Four subjects (counted among non-list makers) said they underlined or highlighted signicant phrases and later went back to the text and lifted useful language (phrases and sentences) when they were writing (a common practice, cf. Gosden, 1996). Another frequent strategy was to write interlinear translations of dicult words and to reread in order to learn the words.1 One subject
Table 1 Origins of interviewees who produced lists Arabic Chinese: German: Indonesia Japanese 1 (Egypt) 3 (1 Hong Kong, 1 PR China, 1 Malaysia) 3 (2 Germany, 1 Austria) 2 3 Korean Persian Spanish Thai Urdu 1 1 (Iran) 3 (2 Spain, 1 Colombia) 1 1 (Pakistan )

1 The most successful user of this strategy wrote her glosses to words in the Psalms, which she read very often; success depends on choosing a text one will actually reread!

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marked a word when he looked it up in the bilingual dictionary so that he would know when he looked it up again, remember the occasion, and improve his learning. 5.2. Why do they give up, why do they continue? One factor aecting recording behaviour seemed to be personal learning style, or beliefs and motivation arising from it. Of the 35 interviewees currently making no lists, four said they had never done so voluntarily; they found them of no use at all in improving vocabulary. One of them was a clinical biochemist in his 20s who was exceptionally outward-going (``I have lots of English friends: we go out drinking!''). He had not made lists as an adult because he ``didn't like writing'' and found it easy to memorise things he heard or read, so that he ``just memorised'' words and phrases from conversation and from his reading without bothering to write them down.2 Although only four interviewees had `never' made lists, as many as 21 questionnaire respondents said they had ``never thought of '' doing so. Without discussion with the respondents this anomaly cannot be resolved. A second factor was the stage of learning reached. Thirty-one interviewees said that they had made lists at earlier stages of their studies (usually because their teachers had told them to). They stopped making lists on a regular basis when they ``got better'' and achieved a ``better advanced level'' or ``travelled abroad''. Typically they reported that list making was useful at ``early'' or ``starting stages'' but were unable really to say why. Some comments suggest an attempt to achieve vygotskyan object-control (Frawley and Lantolf, 1985), faced with the magnitude of the L2 learning task: observations like ``it helps control the language'' and ``I could look back and see what I had learnt'' might indicate that list making had given these learners a sense of progress and a way of ordering the language. Most other comments may relate to the switch from an L1 to an L2 environment and the consequent increase in comprehensible input. Subjects said listing was less useful at later stages because ``you can talk more'' you could ``ask the people what words mean''. A typical progression from focus to reliance on exposure was shown by one middle-aged PhD student. During a year's preparatory language course in Britain he made word-lists with L1 translations and looked at them while walking to the University in the morning(!). At that stage too, he had found it quite practical to record word-translation pairs on a cassette and listen while doing other things, but the problem was that his own English pronunciation might be misleading. In the second stage he was doing a taught course in politics. He made less use of vocabulary lists and found the most useful practice was to record the lectures and listen to them repeatedly to learn vocabulary (and learn to recognise it in its spoken form!). Now (writing up), he was relying on exposure ``just reading books on the subject, not listing phrases or anything''.
2 This man was from Jordan. An anonymous reviewer for System reports an unpublished investigation in which ``Arabic-speakers'' were found generally to resist using vocabulary notebooks. Nevertheless, attitudes or practices like this are likely to be connected with particular national school systems rather than a culture or language-group.

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On the other hand, some people come back to lists when they have to start writing, i.e. when they have a clear goal for production. List G was made by someone who had made no lists since school until he came to the writing-up stage, when he found his style ``jerky'' and started to work through articles to nd transitioncreating items. Similarly, lists H and M were specically made to help with production in late stages of work for a research degree. Similar lists were found in the survey reported in Shaw (1991). A third factor was the level of extrinsic motivation. Thirteen questionnaire respondents said they had ``no time''. Several interviewees said that they had made lists ``because the teacher forced them to'' and a number said they were now ``too lazy'', or that list making was too time-consuming. One interviewee said he had kept lists at an early stage because he was embarrassed ``to keep on asking''. He did not like to forget the meaning of words because it would appear to the teacher that he had not studied. He had now given up using his vocabulary notebook because on a long-term basis he tended to forget the words he wrote down and could not use them in ``general conversation''. Social pressure or support is useful but probably not a substitute for eective mnemonics (Hulstijn, 1997). 5.3. What mnemonic devices seem to be maintained or spontaneously adopted? Table 2 shows that subjects claim often to give an indication of meaning by translation, and somewhat less often by providing context or an English synonym. As Table 3 shows, most lists were simple bilingual lists with translations (mostly also including some phrases or words with no further explanation). Three lists of semitechnical phrases (GHM) and one of example sentences (E) included no translations. The apparent uniformity of the others conceals variation. Thus D and J, both bilingual EnglishGerman lists, were quite dierent. D copied all the translations for his single words out of the dictionary unselectively, so that one English word in his list typically had ve or six German equivalents, while J showed greater sophistication about the translation process, noting the contexts of dierent meanings, and included a lot of full phrases. The amount of information recorded depends
Table 2 Questionnaire: systems used to represent meaning Meaning system Translation only Translation+context Translation+synonym Translation+context+synonym Context only Context+synonym Synonym only Other None No answer No. of subjects reporting this system 28 4 5 5 13 5 11 3 4 1

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Table 3 Interviews/inspection of lists: information supplied, at least occasionally, alongside English item Information List giving this information at least occasionally

None at all E G H (M) L1 translation A B C D F I J K L (M) N O P Q R S English paraphrase/EE dictionary denition I N P Part of speech O Phonetic/L1 script transcription P S Letter hint (i.e. initial letter for self-testing) O Collocations (prepositions, verbs, etc.) O P English synonym O P R Stress marked on word P Q S

not only on such beliefs about language, but also on personal motivation and priorities. The writer of list F expressed the conict between language beliefs and motivation/priority very well: ``word is not important, sentence is. I think [listing words] is not good way. But you have to spend a lot of time writing a sentenceF F F If I write the English explanations it is time consuming and I have to understand.'' A phenomenon we had not encountered before was the Japanese pre-printed vocabulary book. These are notebooks with pages divided into blank columns, each with a heading in English, published in Japan. We saw three examples, from the writers of lists N, O, and P. The notebook formerly used by the writer of N had headings for Page (apparently of source) Foreignword (sic), Pronunciation, Part of Speech and Japanese, though in fact the list written in it was a simple bilingual one. The writer of O entered all her vocabulary in a notebook with the headings Word (to which she attached the page number in the book she was reading), Japanese, part speech (sic), letter hint, and example sentence. In the last column she actually wrote further meanings (in Japanese, often with English contexts), a few example sentences, and what looks like other Japanese commentary. The writer of P no longer used her notebook by the time of the interview, but it had the headings Foreign Word, Pronunciation and Japanese (to which she had added pos ``part of speech'' not preprinted). 5.4. How are the lists ordered? Table 4 shows that the largest group of questionnaire respondents said that their lists were collections of items ordered, if at all, by the text in which (or date on which) they were found. The proportion of lists in apparently random order was even higher in the sample we saw. Most were essentially unordered, though often containing islands of order, such as sets of planet names, long lists of connectors, or sequences of items from the same book. Some sections had promising headings. List O had a section headed Wordlist of CALL, and E included sections on Slang and Radio FM 93, but the content seemed to bear little relation to the form. Slang started out well enough with I need the loo, but ended up mysteriously with You're worthy.

P. Leeke, P. Shaw / System 28 (2000) 271289 Table 4 Questionnaire: reported system for ordering the entries Ordering system Random By location of example Alphabetical By meaning Other system (e.g. by chapter, by date) No answer

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No. of subjects reporting this system 27 16 15 5 7 10

However, ordering by location of example did appear, in dierent forms. Several lists included parts organised according to the book and page where the words were found. Others were more clearly classied by source and type of words. List M consisted of four separate sequences (Fig. 1): spoken semitechnical phrases, sentence-stems or whole sentences from articles, technical terms with content notes, and lists of similar words for discussion with a language teacher (interrupt/disrupt/ abrupt/rupture/perturbation). Two records were entirely dependent on their sources in that they were appended to copies of the article or chapter they derived from. One of these was a list of new single-word vocabulary items intended as a glossary; the other (G) was a list of sentence-stems and transition sequences intended for re-use in writing. Two lists had been rewritten in alphabetical order. Q was a collection of lists of dierent kinds, one of which was an alphabetical glossary for the book currently being read, and D was a word-processed bilingual list sorted alphabetically. The maker of list O described a frequent memorisation practice: ``rst you write it down and forget, then you look at the book''. But many subjects admitted that they did not get beyond the rst stage: often the making of the list is the only processing

Fig. 1. Sample lists from subject M.

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the word gets and where this is not enough to x it in memory the activity begins to seem pointless. On the other hand, the maker of list D processed his list in a complicated way which must have helped memorisation, although the lists consisted of linguistically simple L1L2 word pairs. He wrote the words down, then wordprocessed them and copied out elaborate mother-tongue equivalents from dictionaries. Similarly the maker of list G (our most procient subject linguistically) had learnt a dierent pattern of repetition from a colleague who had found it useful; he ringed items in articles he was quarrying for useful phrases, went over again and highlighted the phrases, and then went over again and copied them out in a list. These practices involve a great deal of quite simple repetitive processing, and Lawson and Hogben (1996) suggest that this is quite useful, though not optimal, for memorisation. 5.5. Where lists are kept, what register (and what medium) do the items come from and how does this relate to the intended use of the lists? Teachers of English for Academic Purposes tend to lay considerable emphasis on semitechnical vocabulary and `general academic' linkers. However, they often meet demands from their students for `the language of the subject', on the one hand, and `general chat' on the other. We therefore investigated the types of item learners themselves considered worth recording, relying on examples on the questionnaire form, and explanation while it was being completed, to enable them to distinguish between `technical', `semitechnical' and `everyday' vocabulary. Table 5 shows that most subjects in the questionnaire survey claimed to record more than `a few' items from all three areas, but that `everyday' vocabulary was excluded by some ``because you pick it up anyway''. Table 6 shows that although substantial numbers concentrated on both semitechnical and everyday phrases, the largest group of subjects thought that technical vocabulary made up the highest proportion of their lists. As noted above, this nding probably explains the dierence in proportions of list makers assessed by the two methods. Of the 19 lists we actually saw, eight consisted mainly of a mixture of everyday and semitechnical vocabulary, and 11 contained predominantly or exclusively semitechnical items. We were not shown any lists exclusively or predominantly of technical terms, though we saw several sets of content notes which included denitions of terms along with other information.
Table 5 Questionnaire: numbers of list makers reporting that they record more than `a few' items of the given type (n= 81) Type of vocabulary (see Appendix A for the examples given to the subjects) Technical words/phrases from your subject Semitechnical words/phrases Everyday/colloquial words/phrases Nos. of subjects recording more than `a few' such items 61 65 50

P. Leeke, P. Shaw / System 28 (2000) 271289 Table 6 Questionnaire: subjects reporting given areas as making up the largest proportion of their lists Vocabulary types Technical Semitechnical Everyday Various combinations, equally

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Nos. of subjects 30 16 18 15

The most frequent sources of items were written, and predominantly specialist `work' reading (Table 7). The second most frequent source in the lists we saw (though much less often referred to in interviews) was support English classes: naturally enough learners wrote a high proportion of their words down when their minds were focused on form. Most of the reading had been undertaken for purposes other than vocabulary expansion, but the maker of list G said that he had chosen the articles he quarried for useful phrases specically for their relevance to what he was writing (rather than the value of their content). As for purely oral sources, four interviewees reported writing down expressions they heard on television, though the actual lists did not suggest that this was a frequent practice; few items were either colloquial or `newsy'. Lectures and oral presentations were reported as sources by several subjects and the list quoted from M (Fig. 1) came from listening to an academic paper. Although several subjects said they took their notebooks ``everywhere'' and noted phrases down, no list actually contained more than one or two phrases which sounded as if they had come from conversation. The determining factors in this area seem to be list purpose and personal opportunity and motivation. Where the aim was general language improvement, words were written down if they were met in convenient circumstances. However, lists also have more direct uses as reference tools in reading and production. Lists P and Q were used as special-purpose glossaries for books to avoid looking the same thing up over and over again.
Table 7 Interviews: reported sources of items Source Specialist reading Other or unspecied reading Television Lectures/classes EFL textbooks Novels Newspapers Conversation EFL classes No. of interviewees claiming this source 11 7 4 4 3 2 2 2 1

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The various sequences in M were each intended for re-use in speaking or writing, and several other lists (A, B, G, H, I) were intended for active production (in writing) rather than recognition. On the other hand, a frequent reason for having given up making lists was that the words learnt were not available in speech, i.e. that the aim of production had not been realised. The maker of list O reported a psychological principle: she selected words on the grounds of ease of memorisation ``if the spelling is very very long you wouldn't write it down''. Similarly List N consisted mainly of phrases because its creator thought they were easiest to remember. 5.6. To what extent do learners working autonomously record multiword units, and what sorts do they record? How does this relate to the purpose of the list? Of our 19 lists, six consisted mainly (>80%) of phrases of various kinds, two consisted of substantial proportions of both phrases and individual words, and 11 consisted mainly (>80%) of individual words. There was no correlation between the register of the items and their status as words or phrases. As noted above, it seems likely that many of those classied as non-list makers in the interviews here might have responded that they did make word lists in the questionnaire, because of the overlap between lists of technical words and purely content notes. For example, one of our interviewees said ``no'' to the question as to whether he kept word lists but showed us lists which performed a similar function. They consisted of key sentences from particular named sources. He viewed much of the language he used as terminological in nature, i.e. as having a fairly one-to-one relation with content, so that to learn the form was to learn the content and vice versa. Table 8 classies the eight lists with many longer items according to the types that appear in them. The rst four categories are those into which Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) divide their ``lexical phrases''; the fth represents a very common
Table 8 List inspection: types of phrase occurring in eight lists Type of phrase (with Nattinger and DeCarrico's examples for the rst four categories) Polywords (for the most part, as it were), especially sentence connecting phrases (to the extent that) Institutionalised expressions (have a nice day, give me a break) Phrasal constraints ( as far as I _________, see you________) Sentence builders (my point is that_________, Let me start by/with) Non-lexicalised phrases/sentences (illustrating usage/collocation) He could not be reached for comments/Several words had been deleted by the censor (examples from Q) Lists containing this type H J J G G E M M M N Q S M N Q S S (5) (3) (2) (2) (5)

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category in some lists: sample sentences that do not represent supposedly lexicalised items, but just exemplify usage. Table 8 shows that lists G and M were the only ones to include sentence stems, as illustrated in Fig. 1. List H was comparable, but contained only unglossed connecting phrases (on behalf of, in terms of, by means of, on condition that, in the application ofF F F). Lists E, J, N, Q and S contained more conventional `idioms' along with illustrative sentences. The idioms can be illustrated by this sequence from J (glosses omitted): Sleeve, To have s.th. up one's sleeve, To laugh in one's sleeve, Sleeve-link (! glossed Manschettenknopf=`cuink'), It is high time, In time/out of time with the music, ThoroughF F F, Illustrative sentences were like these from E (who wrote no glosses): I'm famished, It's boiling/freezing, The food is lling, I'm getting behind, I'll give you a ring, It's hailing, TerribleF F F The examples show that the distinction between the types of phrase recorded is partly aligned with that between semitechnical and general words, and this in turn with the purpose of the list. Those intended for imminent production tended to consist of incomplete sentence stems, connectors, etc., of a semitechnical type. 6. Discussion A little more than a third of our subjects continued to make vocabulary lists when they were learning independently in an L2 environment. This is quite a high proportion if compared with the number engaged in other autonomous learning practices such as use of the self-access centre. The majority do not make vocabulary lists because they observe that they have crossed the threshold where learning by exposure becomes possible (Laufer, 1997), simply because they prioritise other activities higher, or because the mnemonic procedures they used when making lists were inecient. Correspondingly, those who make the lists do so because they have found that exposure does not lead to enough familiarity to produce the item, because they give a high priority to language learning, or because they have found mnemonic procedures which satisfy them. One reason for giving a high priority is that one has an immediate purpose for the learning associated with the list, in this case a thesis that has to be written. As far as the information attached to the L2 word is concerned, there are two main strategies: translation (most often) and giving context. Many list makers also give pronunciation information, grammatical information, or L2 synonyms, but not consistently and not as frequently as translation. One may speculate that a translation gives a substantial number of associations and a good hint at the L2 function of the word and costs very little in terms of note making eort or imagination. This kind of costbenet analysis is at the heart of the learner's decision as to whether and how to make vocabulary notes. It is notable that lists aimed at immediate writing needs relied on the context in which the items occurred rather than translation. Items were familiar enough for reading to recall possible contexts for use and meanings. The cost of ordering the list in semantic or other terms is evidently too high for most learners. The only reordering we found was alphabetic, an approach which

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helps retrieval from the list but does not structure the input to improve retention. In fact, the main benet from reordering the list is the extra processing of the items that it requires. Our subjects did not make use of any elaborate mnemonic procedures, although individuals had a number of practices which maximised repetition. They either did not know of other procedures or judged their cost in time to be too high. Technical terms seemed to belong in content notes from lectures, etc., rather than in language-focused vocabulary lists. This reects a fairly sophisticated analysis, since such terms are indeed only explicable in terms of the discipline which generated them. Parry (1997) describes a learner who had diculty reading his textbooks because he relied on exposure to pick up the meaning of technical terms. Exposure may be enough, Parry implies, for everyday language, but technicalities require deliberate denition within the discipline. The lists we saw were either purely semitechnical or contained a mixture of semitechnical and everyday language, conrming that English for Academic Purposes teacher emphasis on semitechnical vocabulary is justied. Several of the purely semitechnical lists were aimed at foreseeable production in writing or foreseeable reception as key expressions in a book, while the others were more generally aimed at language improvement, often perceived as reception. Although indications of meaning and mnemonic practices were rather simple, many of these lists reected quite sophisticated views of language. Nearly half the lists included a high proportion of multi-word units and at least one other interviewee ``knew'' that sentences would be more useful than single words but simply found the cost of writing longer items too high. The multi-word items could be simply sentences providing context or collocational information for a single word, or xed expressions, or lexicalised formulae, sentence stems, etc., with open slots in them. Again, it was the writers of lists with clear purposes who most clearly saw the value of multi-word items, while reception-oriented or unfocussed lists often continued a `school' tradition of bilingual single-word sequences and xed expressions. It was the production-oriented lists which included frames and sentence-stems, while xed expressions were more likely to be in reception-oriented or unfocussed lists. The literature suggests that the main factors determining desirable word-listing practices are psychological and linguistic. However, the discussion above shows that optimal practices for an individual are aected by two more groups of factors: personal and motivational considerations, and the stage and environment of learning. Practices which are less than ideal but suit the individual and so are actually used are better than ideal precepts which are never followed. Gairns and Redman (1986) take some account of these considerations when they end their section on ``written storage'' with a concession that learners are likely in fact to enter words chronologically in lists and they recommend doing this systematically and neatly. Similarly, they admit that the widely recommended (cf. Nation, 1990) vocabulary cards are rather ``cumbersome''. The optimal system for self-directed written storage of vocabulary is one which not only recognises the ndings of research in psychology and lexis but also ensures that a reasonable proportion of learners actually keep records. It can therefore be expected to vary among individuals, and not necessarily to be identical with linguistically or psychologically optimal systems like those

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recommended by Lewis (1993). The relative simplicity of the procedures actually used by our interviewees supports this contention. The environment and stage of learning constitute further factors in determining optimal practices. Learners in an L2 environment are subject to frequent natural repetition of many types of words and perhaps need conscious acquisition strategies less urgently or only for some kinds of word. Lawson and Hogben (1996) cite several studies which found spontaneous use of quite complex mnemonic procedures by early learners, but they themselves found that experienced language learners relied largely on repetition and a few fairly simple strategies for deepening processing. The content of the lists might also depend on the stage of learning and the purpose of the vocabulary acquisition. Word lists for reception can be very simple, because in general the meaning of a lexical phrase can often be worked out from its constituents, and production at lower levels aims at communication rather than ``nativelike selection'' (Pawley and Syder, 1983), so home-made phrases may be adequate. But if one wants to speak or write appropriately one has to control the phraseology and so one might expect lists for production at more advanced levels to include sentence-builders, phrasal constraints, etc. The actual lists learners make are determined by personal and environmental factors and by their beliefs about what is important in language, and what is useful for memorisation. As our interviews showed, teaching may inuence the form of lists directly (``I do it like this because my teacher told me to'') or indirectly, in that the beliefs about language and memory will come from teachers. `Teaching' here has to be interpreted as including the guidance oered by pre-printed vocabulary books. One can visualise the factors aecting these actual vocabulary retention/recording strategies as in Fig. 2. 7. Conclusions The term `written records of vocabulary' covers a variety of types of record with dierent aims. Records made in class under teacher direction are likely to be much more elaborate than autonomously made lists. One should not recommend practices which are too demanding of time and motivation to be realistic. By and large learners have chosen the amount of eort they are able to put into direct vocabulary acquisition and their practices will only change if they nd that they get more out of listing. Preparing learners to make autonomous word lists should not mean presenting theoretically ideal practices but establishing and sharing actual ones and perhaps upgrading them towards practices which would be optimal in the given situation. Learners could be led to discuss their actual practices in class and their success and failure, to raise awareness of the possibilities. This could be related to discussion of the purpose of vocabulary records, perhaps distinguishing records designed for general improvement from those for specic purposes. After that, learners could be shown examples of dierent kinds of item which can be listed, preferably using lists genuinely produced by learners for general or specic purposes. Learners may not know how useful sentence-stems and other incomplete

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Fig. 2. Factors aecting actual vocabulary retention strategies.

items are, or that, for example, apparently synonymous items have dierent collocations. However, these insights have to be capable of encapsulation in a fairly conventional list form. Maybe learners could be asked to extract useful material from a text and share their way of presenting it with the group. To conclude, training in vocabulary recording procedures should recognise all the factors in the model in Fig. 2. The list entries should, of course, take account of lexical structure and collocational features, and be recorded in a form which makes memorising ecient. But the learners should also have a clear and perhaps restricted purpose for their records, and the practices recommended should be appropriate to the learning environment and stage. Finally, the procedures should be appropriate for the individual's learning style and priorities. Eective advice on these aspects should boost motivation and enable all the factors in Fig. 2 to work more positively. Appendix A. Vocabulary questionnaire 1. Do you keep any record of new or useful words or phrases? Y or N 2a. If not, why not? No time Don't often meet new words ` ` `

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Never thought of it English is (virtually) my rst language 2b. If you do, is it a book Cards Something else Answers to this question were meaningless because the word book was not perceived as including notebook! 3. About what percentage of the items you write down are single words, rather than phrases or sentences? Nearly all (80100%) More than half (6079%) About half (4059%) Less than half (2039%) Only a few (019%) 4. What kind of words/phrases do you mainly write down? * Technical words/phrases from your subject (uniaxial stress/rumen contents/morpheme/architrave) Nearly all (80100%) More than half (6079%) About half (4059%) Less than half (2039%) Only a few (019%)
* Semi-technical words/phrases (to an equal extent/It has been suggested thatF F F/scope/range/hypothesis) Nearly all (80100%) More than half (6079%) About half (4059%) Less than half (2039%) Only a few (019%) * Everyday/colloquial words/phrases (Can I help you/Actually/Not at all/I must dash) Nearly all (80100%) More than half (6079%) About half (4059%) Less than half (2039%) Only a few (019%)

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5. If you use a book, how do you order the words/phrases? Alphabetically by their meaning by the place where you found them

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Another system Randomly 6. How do you indicate the meanings of the words (tick all the systems you use)? Write a translation Write down the whole sentence or phrase you found Write an English synonym None of these Another system Appendix B Making, past and present, perceived value Do you make lists of useful language now? Yes Why do you do it? Do you personally nd it useful, and how? When do you think it is useful to make lists? (at which stages of learning/studying/writing-up) Have you ever made lists? yes Why did you do it? Did you personally nd it useful, and how? When did you stop, and why? When do you think it is useful to make lists? (at which stages of learning/studying/writing-up) no (investigate language background)

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No

Nature of lists When do you write something down? What do you write? technical, subtechnical, everyday/social How if at all do you indicate meaning/context, etc.? Average item length in words? List usage What do you do with your notes? Do you go back to them, how do they help? Do you use them in writing or for memorising, F F F? Do you try to use the new language in spoken communication, writing, for recognition in reading, or what?F F F How could you improve your skills?

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