Building Vocabulary Through Interaction

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 present empirical data and provide a fine-grained description and interpretation of the lives of the six participants as they learnt English vocabulary in the UK, each chapter covering a specific university context. This chapter examines the strategic attempts made by two Chinese learners, Wu and Xia, who in pairs had studied on the Ryder university site, to develop their vocabulary, in response to linguistically demanding academic and social tasks in the UK. In particular, verbal negotiations and playful vocabulary practices played an important role in their vocabulary development. The chapter also engages with recent literature and highlights the key issues arising from the data, including the appropriateness of strategy use, the use of strategy combination and strategies for fine-tuning semantic distinctions across words.