Carol: Professor Ranalli teaches English at
Iowa State University. He has taught English in Africa and South
Korea and has also done research to investigate how to teach vocabulary better by using technology. I asked Professor Ranalli how he became interested
in vocabulary. Carol: How did you become interested in vocabulary? Prof. Ranalli: So my interest in second language
vocabulary really started with my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia in Southern
Africa. Because I’d been frus
trated in my efforts
to learn a second language when I was in high school and college, I really wanted to use
my immersion experience living in a rural village, where very little English was spoken
and where my target language, which was called Oshiwambo, surrounded me, to finally help
me develop a strong communicative ability in a different language. For me, the most challenging part of learning
this new language seemed to be getting a handle on the lexicon because this was a Bantu language
tha
t has very little in common lexically with English, except for a fair number of loan
words. Although I had a pretty good ability at pronouncing
and discriminating the sounds of this new language and reproducing the grammatical patterns
of the language, my memory for vocabulary items wasn’t the best, so I found myself
putting a lot of effort and a lot of time into that aspect of my learning. And then, when I moved to South Korea and
started working there and started trying to learn the Korean lan
guage, I found a similar
situation—a language very dissimilar to English whose vocabulary I basically had to
start learning from scratch. I really spent a lot of time thinking about
how to make this very difficult, very daunting, task of second language vocabulary learning
manageable for myself but also for my students. Carol: Based on Professor Ranalli’s experience,
he wanted to find better strategies for learning vocabulary--strategies that he could use himself
as well as strategies that he co
uld use to help his students learn better. He eventually turned to technology when he
saw the many ways that technology can support vocabulary learning and we will look at these,
but first I asked Professor Ranalli to tell us why he thinks that vocabulary is so important
for English learners. He pointed out that we cannot say anything
without vocabulary.
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