The Vocabulary Acquisition Process in Second Language Acquisition

There has been a great deal of research addressing learners's second language development. By paying attention to two particular approaches in second language acquisition research, (a) form-meaning connection (VanPatten, Williams, & Rott, 2004) and (b) cross-linguistic influence (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008), this paper addresses the issues of how the learners learn and use a word in a second language and whether their first language influences the process of vocabulary acquisition in the second language. The results of recent studies conducted from these standpoints provide us with many fruitful suggestions for L2 pedagogy, and new perspectives on the role of first language in second language vocabulary acquisition are discussed