Miller and Gildea's (1987)
work on vocabulary teaching has shown how the assumption that knowing and doing
can be separated leads to a teaching method that ignores the way situations
structure cognition. Their work has described how children are taught words
from dictionary definitions and a few exemplary sentences, and they have compared
this method with the way vocabulary is normally learned outside school.
People generally learn words
in the context of ordinary communication. This process is startlingly fast and
successful. Miller and Gildea note that by listening, talking, and reading,
the average 17-year-old has learned vocabulary at a rate of 5,000 words per
year (13 per day) for over 16 years. By contrast, learning words from abstract
definitions and sentences taken out of the context of normal use, the way vocabulary
has often been taught, is slow and generally unsuccessful. There is barely enough
classroom time to teach more than 100 to 200 words per year. Moreover, much
of what is taught turns out to be almost useless in practice. They give the
following examples of students' uses of vocabulary acquired this way:
