INVITED COMMENTARY: VOCABULARY

Ron Martinez and Norbert Schmitt The University of Nottingham While attending a conference in Brazil in 1998, the first author came across a store specializing in video games called “Game Over.” When asked if the locals knew what that expression meant, the store manager’s matter-of-fact reply was, “Todo o mundo sabe” (literally, “the whole world knows”). He may be right. It turns out that the phrase game over is recognized practically worldwide (just do a few language-specific Google searches to get an idea), and one need not stretch the imagination very much to guess why. While formal research into the effect various technologies have on vocabulary acquisition is still in its infancy, it is clear that—intentionally or incidentally—students have used various electronic media to learn new words for some time now. Moreover, although it is still far from clear exactly how one acquires vocabulary in a second language even from “traditional” media such as newspapers and books (see Schmitt, 2010, for a review), the growing ethos among L2 pedagogy practitioners seems to be that technologies like computerized corpora, captioned videos, electronic games, and mobile phones can somehow enhance the learning and teaching of new words. The timeliness, therefore, of the four datainformed papers in this special edition in supporting that ethos is indisputable. Perhaps less obvious are the further questions that the respective studies beg—ones that perhaps we did not even realize needed asking.