July - September 1998 Page 12 . . .
Many students consider learning vocabulary a tedious job.
They try studying lists of words, with their spelling, pronunciation, meaning, synonyms, etc. only to realize a few hours later that their results are hardly satisfactory. They start blaming their poor memories. They say they are discouraged by the number of words in English and their complex usage. They come to rely on incidental learning, finding intentional studying boring and inefficient. They say that learning words is a task which cannot possibly be intrinsically motivating.