Learners are usually admonished to memorize paired lists like the one
above, but with no training on how to achieve this feat. The small amount
of context provided by typical dialogues or stories does not help much,
and students usually focus on rote-memorizing the paired list rather than
looking back at the slim context afforded by the passage. Paired lists are
easier to learn if the student generates his or her own associations between
the L2 and LI equivalents (see the discussion of word association below),
if the L2 and Ll words are obvious cognates, if the new L2 word is easily
pronounceable and thus provides an acoustic hook for the learner, or if
the L2 word represents a familiar part of speech (see Oxford, 1990b;
Swaffar, 1988).