Many colleges and universities in the United States admit large numbers of international or immigrant students whose proficiency in English is quite limited. Such students are usually required to take a language test, and if they do not do well, they have to enroll in courses in English as a second language (ESL). Only after passing these are they allowed, in many colleges, to proceed with regular courses and complete their degrees. By this time, they are, presumably, at an advanced stage of language learning: They have control of the main grammatical structures of English, and they know a good deal of vocabulary. But as they embark on courses designed for native speakers, they are bound to come across many words that are new to them, both the specialized terms of particular academic fields and the enormous numbers of nonspecialized but nonetheless infrequent words that characterize English academic prose (Hofland & Johansson, 1982; Kucera & Francis, 1967). These words are not taught in language classes – as Nation (1990) points out, it is neither practicable nor productive to try to teach them – and the nonspecialized ones are not taught in content classes either; so the students must deal with them on their own. The question is, How do they do this? And can language teachers help them, before they leave ESL classes, to develop more appropriate strategies?

My approach to these questions has been through case studies of individual students who had been through the ESL sequence at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and who were, at the time I studied them, enrolled in Introductory Anthropology, one of the college's distribution requirement courses.