Reducing Learners’ Cognitive Load and Emotional Challenges Created by Lexis: The Andragogical Approach to Enhance Adult Learners’ Mental Lexicon

Lexical competence plays a key role in learning a foreign language. This requires language teachers to pay particular attention to helping learners develop their mental lexicons. Considering the breadth of the English language vocabulary, developing one’s mental lexicon can be a rather challenging task. The situation is often exacerbated because of issues individual learners may have to deal with. Taken together, these can create cognitive and emotional challenges for learners, both in their roles as students and in their personal and professional lives. To address this issue, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of individual learners and learner groups. Indisputably, adult learners differ from ‘younger’ learners in significant ways. In this chapter, we discuss why we believe andragogy, defined as “the art and science of helping adults learn” (Knowles, The modern practice of adult education: andragogy versus pedagogy. Association Press, New York, 1980, p. 38), and its associated andragogical assumptions, could help tackle cognitive and emotional challenges adult language learners are likely to face in their attempts to improve their mental lexicons. We complement this by providing practical ideas for how andragogical assumptions can be applied to pedagogical practice in foreign language learning contexts.