Teaching Vocabulary
Fiona Elsted
University of Essex
• ‘..while without grammar very little can be
conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be
conveyed.’ Wilkins, 1972:111-112
• ‘Language consists of grammaticalised lexis,
not lexicalised grammar.’ Lewis, 1993:51
The questions I asked you to think about
1. What do you teach when you teach vocabulary?
2. How do you decide which vocabulary to teach?
3. What do you think learners need to know about
a word or lexical item?
4. How do you help students develop their
vocabulary?
5. Problems associated with teaching/learning
vocabulary.
1. What do you teach when you teach
vocabulary? An experiment
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• How many lexical items are in this sentence?
•
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
What can we notice about the examples of ‘like’
in this sentence?
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• What can we notice about the examples of
‘look’ in this sentence?
•
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• What’s this?
•
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• And this?
•
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• What do students need to know about this
lexical item?
•
Adapted from: Thornbury, S (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
What do we teach when we teach vocabulary?
Words
What counts as ‘a word’? (Nation 2001)
• ‘Tokens’ and ‘Types’
• ‘Lemmas’: a headword (e.g. Do)+ inflected forms (
does, doing, did, done)
• ‘Word families’: a headword + inflected forms (as
above) + derived forms (undone, undoing, underdone,
overdone, deed, misdeed etc)
Other lexical items
• Lexical phrases-multi-word verbs and fixed expressions
(Lewis 1993)
2. How do we decide which vocabulary
to teach?
•
•
•
•
Coursebooks
Exams
Curriculum
Word lists: General Service List; Academic
Word List (Mark will talk more about this)
• Corpora (and this!)
• Student need
Some numbers...
Level
No of words
Text Coverage %
High Frequency Words
2000
87
Academic Vocabulary
800
8
Technical Vocabulary
2000
3
Total to be learned
4800
98
Low Frequency Words
123200
2
Total to be learned
128000
100
Nation & Newson 1997:239
Implications?
• Nation & Meara (2010) argue that 4000-5000
word families are required for Intermediate
level performance; 6000-9000 for Advanced
level performance; and an educated NS could
have 16000-20000 word families in their
vocabulary.
Language corpora
Corpora inform many coursebooks and all dictionaries.
There is evidence to suggest that in terms of assessing
frequency, corpus evidence is more effective than
intuition.
Problems: Seen as a tool of the applied linguist rather
than the language teacher ?
Over-emphasis on journalistic type language and
underrepresentation of spoken language.
3. What do students need to ‘know’
about a word/lexical item?
We need to take into account:
•
•
•
•
Form (s)
Meaning (s)
Use (s)
Receptive vs productive knowledge
Word knowledge: MEANING (Nation 2001)
Form and meaning(s):
• R: What meaning(s) does this word form signal?
• P: What word form(s) can be used to express this
meaning?
Concepts and referents:
• R: What is included in this concept?
• P: What items can the concept refer to?
Associations:
• R: What other words does the word remind us of?
• P: What other words could be used instead of it?
Word knowledge: FORM (Nation 2001)
• Spoken:
• Receptive: What does the word sound like?
Productive: How is the word pronounced?
• Written:
• Receptive: What does the word look like?
• Productive: How is the word written and spelled?
• Word parts:
• Receptive: What parts are recognizable ?
• Productive: What word parts are needed to
express meaning?
Word knowledge: USE (Nation 2001)
Grammatical functions:
• R: In what patterns does the word occur?
• P: In what patterns must (might?)we use this word?
Collocations:
• R: What words occur with this one?
• P: What words must (might?) we use with this one?
Constraints on use:
• R: Where, when and how often do we meet the word?
• P: Where, when and how often can we use it?
Some practice
• I like looking for bits and pieces like old
second-hand record players and doing them
up to look like new.
• Work with a partner and make notes on the
form, meaning, use of this lexical item.
4. How do we help learners develop
their vocabulary?
Hunt &
Beglar?
Convey Meaning
Based on the 3 Cs-Pinkley, D
PearsonLongmanhttp://www.pearsonlongman.com/backpackgold/pdf/teachin
gvocab.pdf
Check Understanding
Consolidate learning
Diane Pinkley
PearsonLongmanhttp://www.pearsonlongman.com/backpackgold/pdf/teachi
ngvocab.pdf
R
Diane Pinkley
PearsonLongmanhttp://www.pearsonlongman.com/backpackgold/pd
f/teachingvocab.pdf
Zimmerman (2009)
Raising ‘word consciousness’ is key.
1. Be selective – choose words based on
‘frequency, salience, learners’ goals and the
learning burden of words’.
2. Provide repetition – 10+ times
3. Offer effective practice in meaningful contexts
4. Monitor understanding and learning-bear in
mind the incremental nature of vocab learning
• Nation (2008) argues that learners need to
take responsibility for their vocabulary
development by
• Practising
• Focusing on deliberate learning
• How far is a teacher responsible for
developing these attitudes in a learner?
Teaching Vocabulary:
Some Issues raised in Hunt and Beglar
• Incidental learning, explicit instruction and independent strategy
development
• The role of graded readers
• The role of translation
• Length of time sts should be focusing on vocabulary in one class
• The number of items to be taught in one session
• The need to ‘deepen sts’ knowledge of words.’
• The connection between development of vocabulary and timed
reading exercises.
• The effectiveness of guessing from context.
• The role of dictionary training (for interesting view of the future of
dictionaries in ELT see:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/seminars/who-needsdictionaries)
RECYCLE AND REVIEW
• A teacher’s work doesn’t end with the
‘effective’ presentation; it only begins there.
Over to you
• Work in groups of 3 or 4 and
demonstrate/discuss the vocabulary practice
activity you have brought along to the session.
• Use this time to discuss your responses to
question 5 from the preparation sheet.
Indicated Reading 1
• Brown, D., 2011 What Aspects of Vocabulary Knowledge do
Textbooks Give Attention to? Language Teaching Research, 15, 8397
• Lewis, M. 1993, The Lexical Approach, LTP
• McCarthy, M. 1990, Vocabulary, Oxford
• Nation, I. 2001, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language,
Cambridge
• O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. & Carter, R. 2007, From Corpus to
Classroom, Cambridge
• Thornbury, S., 2002 How to Teach Vocabulary Pearson Longman
• Ur, P. 2011, Vocabulary Activities, Cambridge
• Zimmerman, C. B., 2009, Word Knowledge: A Vocabulary Teacher’s
Handbook Oxford
Indicated Reading 2
• Schmitt, N. & McCarthy, M. (eds.) 1997,
Vocabulary Description, Acquisition and
Pedagogy, Cambridge University Press
• Ch.2.6. Schmitt, N. ‘Vocabulary Learning
Strategies’
• Ch.3.1. Sokmen, A. ‘Current trends in Teaching
Second Language Vocabulary’