1
ING303
Teaching Language Skills
LECTURE 5: TEACHING VOCABULARY
A Joke
2
.
Aims of the Chapter

What is vocabulary?: A definition of the word vocabulary in the
context of English Language Teaching.

What students need to learn: aspects of vocabulary knowledge:
Aspects of lexical items that learners need to learn, associated with
their form, meaning and use in context.

How best to teach vocabulary: some facts and figures: Researchbased information about how vocabulary is most effectively learned
and taught.
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Aims of the Chapter (cont’d)

Presenting new vocabulary: selection and presentation: The
selection and initial presentation of new lexical items.

Vocabulary review: consolidating and extending lexical knowledge:
Later practice and enrichment activities to enhance vocabulary
learning.

Vocabulary assessment: Different methods of testing the various
aspects of vocabulary knowledge.
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A good saying
A word is not fully learned through one
meeting with it…
even if this meeting involves
substantial deliberate teaching.
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What is vocabulary?

Vocabulary can be defined as the words in a language. It may
include items that are more than a single word.

bicycle, tree, phone; door handle, brother-in-law

Multi-word expressions: call it a day, be that as it may, get along (with)

A useful convention is to cover all such cases (e.g. single word,
double word and multiple word) by talking about vocabulary items
rather than words.

Vocabulary, or the lexicon, refers to the information stored in
memory concerning the spelling, pronunciation, meaning and the
use of words in a language.
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What is vocabulary? (cont’d)



The term vocabulary is taken to include grammatical items:

Pronouns: she, they, someone, nobody

Determiners: a/an, the, that, those, any
These are contrasted with lexical items:

Nouns: book, car, friendship, love

Verbs: go, feel, jump

Adjectives: big, expensive, round

Adverbs: fast, often, carefully
Grammatical items are closed set while lexical items are open set.
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What students need to learn:
aspects of vocabulary knowledge

The most important things to know about a lexical item are:
pronunciation
spelling
book
meaning
use
Form: pronunciation and spelling

The learner has to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation)
and what it looks like (its spelling).

Meaning of a word may be viewed as more important than form
but meaning is useless without knowing the from it is attached to.
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What students need to learn
(cont’d)
Meaning (denotation)

The meaning of a language item is what it refers to, or denotes,
in the real world. This is given in dictionaries as its definition.

Sometimes a word may have a number of meanings: most
often these are metaphorical extensions of the meaning of the
original word.


foot of a mountain deriving from foot as part of body
Sometimes a word such as bear has multiple meanings:

bear the animal

bear meaning ‘tolerate’ / they come from different words that
developed into the same form.
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What students need to learn
(cont’d)
Grammar

The grammar of a new item will need to be taught if this is not
obviously covered by general grammatical rules. An item may have
an unpredictable change of form in some contexts:

the plural form of foot and goose; sheep and fish

the past tense form of learn and burn

the comparative and superlative form of good and bad

The verbs that take –ing forms and the verbs that take the to infinitive:
admit and consider, expect and deserve
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What students need to learn
(cont’d)
Collocation


Collocation refers to the way words tend to co-ocur with other
words or expressions. For example, we normally say:

tell the truth but not say the truth

do the cooking but not make the cooking

make a mess not do a mess

throw a ball but toss a coin

a tall man but a tall mountain is inappropriate
Collocations are often, but not always, shown in dictionaries under
the headword of one of the collocating items. (look at p. 61)
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What students need to learn
(cont’d)
Connotation

The connotations of a word are the emotional or positive-negative
associations that it implies.

Moist / dump: (slightly wet) have the same basic meaning

Moist has favorable connotations: a moist chocolate cake

Dump has unfavorable connotations: a dump cake

slender / skinny – energetic children / wild children
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What students need to learn
(cont’d)
Appropriateness


To know how to use an item, students need to know about its
appropriateness in a certain context.

My uncle cried all night when his dog ran away.

My uncle wept all night…….
chew and munch ‘to eat something’

The boy chewed his food before swallowing / crush food with teeth

The buy munched his food / eat food audibly
(do the Task on page 62)
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Meaning Relationships

Synonyms: Two or more items that have similar meanings


Antonyms: Two or more items that have opposite meanings



smart, bright and clever are the synonyms of __________
rich is an antonym of poor; risky is an antonym of __________
Hyponyms: Items that serve as a specific example of a concept

dog, lion and mouse are the hyponyms of animal

rose, poppy and carnation are the hyponyms of __________
Superordinates: General concpets that ‘cover’ specific items

Animal is the superordinate of dog, lion and mouse
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Word Formation

Words can be broken down into morphemes:



The word unkindly is composed of the prefix un-, the root kind and the
suffix -ly.
(disappointment, unlockable)
You may want to teach the common prefixes and suffixes:

con- / co- : ‘together, with’, connect, correspond, cooperate

inter-: ‘between’, interval, international, interstate

-let: ‘diminutive’, booklet, pamphlet, piglet, eaglet
Another way vocabulary items are built is by combining two or three
words to make one item:

bookcase, follow-up, swimming pool, four-wheel drive
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How best to teach vocabulary:
some facts and figures
How many of its words do you need to know in order to understand a
text?

The claim was that if you understand 80-85% of the words of a text,
then you can probably guess the rest and understand the text as a
whole.

This is now known to be an underestimate. It is now believed that in
order to understand a text, you need to be able to understand
between 95% and 98% of its words (Schmitt, 2008).

If there is more than one word every two lines that you do not
understand, you may have trouble understanding the text. (Task. 64)
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How best to teach vocabulary:
some facts and figures (cont’d)

Knowing about 98% of an unsimplified text means knowing a huge
number of word families: 5,000 and 8,000.

Word families: groups of words which have a common root: nation,
nationalize, national, international

The number of single words to be learned is even larger. It will still be
larger if we include idiomatic expressions.

The challenge that faces the teacher is how to help students
achieve such a huge vocabulary.

The learners of English learn three or four hours of English, meaning they
need to learn about 20-30 word families every week.
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How best to teach vocabulary:
some facts and figures (cont’d)

It is not enough for learners just to read, hear and understand a new
item once. We need at least 6, as many as 16 re-encounters with an
item in order to learn it (Zahar et al., 2001).
Incidental and deliberate teaching and learning

A large vocabulary is learned incidentally only through listening,
reading and conversation in L1. In the context of a formal school
course, this is inefficient: very slow and unreliable.

We need to include some deliberate, focussed vocabulary-teaching
procedures
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Presenting new vocabulary:
selection and presentation
Selection and sources of new vocabulary

Usefulness of the vocabulary items is the most important criterion.
One helpful measure of the usefulness is frequency i.e. how often a
word, or expression, is used in conversation or writing.

There are vocabulary lists based on frequency avaliable to teachers
online:

www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/oxford3000/

http://vocabularypreview.englishprofile.org/staticfiles/about.html

http://intra.collegebourget.qc.ca/spip/IMG/doc/AWL_complete_list2.doc
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Presenting new vocabulary:
selection and presentation (cont’d)
Selection and sources of new vocabulary

Frequency is not the only criterion. You might want to teach new
words because they are important for students’ culture or present
situation.

Sometimes you teach words because they are easy to learn (short,
easily pronounceable and similar to a word in L1).

Or simply because they are fun and interesting items in themselves.

When you have a long list of new vocabulary items in a text, we do
need to distinguish between which items are important to teach
and review so that our students remember and can use them.
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Presenting new vocabulary:
selection and presentation (cont’d)

It is important to provide activities whose focus is simply vocabulary
expansion.

We might have a spot in the lesson, perhaps at the beginning, called
‘word of the day’ or ‘expression of the day’ where we teach a new
item.

We might have students themselves ‘show and tell’: find out about new
items and teach the rest of the class.
A useful website for introducing new vocabulary:

http://busyteacher.org/4197-5-best-ways-to-introduce-newvocabulary.html
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Presenting new vocabulary

Once we select the items to teach, we then have to get students to
perceive their form and understand their meaning(s).

We want to do this as interestingly as possible so that students pay
attention and take the items into the short-term memory. Some key
practical principles are;

Include both written and spoken form, both receptive and
productive: New items have to be written up on the board, and said
as they are being written.

Some students find it easier to learn new items by seeing them, others by
hearing. Providing both spoken and written forms will make the target
item more memorable.
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

Ensure understanding of meanings: Make sure your students learn
the intended meaning, not the wrong meaning. At the beginner
level, the meanings of new words are more concrete. You can use:

Pictures (flashcards, posters, google images!)
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

Ensure understanding of meanings (cont’d)

Realia (actual objects or toy objects)
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

Ensure understanding of meanings (cont’d)

Gestures and Mime (Works great with kids who like to move their body)

You can get students physically engaged in the lesson. It gets them out of
their seats and shakes things up.

You say “The elephant was very…” with outstretched arms and your
students should say ______.

If you use the same gesture when you say “Please stand up.” students
will become accustomed to it and stand up when you use that gesture
even if you occasionally leave out the oral instruction.
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

Ensure understanding of meanings (cont’d):

At intermediate level, you could use translation, definition and
description, giving examples, hints and sample uses of the item.

Friend: arkadaş, a person who knows and likes another, Ahmet is my friend.

The most effective in most cases is translation (if you have a monolingual
class and are fluent in your students’ L1).
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

Optimize impact: Use mnemonic devices, use ‘keywords’: students
link the target word with an image involving a similar word in their
own language.

Suppose you are teaching the word shelf to a
group of German speakers: tell them to imagine
a cat sleeping (schläft) on a shelf.

The next time they come across the word, or
need to use it, the image of a cat asleep on a
shelf will help them remember it.

How do you teach the word love to Turkish kids? How about fork?
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Presenting new vocabulary
(cont’d)

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What helps students remember individual items?

How does the memory work?

Experiment: memorizing contrasting lists of vocabulary: all with three letters,
but of varying difficulty and meaning-value.

Look at the words in List A and List B on p. 67. Which list of vocabulary do you
think is learned easily? Why?
(do the task on p. 67)

List B produces near-perfect scores; List A noticeably less. There are two main
reasons for this.

The uniform (fairly low) level of difficulty of the items in List B in contrast to the more
advanced and varied level of List A.

The fact that the words in List B are grouped according to meaning or sound
association whereas there is no such grouping in List A.
Practical Tips


Get students to use vocabulary notebooks

Students should write down the new vocabulary they have learned. The
best way to do it is to have a vocabulary notebook, which can be used
for later review.

They can also list the items in a file on their computer/laptop, cellphone.

They should note down the meaning of each item beside it / cross out
Do not insist on students writing detailed entries for each item

It is suggested that students add to each item an English definition as
well as an L1 one, a sentence contextualizing it, maybe a drawing, PoS.

However, experience shows that students rarely keep this up over time
and find it more tedious than helpful.
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Practical Tips (cont’d)

Encourage students to think up their own ‘keyword’ devices for
remembering words


Do not teach more than ten new items at a time at intermediate
classes


Students are more likely to remember keywords that they have devised
themselves.
and even fewer for younger classes. There is a limit to how many items
can be taken on board in one lesson.
Teach new items early in the lesson

Students are faster and better at learning new material at the
beginning of lessons than they are later.
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Vocabulary review: consolidating
and extending lexical knowledge


A learner needs to re-encounter a new item several times in order to
remember it permanently.

Very common items like go, put, person, and day are likely to be met
again in the texts or interpersonal communication.

When you start teaching even slightly less common vocabulary like
cook or business, you need to create opportunities to review.

You need to use effective learning tasks whose focus is multiple,
meaningful encounters with the target items.
‘Expanding rehearsal’ (Baddeley, 1997)

It is a useful techinque that is used when students still remember the item
but need a slight effort to recall it. Do review at regular intervals!
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Vocabulary review (cont’d)

Reviewing, not testing: It is important to ensure that review tasks are
not just tests.

Tasks that review vocabulary aim to consolidate and deepen students’
basic knowledge. Their aim is to teach.

Tests aim to find out what students know; they may not result in much
learning.

The aim of vocabulary learning activity is that students should engage
successfully and meaningfully with target items.

There is plenty of room for peer-teaching and collaboration but there is
NO particular need for assessment or giving of grades.
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Types of Review Tasks
Single-item

Review of single words or expressions does not have to be done
through encountering them in full sentences.

Reminding students of the meaning or form of individual items is also
very useful and a lot quicker than working on full contexts.

Going through the target items and reminding students of what they
mean.

Giving students a few minutes so that they look through their
vocabulary notebooks during lesson time.

Writing up the items on the board and asking students to identify
those they do not remember so that you can re-teach them.
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Types of Review Tasks (cont’d)
Items in context

Asking students to engage with (understand and produce) items
within a sentence takes longer. However, it provides for review and
deeper learning of aspects of the word (grammar, collocation etc.).
Some examples

Compose sentences: Students compose sentences that
contextualize items.

Compose a story: In groups, students make up stories that
contextualize as many as possible items from those recently taught.

Find collocations: Students are given single words and find collocat.
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Practical Tips

Get students to review on their own: Explain to students the
importance of vocabulary review and urge them to use vocabulary
notebooks to remind themselves of the vocabulary items at home.
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Practical tips (cont’d)

Use word cards: Word cards are slips of stiff paper with the target
item on one side and the L1 translation on the other.
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Practical tips (cont’d)

List new items on mobile phones: Tell students to note the new items
either on their mobile phone or any other electronic equipment.

Display new vocabulary (semi)-permanently: New vocabulary can
be displayed on the classroom wall or on the board.

Recall at the end of the lesson: Use your lesson summary time to
remind students of the new items they have learned.

Go back to earlier items: Remember to occasionally review items
you taught a month or two ago.
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Vocabulary Assessment

We need to check how much of the vocabulary we have taught
has been mastered by students.

It is useful to do an assessment of how much vocabulary students
know overall.

This is done by way of a variety of vocabulary tests.
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Vocabulary Assessment (cont’d)
Tests of target vocabulary

Most vocabulary tests target specific sets of items, but how and
what they test often varies. For any particular test you need to ask:

Does this test only check understanding (receptive knowledge) of the
target items or does it find out if students can actually say or write them
when needed (productive knowledge).

Does it test spoken or written knowledge of the item, or both?

Does it require students to contextualize the item or just understand or
produce in isolation?

Does it provide for objective assessment (such as multiple-choice) or
does it need some measure of subjective judgment (open sent.
writing)?
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Common vocabulary test formats

Multiple-choice: Students mark the right option of several
possibilities.

Gapfills: Students fill in a single gap in a sentence with the right
word.

Focused cloze: A full, coherent text is supplied with the target items
missing; students fill in the appropriate items.

One-to-one matching: Students match appropriate items from
parallel lists: this could be matching a word to its definition, or
matching opposites.

Dictation: Students write down items from the teacher’s dictation. A
variation of this is translation-dictation. Q. How does it work?
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Common vocabulary test formats
(cont’d)

Sentence completion: Students are given the beginning of
sentences that include the target item, and complete them to
demnstrate understanding.

Say if you know it: Students simply state whether they know the
given item or not. If they say they do, they use it in a sentence.

Translate: Students translate the item, isolated or in a sentence
context, to or from L1.

Read aloud: Students read aloud the items, showing they can
pronounce them properly

What is in the picture?: Students tell orally what items they can see in
the picture.
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Common vocabulary test formats
(cont’d)

Do the task on page 73.

How many words do you know?
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Vocabulary Teaching

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Suppose you are about to teach a set of new vocabulary items to
elementary students in the lesson. Here is the vocabulary list:
Vocabulary

boy
door
girl
picture
wall
clock
floor
person
room
window
Prepare a lesson plan that shows how you would introduce these
new words to your students.