Vocabulary teaching
General approaches that teachers
and teaching materials can adopt
– Traditional direct approach: Teach vocabulary
items
– Indirect1, learner training approach: Teach
conscious vocabulary-related strategies
– How to help a poor man?
– Indirect2, natural approach: Create opportunities
for spontaneous acquisition via communicative
tasks . The three hypotheses.
Direct teaching
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Selection and ordering
Amount and rate
Presentation
Practice
Production
Assessment
– TASK Which are in the teacher’s hands?
• Selection and ordering… the vocab syllabus
– Who does it?
– What criteria are relevant?
– TASK
• Importance, aka utility
• Frequency lists e.g.
http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnc/nation_14/
• Ministry lists
• Other student needs
• Ease, aka learnability, teachability
• Interlingual, intralingual, extralingual
• Interest
• Amount and rate
– What would be the ideal amount of vocabulary to
be learnt overall in a course?
– What is a suitable rate per hour of new words?
– TASK
• Presentation
– What actually is a pedagogically useful vocabulary
item to present?
• Words?
• Word families?
• Lexical chunks aka lexical phrases, formulae,
readymades…?
• Beyond phrasal verbs (e.g. bring up), multiword compounds
(e.g. hard disk) and idiomatic phrases (e.g. pull someone’s leg)
to:
• polyword
• frame or slot
• sentence head
• sentence tail
• cliché
at any rate, by and large, as well [= ‘also’]
the [adj.]-er the [adj]–er, as [adj]….as,
so [adj]…that… ,
Little did…realize that…
Could you....., God only knows wh-…
…, if you would., …and so on.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
– What is there to present about a lexical item?
• ..beyond the basic ‘form – one meaning’ link
– How can presentation be done?
• Traditional deductive presentation
• Inductive presentation
• Deductive presentation
– Three basic ways to present word meaning
– Extension to other aspects of words like
collocation
• E.g. More Words You Need (Rudzka et al., 1985,
MacMillan)
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~scholp/corptask2.htm
• Inductive presentation, requiring learner
strategies
– To present word meaning
• Teacher provides a ‘pregnant context’ , e.g. a situation
or story from which the meaning of the word can be
easily guessed
– For other aspects of words like collocation,
grammatical behaviour, stylistic value
• Students work on corpus concordance lines or
statistics e.g. at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
• Practice… Production
• Any repetition / practice of vocab has some at least
minimal value… but
• ….there are many types of vocab exercise/task
• Teacher needs to choose suitable ones in the light of
what kind of work needs to be done on vocab that has
been presented
• So what are the functions of exercises / practice?
X = what the teacher presented about the lexical items
• Confirm that X has been correctly learnt
• Reinforce prior learning, i.e. aid memory of X
– Recycling, repetition
– Establishment of associations
– Deepening of processing
• Activation: automatise /proceduralise what has been
learnt of X so that learners access it more fluently
• Activation: extend knowledge of the items beyond X
• Activation: turn passive/receptive/recognition mastery
of X into active/production/recall ability
Recycling… or lack of it
Exercise types in P and W
– Selective attention: Make students identify/notice
wordform (e.g. underline the word wherever it occurs in
the text) a
– Recognition: Make students show recognition/receptive
knowledge of meaning (e.g. match word with picture) b
– Manipulation: make students show wordformation
knowledge (e.g. change word from noun to adjective)
– Interpretation: make students show knowledge of
collocation and syntactic properties (e.g. guess meaning
from context, give grammatical function of word in text)
– Production: make students show recall/production word
knowledge (e.g. open cloze) c
• Communicative practice/production
– Often seen as ultimate goal of vocab teaching
– ‘Deep end’ approach… reverse PPP
– Indirect 1 approach needed here
Indirect1 teaching
• Vocabulary related strategies potentially to
teach
– To help learner where (s)he does not know
vocabulary, esp. in real communicative use:
Coping
• Some of those involve learning: Discovery
• Some involve managing without the needed vocab
– To help learner remember vocabulary previously
met/taught: Consolidation
– TASK… think of examples
• Coping
• Skip/avoid
• Make do with existing L2 resources (and maybe
Discover)
• Appeal (so Discover)
• Consolidation
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Self-selection and note keeping
Repetition
Association
Integrative practice
• What the teacher needs to check
– What strategies do students already know from L1?
– What strategies have been already taught, maybe
implicitly, through direct teaching?
– For more demanding strategies, check if students have the
threshold language prof to be able to exploit them /
transfer them from L1
• Three general approaches:
– Allow or encourage them (e.g. ‘Use your dictionary’, ‘Try guessing
it’, ‘Why not put that in your vocab notebook?’)
– Teach them overtly as opportunities arise during a reading
task, on specific instances
• Inductively: e.g. ‘What did/could you do here to get the meaning?’
• Deductively: e.g. ‘Look at the phrase after the word and guess’
– Teach them overtly and separately from reading task
• Inductively: e.g. ‘What do you do when you meet an unknown
word?’, ‘What do you do to try to remember words?’
• Deductively: e.g. ‘I am going to show you how to use your
dictionary properly’. Note: examples used may be known words
• After strategy teaching…
– Implement ‘deep-end’ approach
– Indirect2 should work better now
Indirect2 teaching
• Incidental spontaneous learning in extensive
communicative language use
• The three hypotheses claiming major sources
of this
– Input (Krashen)
– Output (Swain)
– Interaction (Long)
• What really occurs?
– Incidental learning/acquisition
– ..but is it unconscious/implicit?
• The need for noticing
• So consciousness is involved
• … but the teacher does not teach vocab or strategies in
this approach/phase
• Conditions the teacher needs to create
– Interesting communication opportunities
– Motivated students
– ?Input modification
– Incidental learning may be planned to be
• Vocab acquisition tasks: required vocab at i+1… but not
i+2
• Vocab fluency tasks: required vocab at i or i-1
• Strategy development tasks?
References
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Thornbury, S. 2002. How to Teach Vocabulary. London: Longman.
Gairns, R. and Redman, S. 1986. Working with words: a guide to teaching and
learning vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. 1988. Vocabulary and language teaching. London:
Longman.
Sökmen, A. 1997. ‘Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary.’ In
Schmitt, N. and M. McCarthy (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and
Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press
Hatch, E. and C. Brown. 1995. Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (parts only)
Nation, I.S.P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in another Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series, CUP
Read, J. 2000. Assessing Vocabulary.