Teaching vocabulary
What is more important for practical use of English, grammar or vocabulary?
The importance of vocabulary
Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed
(Wilkins)
If you spend most of your time studying grammar, your English will not improve very much.
You will see most improvement if you learn more words and expressions.
The advent of a communicative method set the stage for a major rethink of the role of vocabulary. Coursebooks began to introduce activities that specifically targeted vocabulary.
Two key developments challenged the hegemony of grammar: 1. Lexical syllabus – based on those words that appear with a high degree of frequency in spoken and written language
2. Recognition of the role of lexical chunks in the acquisition of language and achieving fluency.
Even if most coursebooks still adopt a grammatical syllabus, vocabulary was no longer treated as a comlement. Much more attention is given to the grammar of words, to collocation and to word frequency.
Cutting Edge Intermediate – Strong emphasis on vocabulary, with a particular focus on high frequency, useful words and phrases.
New Headway English course - Well-defined vocabulary syllabus plus dictionary training and pronunciation practice, including the use of phonetics.
Innovations – a strongly lexical syllabus, presenting and practising hundreds of natural expressions which students will find immediately useful
What is involved in knowing the word
The meaning
The spoken form
The written form
The grammatical behaviour
The word’s derivations
The word’s frequency
The collocations of the word
The connotations of the word
The register
How large must be a vocabulary stock?
What are the objectives in studying vocabulary?
An educated native speaker will have a vocabulary of around 20 000 words. Most adult second language learners acquire about 5000 word families after several years of study.
At the same time, It has been calculated that a classroom learner would need more than eighteen years of classroom exposure to supply the same amount of vocabulary input that occurs in just one year of natural setting.
Is there such a thing as a threshold level – a core vocabulary that will serve in most situations? One figure that is often quoted is 2000.
This is around the number of words that most native speakers use in their daily conversation. About 2000 words is the size of the defining vocabulary used in dictionary’s definitions.
A passive knowledge of the 2000 most frequent words in English would provide a reader with familiarity with nearly nine out of every ten words in most written texts.
Most researchers recommend a basic vocabulary of at least 3000 word families, while for more specialised needs a working vocabulary of 5000 word families is desirable.
Students aiming to pass FCE should aim to understand at least 5000 words. (even if their productive store is half that number).
The task of acquiring a functional lexicon is more complicated than merely memorising words from lists.
Which words a learner needs to know is a personal matter!!!
A good part of vocabulary acquisition has to be incidental. Incidental learning is facilitated through exposure to language input through extensive reading for example.
Most important of all, is that the teacher encourages enthusiasm for vocabulary acquisition and provides learners with the strategies for self-directing learning.
Learning a vocabulary is a question of memory
The short-term store (STS) is the brain’s capacity to hold a limited number of items of information for periods up to a few seconds. It is the kind of memory that is involved in holding in our head the word we have just heard the teacher modelling.
Focusing on words long enough to perform operations on them is the function of working memory. It can be thought of as a kind of work bench, where information is first placed, studied and moved about before being filed away for later retrieval.
Long-term memory can be thought of as a kind of filing system. Long-term memory has an enormous capacity and its contents are durable over time.
The main challenge: the learners can retain new vocabulary items the length of the lesson but have forgotten them by the next lesson.
The man task is to tranfsorm material from the quickly forgotten to the never forgotten.
Principles that help us do just that:
Repetition: repeating material while it is still in our working memory. e.g. when reading words have a good chance to be remembered if they appear at least 7 times over spaced intervals.
Distributed space principle. It is better to distribute the work of memory across a period of time rather than to mass it together in a single block.
Pacing. Learners should be given an opportunity to pace their own rehearsal activities.
Use. Putting words to use is the best way of insuring they are added to the Long-term memory. Use it or lose it!!!
Imagining - Silent visualising a mental picture to go with a new word. Even for abstract words it might help if learners associate them with some mental image.
Mnemonics – tricks to help retrieve items or rules that are stored in memory and are not yet automatically retrievable.
Motivation – the learner is likely to spend more time on rehearsal and practice, which in the end will pay off.
Attention: words that trigger a strong emotional response are more easily recalled that ones that don’t.
Personal organising. Those students who make up their own sentences containing the words and read them aloud do better.
Why do we forget words?
Forgetting may be caused both by interference from subsequent learning and by insufficient recycling.
Most teachers are familiar with the symptoms of overload when the price of learning new language items is the forgetting the old ones. A remedy against forgetting could be recycling. The spaced review of learned material can dramatically reduce the rate of forgetting.
Research suggests that if learners see or use a word in a way different from the way they first met it then better learning is achieved.
How to teach vocabulary