2. Teaching vocabulary to young learners

 Some principles of teaching vocabulary to young learners are:

- it is important to visualize the item and get the pupils to repeat or use the item actively. One good way of doing this is to let them see or perhaps touch the vocabulary item, for instance a house.

-It is necessary to let children repeat the words in different ways and they should be given a chance to listen to the teacher talking about it.

-The Total Physical Response should be used (commands, prepositions)

- Communicative Language Approach (Teaching) – CLT – stresses the meaning of a language in context. Communicative competence is highly developed here and learners are encouraged to communicate.

-Fun and games are important (singing, clapping hands, chanting rhymes, solving puzzles, drawing, coloring, model-making, games)

Stages in teaching vocabulary

There are three stages in teaching vocabulary: presenting, practicing and revising.

Techniques for presentation:

-showing the meaning of the words visually (using pictures, realia, mime, gestures)

-showing the meaning of words in context (using examples, situation, explanation). -using synonyms and/or antonyms

-translation (it is quick, easy and saves time)

For example, to present the words on the topic “Fruit” the teacher brings a bag of different fruit, picks up one fruit and says the word clearly a number of times, encouraging the students to repeat the word. In this way the teacher goes through all the words. Teacher regularly returns to the words to check if students remembered them. He picks up a banana and asks: Is this an apple? Students should say “yes” or “no”. For teaching abstract nouns synonyms, antonyms, definition, substitution, context are used.

A combination of techniques can make presenting the meaning of the new words effective. Each technique will reinforce and support the others, thus marking the presentation of new words clearer and more efficient.

Techniques in practicing vocabulary

 -Identifying

(for example: Listen, then tick the words you hear). Identification is the first step in recognizing words and requires learners do easy task as counting, ticking or a bit difficult is to unscramble words as in anagram

-Selecting

(learners have to recognize words and make choices among them at the same time. Finding and odd one out is a common task that teachers often use in class for checking comprehension

-Matching

-(learners need to pair a set of given words to a translation, a synonym/antonym, definition, etc).

 -Sorting

(students group words into different categories It should be noted that the categories can be given in advance or learners have o guess what the categories are.

Techniques in consolidating and revising vocabulary

-Ordering

-Rub out and remember

-Networks (mind map)-learners put a list of words into different groups

-Bingo

 -Word storm-an area or a concept are given by the teacher. Students write down as many words as they can remember on an area or a concept.

 -Guess the picture

 -Matching

 -Noughts and Crosses

 -What & where

 -Jumbled words

-Crosswords

Production tasks (learners produce something as a product of their own).

 -sentence and text completion

-gap-filling.

In close gap-fill, words are provided in advance. In open gap-fill learners have to fill in basing on their amount of lexical items.

-creation tasks

In creation tasks typical instructions are used. For example: choose six words from the list and write a sentence using each one; write a short narrative or a dialog which includes at least five words from the list, etc.