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

• 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 at any rate, by and large, as well [= ‘also’]• frame or slot the [adj.]-er the [adj]–er, as [adj]….as,

so [adj]…that… ,Little did…realize that…

• sentence headCould you....., God only knows wh-… • sentence tail …, if you would., …and so on.• cliché 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• 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• 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.