Principles and Practice in Vocabulary Instruction

Rob Waring

A: Overview of language teaching

The Balanced Curriculum

Input
(Receptive) / Output
(Productive)
Building
Language / Box 1 - The Formal Learning Box
Building knowledge about the language
Awareness raising / Box 2 - The “Getting Control” Box
Linking knowledge
Accuracy focus
Building
Fluency / Box 3 - The Fluency Input Box
Networking knowledge
Comprehending input fluently / Box 4 - The Fluency Output Box
Experimenting with language
Developing fluency

The Balanced Curriculum - example activities

Input
(Receptive) / Output
(Productive)
Building
Language / Box 1 - The Formal Learning Box
  • Explicit teaching
  • Dictionary lookups
  • Studying from a grammar book
  • Intensive reading
  • Language awareness activities
  • Conscious word learning
/ Box 2 - The “Getting Control” Box
  • Controlled language production activities.
  • Language and pronunciation drills
  • Gap fill exercises
  • Memorized dialogs
  • Sentence completion tasks
  • Tests

Building
Fluency / Box 3 - The Fluency Input Box
  • Extensive reading
  • Extensive listening
  • Watching movies
  • Browsing the Internet
  • Listening to the radio or music
/ Box 4 - The Fluency Output Box
  • ‘Free’ language production
  • activities.
  • Casual conversations
  • Debates and discussions
  • Email, and online chat
  • Diary writing
  • Essays

The Balanced Curriculum – what each box does

Input
practice / Output
practice
Building
Language / -provides new knowledge about language features
-raises awareness of how the language works
-raises awareness of strategies needed to become more language aware / -gives practice in checking whether something is known
-allows learners to actively construct language
-focuses on attaining accurate control over language features
Building
Fluency / -allows learners to get a feel for how the language works (getting collocational and colligational knowledge)
-consolidates the learned discretely language features
-allows learners to meet huge amounts of text / -gives real time opportunities to experiment with language use
-gives feedback on the success of language use
-builds fluency of language production

The Cycle of Learning

B. Vocabulary teaching

Typical vocabulary teaching

  • Most vocab teaching is from context
  • Haphazard selection of materials
  • Different vocab topic in each unit
  • Too many words at once
  • Rare words are favoured over common words
  • Focus on single words not lexical chunks
  • All students learn the same words
  • Word teaching = definition and spelling
  • Teachers give meanings
  • Low recycling of vocab in course books
  • Low recycling of vocab by teachers
  • Teachers leave vocab learning to learners
  • Vocab learning strategies are rarely taught
  • Vocab learning techniques are rarely taught
  • Vocabulary learning goals are rarely set
  • Dictionary skills are rarely taught
  • Vocab notebooks not encouraged
  • Words are kept in lists
  • Vocab exercises test not teach
  • Teachers trust the course book to deal with vocab

Common sense stuff about vocab learning

  • There are many things to learn about a word

- spelling- pronunciation - frequency

- meaning - relationships with other words

- inflections and derivations formal / slang?

- spoken or written? etc.

  • There are 2 stages in word learning

1) the connection between the spelling or sound with its meaning “the form–meaning relationship”

2) deepening the knowledge of the word collocation (word partners)

  • It takes 8-50 meetings (or more) to ‘learn’ a word
  • Initial word knowledge is very fragile. Memoriesof new wordsthat are not met again soon, are lost to the “forgetting curve”.
  • Because we teach a word does not mean they learned it (i.e. teaching does not cause learning). Note* our text books assume this. Because they finished the textbook does not mean they know all the words in the book
  • Written and spoken vocabulary are different. Fewer words are needed for speaking
  • Not all words are equally frequent. There is a core useful vocabulary everyone needs (about 2000 word families). Not everyone needs the other 90% of the words in English.
  • Students should learn the most frequent anduseful words first, later they can specialize.
  • They cannot guess new meaning from context ifthe surrounding text is too difficult.
  • Some words are more difficult to learn than others
  • Words live with other words, not in isolation

What do learners need to know?

  • Words first, grammar later
  • The most useful words (2000 general service words)
  • High utility English- Japanese loanword pairs (gairaigo) and local words, shrine, temple etc.
  • Many language management words / expressions. chalk, textbook, what does X mean?
  • Common sentence heads May I …, I’d like …., Would you, …
  • Fixed and semi-fixed phrases How do you do? Happy Birthday By the way , now or never
  • Colligations lend something to someone vs. borrow something from s/o

excited by sthg / Agree with someone vs. agree to do something

  • Collocations beautiful woman vs. handsome man / yellow car vs. blonde hair

Great surprise vs. large family

  • Register Would you kindly fetch me the …. vs. Get me the …… :

awesome / groovy / fab / cool / wicked / bad

  • Context – medical, engineering, sports, science, computer etc.
  • Spoken vs. written exhausted vs. knackered / dirty vs. mucky

Learning vocab is a MASSIVE task. IDEA

Verb uses of Idea. “Abandon an idea.”

abandon, absorb, accept, adjust to, advocate, amplify, advance, back, be against, be committed/dedicated/drawn to, be obsessed with, be struck by, borrow, cherish, clarify, cling to, come out/up with, confirm, conjure up, consider, contemplate, convey, debate, debunk, defend, demonstrate, develop, deny, dismiss, dispel, disprove, distort, drop, eliminate, encourage, endorse, entertain, explode, explore, expound, express, favour, fit, fit in with, follow up, form, formulate, foster, get, get accustomed/used to, get rid of, give up, go along with, grasp, hammer out, have, hit upon, hold, implement, imply, impose – on sb, incorporate, inculcate, instil, jot down, keep to, launch, meet, modify, negate, oppose, pick up, pioneer, plant, play with, popularise, present, promote, propose, put an end to, put forward, put – into practice, raise, refute, reinforce, reject, relish, resist, respond to, revive, ridicule, rule out, spread, squash, stick to, subscribe to, suggest, support, take to, take up, test, tinker with, toy with, turn down, warm to

More verb uses. “An idea……….”

V: appeals to (me), arose, came to me, caught on, cropped up, emerged, evolved, fell through, flourished, grew, is incompatible with, occurred to (me), spread, took root, took shape, won support

Adjective uses. “An idea is ………...”

A: abstract, absurd, advanced, ambitious, arresting, basic, bizarre, bold, bright, brilliant, classical, clear, common, commonsense, confused, controversial, convincing, crazy, diabolical, disconcerting, elusive, enlightened, entrenched, exaggerated, extravagant, extreme, false, familiar, fantastic, far-fetched, feasible, feeble, fixed, flexible, foolish, grotesque, hazy, heretical, imaginative, inflated, ingenious, ingrained, innovative, instinctive, intriguing, irresponsible, mad, misconceived, mistaken, monstrous, new-fangled, novel, original, old-fashioned, outdated, out-of-date, outrageous, peculiar, persuasive, preconceived, preposterous, prevalent, provocative, (un)real, (un)realistic, remarkable, revolutionary, ridiculous, risky, sensible, silly, splendid, strange, striking, superficial, untenable, useful, vague, valid, well-defined

The two ‘levels’ of word learning.

The Form-Meaning relationship
(How spelling and sounds are matched
with meanings) / The ‘deeper aspects of word learning
(The sense of how and when words are used)
What? / How meanings are pronounced
How meanings are written / Collocation Colligation
Register Frequency
Spoken vs. written
How to learn? / Intentional learning
Word cards
Mnemonics
Word study
Dictionary use
Working with definitions
Vocab notebooks / Intentional learning
Studying word books
Word cards
Exercises on collocation / colligation
Incidental learning (‘learning by accident”)
Extensive (Graded) Reading
Extensive (Graded) Listening

What does this mean for vocabulary learning and teaching?

Principles

  • There is not enough class time to teach everythingabout a word
  • Because time is limited, we have to teach students how to deal with new words (independent learning) thus they need vocabulary learning strategies
  • Learners must be set vocabulary learning goals
  • They need massive input to build vocabulary knowledge to deepen vocabulary connections
  • We should teach words the students need
  • We don’t need to teach every word in the book
  • We should not expect things we teach to be known tomorrow
  • We do not need to teach all words to be available for use
  • Learners must be forced to think about wordssothey can make connections between words

Intensive Learning

  • Words should be learned systematically
  • We should focus on word units larger than a single item
  • Not all learners will want to learn the same way
  • Direct word learning helps them build a start up vocabulary quickly
  • They must learn how to identify and master vocabulary patterns
  • They have to learn how to notice the gap between their own use of a word and how it is really used
  • We should scaffold the vocabulary by building on prior knowledge

Extensive learning

  • They need extensive practice with words
  • so they can meet them often
  • to work out word relationships
  • to build recognition automaticity
  • to get a sense of how words go together
  • They need chances
  • to observe new things about words
  • to hypothesize about their knowledge
  • to experiment with their vocabulary

The most important things for teachers

  • Use a systematic approach (set realistic goals)
  • Select the vocabulary carefully
  • Single words as well as phrases and collocation
  • Opportunities to meet new words
  • Concept check understanding
  • Plan to recycle, re-visit, review, recapitulate, reiterate, reconsider, repeat, revise, re-examine, .... etc.
  • Connect old learning to new learning
  • Give opportunities for incidental learning
  • Give opportunities for developing fluency and automaticity
  • Give opportunities for guessing words from context
  • Give opportunities to develop the pronunciation
  • Initial meetings are followed by deep processing (force them to think)
  • Opportunities for elaborating word knowledge
  • Let them experiment
  • Understand the vocabulary exercises in your book
  • Teach them to use a dictionary properly
  • Teach word learning strategies

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