How to teach vocabulary

Imagine that you are going to use the text below with your class of 14-year-old intermediate-level learners. Read it and decide: which words your learners will already know which words you need to pre-teach.

Deserts
Deserts cover about 20% of the Earths land. The desert has very little rain and extreme temperatures; in fact, a desert is a region that gets less than ten inches of rain each year. Because the desert is so dry, not many plants and animals live there. Some deserts get very hot during the day and then very cold at night, when temperatures can go well below 0 C. But some deserts are always cold, for example, the Gobi Desert in Asia, and the desert on the continent of Antarctica. Animals that live in the desert adapt so they can survive and deal with the lack of water, the extreme temperatures, and the shortage of food. To avoid the heat of the day, many desert animals only come out at night to eat; during the day they stay beneath the ground or hide in the shade. Many desert animals do not have to drink at all: they get all the water they need from their food. Most desert animals are also small. The biggest desert is northern Africas Sahara Desert; it covers roughly 3,500,000 square miles (9,065,000 square kilometres). The driest deserts are the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, South America, and the Lut Desert in eastern Iran.

Possibly your learners will not know these words in the text: extreme, region, inch, adapt, survive, deal with, (a) lack (of), shortage, avoid, ground, hide, shade, roughly, square mile. But will you need to teach them all? The answer to this question depends very much on the tasks about the text that your learners need to complete. Look at these three examples of tasks:
1 Choose the right answer to this question. What topic is this passage about? A animals B rain in deserts C deserts 2 Find the names of four deserts the text talks about. 3 Find three ways that animals survive in the desert.

To answer the question in task 1, learners just need to understand the gist or general meaning of the text. They can do this without understanding any of the words listed above, so you wouldnt need to teach any of them. To complete task 2, learners simply have to scan the text to find the names of the four deserts, so again, they do not have to understand any of the words listed above. The answer to task 3 is in the second paragraph of the text. The first and third paragraphs do not talk about animals. To answer the question properly, learners need to understand the meaning of adapt, survive, deal with, lack, shortage, avoid, ground, hide and shade, so you would need to teach these items to them.

Cambridge University Press 2011

How to teach vocabulary

We can see from this that our choice of words to pre-teach (i.e. teach before learners read a text or listen to a recording) depends on the tasks that go with the text or recording. Learners dont need to understand all the words in a recording or text, just the key words related to the reading or listening tasks. When we are choosing which words to teach learmers we also need to think about how many we should teach. Unfortunately our brains and memory have a limit. Many experts say we should not teach more than seven or eight new words at any one time. Lets look again at the words from the text that our learners may not know. They are: extreme, region, inch, adapt, survive, deal with, (a) lack (of), shortage, avoid, ground, hide, shade, roughly, square mile. You can see that some of these are single words (e.g. extreme, region, adapt). Others are two or more words (e.g. a lack of, deal with, square meal); i.e. they are chunks. It is better for our learners if we teach these words as chunks rather than individual words because they so often appear together and their meaning comes from being together. So when deciding which words to teach we need to consider whether we teach words in individual units or as part of groups of words (chunks) that often go together. Now to another big question: what do we teach learners about new words? When they first meet new words, learners clearly need to learn their meaning, their pronunciation (sounds and stress), spelling and how they operate in grammar (as adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc.). Later, when they meet these words again and as they progress in the language, they will need to learn, for example, the lexical set the words are part of, their collocations, the prefixes or suffixes they might take and other meanings. All these things are part of really knowing a word and they help us to realise that learning a word is not a one-off thing, but something that grows. Getting to know a word is a bit like getting to know a friend we can always learn new things about them, and until we have learnt all these things we cant say we know the friend very well. So, how do we teach the meaning of words? Concrete words, which refer to things we can see in the world, are generally easy to teach. We can show learners pictures of these things, bring real examples of them (realia) into the classroom or even mime their meaning. If we show the meaning of a word, ask learners to repeat it with the correct pronunciation and write it on the board for the learners to copy down in their notebooks, we have taught the meaning, pronunciation and spelling of these concrete words. However, it is more difficult to teach the meaning of abstract words, i.e. words that refer to an idea, a feeling or a quality (e.g. extreme, survive, avoid, roughly). We can explain, give opposites or words with a similar meaning or translate. Translation is useful when words are very hard to explain, but many people recommend using translation as little as possible. If we explain through English, we are encouraging learners to use their English to understand and to rely on English not their mother tongue. But it can be useful for the teacher to use translation to check learners have understood the meaning of abstract words that are difficult to explain, simply by asking, for example, How would you say this word in your language? Here is a list of some techniques for presenting the meaning of new vocabulary. Tick the techniques you use. Think about why you dont use the others. Are there any it might be useful for you to try using?

Vocabulary presentation techniques

Teacher-led
Showing flashcards, photos, drawings, wallcharts or realia Miming or using gesture Explaining through giving synonyms, definitions or opposite meanings Translating Eliciting (i.e. giving learners a clue and then asking them to tell you the word) Discussing a topic or describing a situation using the new vocabulary

Learner-centred
Learners ask one another about meaning, pronunciation, etc. Learners use dictionaries Learners ask the teacher about key words they need for a text or task Learners deduce the meaning from the context Learners brainstorm words likely to occur in the text Learners predict words they expect to hear in the text

Cambridge University Press 2011

How to teach vocabulary

When we teach new words from a text we can pre-teach the most important key words, i.e. teach them before learners read the text, as we introduce the theme of the text to the class. Then after the first reading we can introduce more words that are central to more detailed reading tasks if you intend to do some. New words in a lesson often come up through reading or listening texts, but they also come up when we teach new language patterns or when learners try to say things they dont quite have the vocabulary to say. Always give learners these words they need, as these are the words they are likely to be most interested in. Keep a section of your board reserved for all important new words that come up in the lesson. Write only these words there so that learners will know where to find them, and will be able to write them in their notebooks. When we have presented new words, our job is far from over. To really learn words learners need to use them and to meet them over and over again. This means that we need to use vocabulary practice activities, get learners to record new vocabulary and use vocabulary revision activities. There are many ways of doing these things.

Vocabulary practice activities

Here is a list of some techniques we can use to practise the meaning of new vocabulary. Tick the techniques you use. Think about why you dont use the others. Are there any it might be useful for you to try using?

Activities that can be designed to practise new words

Gap-fill texts Brainstorming Categorising Matching tasks Word-building tasks Role plays Discussions Reading books, articles, songs, etc. Listening to stories Project work

Quizzes Labelling Finding the odd one out Grids, crosswords Memory games Descriptions Writing texts (postcards, reports, emails, essays, compositions, etc.) Other communicative activities

Activities that focus on using new words in communication

Recording new vocabulary

After you have presented new vocabulary, it is important to ask learners to keep a record of it in their notebooks. This helps them to remember it and to revise it easily for tests. A list also can form the basis for different vocabulary revision activities. Grids are a common way of recording vocabulary. Here is an example of one:

New word survive

Explanation of meaning to continue to live or exist about

Pronunciation

Part of speech verb

Example of word in a sentence Some animals can survive in the desert because they do not need much water. I live roughly three kilometres from my school.

Translation sobrevivir

roughly

adverb

aproximadamente

Would it be useful for your learners to complete all these columns when they meet new words or just some or others? What columns would be useful for your learners? Think about your answer.

Cambridge University Press 2011

How to teach vocabulary

Revising new vocabulary

Our memories always need help. If we just meet a word once we are likely to forget it. So, we need to give our learners activities that help them reuse and revise vocabulary we have taught them before. Here is a list of some techniques we can use to revise new vocabulary. Tick the techniques you use. Think about why you dont use the others. Are there any it might be useful for you to try using? Asking students to organise their recorded words into sets, e.g. by topic, association, word-class, word family, synonyms Putting recorded words into mind maps and other diagrams Labelling pictures Writing each word on a card with the meaning on the back and playing with the cards in games or quizzes Revisiting the vocabulary record and adding extra/new information learnt about the words Completing gap-fills of texts which contain the words for revision Brainstorming words related to revision topics Categorising Finding the odd one out Grids, crosswords and diagrams Word-building tasks Memory games Vocabulary quizzes Discussions or other oral/written work Try to find examples of some of these activities in your coursebooks or on websites such as http://www.oup.com/elt/students/?cc=global http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/vocabulary/football.shtml Then experiment with some activities that are new to you to see how successful they are in your classes. To finish, lets summarise the main points weve made about vocabulary teaching: 1 Pre-teach key words from texts or recordings. Choose which words to pre-teach by looking at the words which are essential for the comprehension tasks. 2 Try not to teach more than seven or eight words at one time. 3 Teach words as chunks when they usually occur as chunks. 4 Teach the meaning, pronunciation, spelling and grammatical function of words to learners when they meet the words for the first time. 5 Go on teaching new things about words when learners meet them again. 6 Use visual aids to teach the meaning of concrete words. 7 There is a variety of techniques for presenting the meaning of both concrete and more abstract words. 8 After learners have met new words, they need to practise them. The teacher can choose from a variety of activities to give students the chance to do this. 9 Writing words in a notebook is a very useful way for learners to create a record of all the new words they meet. 10 Learners need to meet new words many times in order to remember them. A wide range of activities are available to help us give them the opportunity to do this. Enjoy your vocabulary teaching!

Cambridge University Press 2011