Vocabulary Workshop September/October 2018

Workshop Title:  How to Teach Vocabulary I

“Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” - Linguist David Wilkins

Lexical errors outnumber other types of errors by three to one.

Student objectives:

• Acquire enough words for both understanding and use.
• Remember words over time.
• Develop strategies for coping with gaps in word knowledge (how to cope with unknown words, etc.).

“Knowing” a word:

• Knowing a word is not just knowing its dictionary definition - it also means knowing the words commonly associated with it (its collocations), its connotations, its register (formal/informal), its written form, associated grammar structures and cultural accretions.Example: “famous” and “notorious” have similar meanings, but different connotations so they are used differently. Students need to be made aware of these differences.
  • This is why it is important to point out how words in the same category are different. Examples like “It’s hot.” / “It’s cold.” are not going to help student see the difference between them. Better examples would be “it gets really hot in the desert during the day” / “a cold beer”

Having receptive vs. productive knowledge of a word:

• Receptive:  being about to see or hear a word used in a context and being able to understand it.
• Productive:  being able to actually use/produce the word naturally and correctly.We understand more words than we can say when learning another language. We usually understand them before we can use them.
  • This is why speaking exams, like GBC, are so difficult as compared to other written exams.
• There are different levels of our knowledge of a word. Teachers should help students reach a level where they can understand it and produce it:

How we know words; how they are “stored” in the brain:

• There is evidence to suggest that we “store” vocabulary in our brains in a web-like network (mental lexicon).
  • We often store them in meaning-based categories:  fruit, clothing, animals, etc.
    • ...all the fruit words are interconnected, and all the clothing words interconnected too. So, if I am an English learner and want to say I had a delicious mango for breakfast, the lexicon activates the fruit department before triggering a search of words beginning with mang-. This accounts for the fact that, in experiments, subjects find that answering the first of the following two questions is easier and quicker than answering the second:

1. Name a fruit that begins with p.
2. Name a word that begins with p that is a fruit.

• Learners often confuse words in the same category. For example, students often confuse chicken and kitchen because not only do they sound similar, are both nouns, but they are also part of the same category (the same department was tapped into). 
• Knowing a word is a combination of semantic, syntactic, phonological, orthographic, cultural, etc. connections. This is why it is unlikely that any two speakers will “know” a word in the exact same way.
  • There are often words that can’t be translated into other languages because the very concept doesn’t exist in other cultures.
  • Kevin says that direct translation should be used as a last resort. If the student needs to look it up in the dictionary, the teacher should make sure that the student has understood its English connotations, etc.

Present new vocabulary in four ways by:

• providing an example situation (teacher can give his/her own experience and then invite students to share their own. Imagine the new vocab word is “ecstatic.” Teacher gives an example of when he/she felt ecstatic and then asks for the student to describe a time he/she felt ecstatic.)
• giving several example sentences (students should be able to deduce the meaning from example sentences).
• giving synonyms and antonyms
• giving a full definition
  • Learner’s dictionaries are better than regular ones, like the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English:  https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/let

How are words remembered?

• Learning words is essentially remembering them.
• Research findings for word learning:
  • Repetition. Student must encounter a word at least seven times over spaced intervals. This is why it is important to review.
  • Spacing. Distributed practice.
  • Use. Putting words to use, especially in an interesting way is the best way to ensure they are added to long-term memory.
  • Personal organizing. Students who made up their own sentences using the words remembered them better than other students who didn’t.
  • Imaging. Best of all, were the students who were given the task of visualizing a mental picture to go with a new word. Studies show that easily visualized words are easier to remember.
    • Use Bret's tip and use Memrise, which uses memes to practice vocabulary. He especially recommends this page for phrasal verbs. 
  • Emotional response. Words that trigger an emotional response are more likely to be remembered, which is why students tend to remember swear words after only hearing them a few times.
• It’s easier to remember words in a narrative than just words in a list. It pays to put them in some sort of context.
  • Why do people forget words? Studies show that words that are more difficult to pronounce, spell, are longer and more complex, have difficult grammar associated with the word, have different connotations than in L1 are more difficult to remember.
• Betty suggests that students hand write instead of type. It's easy to forget what we type as it's less involved than writing. Students should also draw diagrams to form a web.

Putting new words to work:

• Students need to “put a new word to work” by: comparing it to other words, matching it to other words, combining it with other words, visualizing it, trying to produce it in a natural example, coming up with related words (“limit” - “limitation,” “limitless,” “unlimited,” etc.).
• Ask students to analyze the surrounding words and phrases:
  • Ask students to look at the prepositions associated with a certain word.
  • Ask students to analyze the associated grammar of a phrase or word, like with “say” and “tell.” You can “tell someone something” but you cannot “say someone something.”
• Draw students’ attention to the way it sounds, so they don’t confuse it with similar-sounding words, which is common (tambourine vs. trampoline / kitchen vs. chicken).
• Bret suggests Grammarly (premium), as it gives students synonyms and other ways to use the word.

Practice producing words:

• Ask students to summarize text.
• Ask the student to explain it in plain English or as if they were explaining it to a friend or a child.
• More production tasks: get the student to use (produce) the language by speaking or writing.
  • Completing sentences or creating sentences:
    • Completing sentences: fill in the gap exercises
    • Creating sentences: exercises that require the student to actually use the new vocabulary (elicitation exercises make it more likely the vocabulary will be stored in long-term memory).
      • Tell the student to use each of the words to create a sentence that clearly shows the meaning of the word.
      • Tell the student to use each of the words to write a true sentence about themselves or somebody he/she knows.
      • Ask the student to talk about it in relation to their own country, culture, work, personal life, etc.
      • Ask student to come up with other associated words, related expressions, or other ways of using the words.

Vocabulary Workshop: How to Teach Vocabulary II (to follow)

Source: 

How to Teach Vocabulary by Scott Thornbury