Teaching VocabularyBased on M. Lewis, S. Moras & P. Nation

Students: Ana Luna

Gary Torres

Teacher: Roxanna Correa

Vocabulary is one of the most vital features in a language, either spoken or

written, as it is what a language is composed of. When teaching English, it is important

to take into account that vocabulary is what compounds a language, consequently, if

students efficiently learn a considerable amount of words, the acquisition of the new

language will become effective. However, when teaching English vocabulary we can

notice that only a few words are the ones which learners remember and use correctly.

This limitation occurs when incidental learning happens, either from listening or

reading. It is easier to find large amounts of vocabulary learning on independent

listening and reading that it is to find these amounts on teaching. Nowadays students

learn English from many other sources apart from the teacher itself, from music and

movies for instance. This becomes a huge part of learning, leaving a small amount of

information about a word at a time for being taught. In this essay we will go deep on

how to teach English vocabulary, having on mind that the more complex the new

information is, the more likely the students are to misinterpret it. We will explain

information based on three important researchers, Michael Lewis, Solange Moras and

Paul Nation, which provide meaningful and real activities for implementing in class and

also suggestions for efficiently teach vocabulary.

Firstly, Michael Lewis is considered as an important contributor to English

teaching, not only because he highlighted the importance of vocabulary as an essential

element for communication, but also because of his controversial and thought-

provoking ideas presented in his work. For instance, his Lexical Approach is one of his

most important contributions to language teaching and learning. Here, Lewis (1994)

gives importance to the term meaning in vocabulary, which is important because if

students do not know the meaning of words they are learning, they are not going to be

able to participate in real conversations, or even in class. In order to make this

participation improve, fluency becomes significant. On one hand he suggests that

vocabulary is not precisely stored only as individual words, but also as phrases and

larger chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing in this way the

difficulties at the moment of processing. On the other hand, he states that learners who

tend to learn individual words are going to need more effort and time to memorize the

word, understand its usage and finally using it to express themselves. That is why

identifying chunks and master their collocational range is very important and teacher

should encourage students to organize and record these, and at least in the beginning,

help them with a lot of guidance. Moreover, in this approach, grammar joins vocabulary

in terms of importance at the moment of teaching. Grammar should be totally present

when teaching vocabulary, either inductively or deductively. Otherwise the new words

turn useless with time, which happens to most of EFL students nowadays. Moras (2001)

mentions that learners can communicate well and make themselves clear, they recognize

items and their meaning, they learn the basic structure of the new language and they

might have a wide range of vocabulary, nevertheless, their productive use of that wide

range of vocabulary is commonly limited. The material used for these kinds of lessons

should be real since the beginning of the lesson. Learners need to be engaged to what

they are going to learn as they also expect attractive, meaningful, authentic and didactic

material to get involved in the class.

Secondly, the way students acquire a language, word by word has a lot to do

with how our memory and storage system works. According to Moras (2001) it seems

that everything we learn goes through our short-term memory first and when we start

using what we learn we transfer it to our long-term memory. In this case, vocabulary

should be taught by creating mental linkages (assimilation and accommodation),

applying images and sounds (imagery, semantic mapping, using keywords, representing

sounds in memory), reviewing in a structured way, using physical response or sensation

(mechanical techniques). Noticing that students forget the words they have learnt seems

to be an inevitable process, unless teachers regularly encourage students to use these

items they have learnt. Consequently, recycling is essential, and it should constantly

happen one or two days after the initial input. We can use this information to facilitate

the learning process in students, by grouping items of vocabulary in semantic fields,

such as topics.

Thirdly and as mentioned before, meaning is one of the most important features

of vocabulary, even though, it I not the only one. On one hand, Lewis (1994) and Moras

(2001) mention the use of dictionaries as a way to discover meaning and foster learner

independence. In addition to this, he suggests activities such as guided discovery, which

implies the teacher asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess

meanings correctly; and the contextual guesswork, which means that students guess the

word by providing them the context in which the it appears. On the other hand, Nation

(1974) provides activities such as word and meaning matching, labeling, sentence

completion or crossword puzzles. Besides, teachers might focus on form and use in their

lessons. For focusing on form Nation states that following spelling rules, recognizing

word parts or building word family tables are good options. For focusing on use,

although, he suggests sentence completion, collocation matching or collocation tables.

Whatever the activity is, it must be focused on useful words which learners are going to

use in the future, and avoid interference by not relating unknown or partly known words

together.

Fourthly, According to Paul Nation (2007) there are 10 best ideas to teach

vocabulary and they are not exactly a list of simple vocabulary teaching techniques.

Nation believes there are much better ways of using valuable learning time.

The first idea to teach vocabulary is to apply principles learning of teaching and

learning. Nation believes that principled planning of vocabulary learning is more

important than particular techniques. He suggest that a principle such as provide

opportunities for cooperative interaction should be more valuable at the moment to

teach than making vocabulary learning exercises (hidden words, match the word and

meaning). The principles can be applied in different ways according to the

circumstances in which the language courses is taught.

Second idea, approach high and low frequency words differently. Teachers should deal

with high and low frequency words in quite different ways. Nation suggests that high

frequency words deserve a lot of attention from teachers because at the moment they are

all know , teachers should train learners to use strategies for learning and dealing with

low frequency words.

Third idea, use the four strands. According to Paul Nation a well-balanced vocabulary

course should have equal proportions of opportunities for learning in each of the four

strands of meaning focused input where students learn vocabulary through

communicative listening and reading activities such as listening to stories, watching TV

or films and shared reading, but learners do not produce anything. The second strand is

meaning focused output where students learn vocabulary through communicative

speaking and writing activities such as talking in conversations, writing a note keeping a

diary. The third strand is language focused learning; learners give deliberate attention to

language features such as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and discourse.

The last strand is fluency in the development in the four skills of listening, speaking,

and reading and writing, here learners are helped to make the best use of what they

already know through typical activities such as speed reading, repeated reading,

repeated retelling, ten minute writing and listening to easy stories.

The fourth idea is to implement an extensive reading program. Learners should read a

least one book every two weeks and a major aim should be that students gain pleasure

from the reading without interference from the teacher; moreover, an extensive listening

program would be a very useful idea.

The fifth idea is to carefully design speaking and writing activities. The teacher should

design speaking and writing activities. This involves written or spoken input in the

activities that each piece of input contains about L2 words that may be new to the

learners.

The sixth idea, use a variety of activities aimed at fluency development. Nation prefers

that learners do not meet or use any new vocabulary; instead, they become more fluent

at using what they already know.

The seventh idea to teach vocabulary is to provide extended training and practice in

guessing unknown vocabulary from context. The eventual goal is to become fluent at

guessing. This is a strategy very useful for dealing with both high and low frequency

words. It can be approached in many ways, but it is best to use a bottom–up guessing

strategy that relies on language instead of background knowledge.

The eighth idea is to train students to use words cards. According to Nation an excellent

way to increase vocabulary in Students is train them in the strategy of learning words

using small cards with a foreign word or phrase in one side and the L1 translation on the

other.

The ninth idea is to teach the high frequency affixes of English. A good useful tool to

help student to remember the meaning of the many Latinate words of English is get

students to learn the most useful 15-20 English prefixes and suffixes.

Finally, the last best idea to teach vocabulary is to encourage learner autonomy. Is

important to encourage students to take responsibility for their own vocabulary learning,

it means, if students know what vocabulary to learn and how to learn it they learning

can be much effective.

To summarize it is remarkable to say that vocabulary should be at the centre of

language teaching, mainly because language consists of grammaticalized lexis and not

lexicalized grammar. In another words, vocabulary relies a lot on grammar, making

these two elements essential to be taught together. We as future teachers must be

concerned about how students learn, how their minds work in order to acquire the new

language. As learners’ productive use of a wide range of vocabulary is limited,

strategies for vocabulary teaching agree on the fact that teachers should turn student’s

receptive vocabulary items into productive ones, which means, encourage students to

learn and to use lexical items eventually. To reinforce this, teachers need to use

authentic material to expose the students to rich, contextualized, naturally-occurring

language. Learning vocabulary is fundamental for any student learning English as a

foreign language. If learners want to do normal activities such as writing a story,

talking in a conversation or comprehending written pieces of text, they need to know

vocabulary for each situation they face. There are many strategies to teach vocabulary

that we have to keep on mind to make our students learn more effectively. In this essay

we provided just some choices from a wide variety of strategies for teaching

vocabulary. As Paul Nation suggests, learners should read at least one book every two

weeks to improve their vocabulary and to comprehend more. Besides, students not only

have to learn new words, but also they have to repeat them a lot because when students

see a word repeatedly they can acquire an idea of what it means faster that if they just

see a word once. We notice the importance of vocabulary at the moment of learning

another language because acquiring vocabulary implies the developing of speaking,

writing, listening and writing skills. We cannot write or tell a story without knowing

words and their meaning, we cannot even comprehend a text. We acquire vocabulary

through meaningful activities and as explained before, learners have to notice

collocations and deal with meaning. Teachers need choose suitable tasks including

group work as a way of exchanging knowledge in class and making students use the

language in realistic context. It is important to remark that students’ production will

depend highly on motivation, and this is what teachers should constantly promote.

References

Lewis, M. (1994). The Lexical Approach. Hove, England: Language Teaching

Publications, Volume 1, Number 2.

Moras, S. (2001). Teaching Vocabulary to advanced students: A Lexical Approach. Sao

carlos, Brazil.

Nation, I.S.P. (2007) The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

1, 1: 1-12.

Nation, I.S.P. (1974) Techniques for teaching vocabulary. English Teaching Forum 12,

3: 18-21.