Teaching vocabulary

Introduction

the average native speaker uses around only 5000 words in everyday speech

your students won't need to produce every word they learn, some they will just need to recognize (active x passive vocabulary)

What a student essentially needs to know about a word (item):

what it means spelling and form (e.g. part of speech,

irregular past/plural, followed by a preposition?...)

how it is pronounced

Additionally, the following aspects may be explored:

connotation (e.g. childish – negative, routine – positive)

how the word is related to others (e.g.synonyms, antonyms, lexical sets)

collocation or the way that words occur together (e.g. dead tired but not *dead exhausted)

word formation (e.g. prefixes, suffixes)

Presenting vocabularyVocabulary is best learned when the meaning of the words is

shown. To remember them, pupils must then meet and use the words repeatedly in relevant contexts.

Techniques for presenting vocabulary : Illustration: picture, drawing on the board, concrete object Demonstration: mime, gesture Definition (as in a dictionary; synonyms, antonyms) Context (description, sentence examples) Translation

→ can be combined → should cater for the different learning styles

Remembering words

Words should be presented in a way that requires the learner to do some mental work in constructing the meaning of a word.

Teachers need to think of ways of making the experience of learning vocabulary more memorable and of recycling the information that we teach, e.g. by using

- personalised response- discovery approach- alternative ways to organise a vocabulary notebook -

using diagrams, word trees or networks

Practice (and testing) techniques Multiple choice Matching Odd one out Gap-filling Cloze Writing sentences Sentence completion Translation