EFL Vocabulary Teaching Tips
Direct Teaching Activities for Second Language Learners
Vocabulary is a key element in the second language class. While grammar is important for meaning, without vocabulary no message is conveyed.
Language learners are faced on a daily basis with the task of acquiring, and retaining, new vocabulary. One of the main tasks of a language teacher, then, is to help students develop a sufficiently large vocabulary. Nevertheless, some language teachers ignore this fundamental fact, assuming that the vocabulary will take care of itself through repeated exposure and classroom activities. As I.S.P. Nation notes in "Teaching and Learning Vocabulary" (Heinle & Heinle 1990), however, developing a principled and systematic approach to teaching, as well as learning, vocabulary, can be a valuable use of class time.
Direct Vocabulary Teaching
Direct vocabulary teaching occurs when teachers do exercises and activities in class that focus the learners’ attention on vocabulary, such as guessing meaning from context and vocabulary games. In direct vocabulary learning, therefore, a conscious effort is made by the learner to remember new words. While indirect learning is still where most vocabulary acquisition takes place, there is room for more direct teaching methods in the second language (L2) classroom, when and if certain factors are taken into consideration.
- In order to retain learned vocabulary, learners need to “meet” the words in a variety of contexts, anywhere from 5-16 different times.
- Learners best remember words when they have manipulated them in different ways, so variety is essential for vocabulary teaching.
- Recycling and reviewing vocabulary is an important part of the lesson plan as most new words are forgotten in the first twenty-four hours after class.
- For long-term retention, no more than 10-12 new words should be presented at a time.
Memory Strategies for Learning New Vocabulary
New words need to be related to learners' existing knowledge (or schema), sounds, images, personal feelings/responses, diagrams, etc. The following activities can be used to reinforce the learning of new vocabulary:
- Connecting words to a personal experience. Learners can think about they way they respond to new words by categorizing them into groups: the words they like/dislike (e.g., based on the way they are spelled or pronounced), or the words they think will be easy (or difficult) to remember, and why.
- Sorting and ranking activities. In the case of learning a list of animals, for instance, learners can separate the new animals by dangerous/not dangerous, or eat/don’t eat. For a list of food, learners can rank the food items from those they like most to those they like least.
- TPR (Total Physical Response). Learners associate a verb to an action (or an emotion to a gesture) by physically acting out the word.
- Pictorial representations. Small drawings in context (a picture of a house labeled with window, door, roof, etc.) can aid retention of new words. Imaging, where learners use the way a word looks to associate it with its meaning, also helps.
- Grouping words by collocations. Another way for learners to manipulate and remember new words is to join them according to the words they are often found with. (i.e., idea: original, brilliant, unusual, great).
