Vocabullary thesis

Aug. 2008, Volume 5, No.8 (Serial No.56) Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072, USA
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Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching:
Strategies for vocabulary teaching
LU Mei-fang 1
(Foreign Language Department, Shanghai Lixin University of Commerce, Shanghai 201600, China)
Abstract: Much research has been done on how to help students to improve their language skills of listening,
speaking, reading, and writing, but how to help students with the acquisition of vocabulary which is essential to
the development of language skills has been neglected. This paper is an attempt to explore the teacher’s role in
helping students with vocabulary acquisition. Word knowledge is discussed, selection of words to be taught,
techniques for presentation and strategies for self-learning.
Key words: vocabulary teaching; teacher’s role; techniques
1. Introduction
If language structures make up the skeleton of language, then it is vocabulary that provides the vital organs
and the flesh. An ability to manipulate grammatical structure doesn’t have any potential for expressing meaning
unless words are used. But, “the teaching and learning of vocabulary has never aroused the same degree of interest
within language teaching as have such issues as grammatical competence, reading or writing which have received
considerable attention from scholars and teachers” (Richards, 1976). For many years, vocabulary was seen as
incidental to the main purpose of language teaching, namely, the acquisition of grammatical knowledge about the
language. Recently, however, methodologists and linguists have increasingly paid the attention to the vocabulary,
stressing its importance in language teaching and reassessing some of the ways in which it is taught and learnt. It
is now clear that the acquisition of vocabulary is just as important as the acquisition of grammar, though the two
are obviously interdependent, and teachers should have the same kind of expertise in the teaching of vocabulary as
they do in the teaching of structure (Harmer, 1991, p. 154). This paper will explore the teacher’s role in
vocabulary teaching. What word knowledge students need to know in learning words, what vocabulary should be
selected to teach, what effective techniques teachers should adopt to teach vocabulary and what strategies should
be introduced to students for self-learning are discussed.
2. Help students with word knowledge
It is clear that there is a far more to a vocabulary item than just meaning. In teaching vocabulary, teachers
should look at words from the perspective of their meaning, their use, their formation and their grammar.
2.1 Word meaning
The first thing to realize about vocabulary items is that they frequently have more than one meaning. One
meaning of the word “constitution”, for example, refers to a legal document setting out how a country is to be
LU Mei-fang (1956- ), female, associate professor of Foreign Language Department, Shanghai Lixin University of Commerce;
research fields: applied linguistics, college English teaching.
Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching: Strategies for vocabulary teaching
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governed. But in a sentence like “My grandfather has an amazing constitution”, that is obviously not the meaning. If
the next sentence is, “Although he is nearly 80, he skis in winter and swims all the year round”, you could assume
the word refers to another meaning, that is, his physical condition, as that is what seems to be amazing for an 80
year-old. You are right. When we come across a word, and then try to decipher its meaning, we will have to look at
the context in which it is used. In other words, students need to understand the importance of meaning in context.
There are other facts about meaning too. Sometimes words have meanings in relation to other words. Thus
students need to know the meaning of vegetable as a word to describe any one of a number of other thing����e.g.
carrots, cabbages, potatoes etc. “Vegetables” have a general meaning whereas “carrot” is more specific. We
understand the meaning of a word like “good” in the context of a word like “bad” and “evil”. Even in that
example, however, one thing is clear: Words seldom have absolute synonyms, although context may make them
synonymous on particular occasions. As far as meaning goes, then students need to know about the meaning in
context and they need to know about sense relations.
2.2 Word use
What a word means can be changed, stretched or limited by how it is used. Word meaning is frequently
stretched through the use of metaphor and idiom. We know that the word “bark”, for example, is a dog’s word, but
we stretch its meaning in the sentence “The householder barked at the tardy paper boy” to describe the person
whose voice sounded like the bark of an angry dog when he was so annoyed at the paper boy for being late. That
is metaphorical use. Likewise, we can describe a difficult life as a dog’s life. It is full of hard work and worry with
very little pleasure. “A dog’s life” is a fixed phrase that has become an idiom like many other phrases such as
“raining cats and dogs”, “letting the cat out of the bag”, etc. Word meaning is also governed by collocation. We
can say headache, stomachache or earache, but we can’t say throatache or legache. Our knowledge of vocabulary
includes the recognition of the constraints of function and situation on word choice. What the British call a “tap”
may be a “faucet” to an American. Middle class British people prefer to call a “house”, a “home”, and a “woman”,
a “lady”. A “chap” or a “fellow” in speech is what a “person” or “gentleman” is in writing. We often use words
only in certain social and topical contexts. What we say is governed by the register we are in. We adjust our
vocabulary to suit the demands of the situation. For example, the two doctors talking about an illness will talk in
different register that one of them who then talks to the patient in question, who has never studied medicine.
Students need to recognize metaphorical language use and they need to know how words collocate. They also
need to understand what stylistic and topical contexts words and expressions occur in.
2.3 Word formation
Words can change their shape and their grammatical value, too. Students need to know facts about word
formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical contexts. The verb “move” has the participles
“moving” and “moved”. The present participle and the past participle can be both used as an adjective and the
verb “move” can also be a noun. There is a clear relationship between the words “live”, “living”, “alive” and
“life”. Students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. How can we make the words precise and
excusable opposite in meaning? Why do we preface one with im- and the other with in- ? Students also need to
know how words are spelt and how they sound. Words like “conduct”, “increase” etc. are stressed differently
when their grammatical function is different—as with nouns and verbs. Word formation then, means knowing
how words are written and spoken and knowing how they can change their form.
2.4 Word grammar
Just as words change according to their grammatical meaning, so the use of certain words can trigger the use
Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching: Strategies for vocabulary teaching
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of certain grammatical patterns.
We make a distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. The former can be singular and plural. The
latter can only be singular; we can say “one chair” or “two chairs” but we cannot say “two furniture”. This
difference, then, has certain grammatical implications. “Chair” can collocate with plural verbs whereas “furniture”
never can. There are also nouns that are neither countable nor uncountable but which have a fixed form and
therefore, collocate only with singular or plural verbs, e.g. “people”, the news “mathematics”, etc. There are many
other areas of grammatical behavior that students need to know about like transitive and intransitive verbs, phrasal
verbs, and the order of adjectives and the position of adverbs in a sentence.
Therefore, knowing a word means far more than just understanding its meaning or one of its meanings.
Somehow our teaching must help students to understand what this knowledge implies both in general and for
certain words in particular. By being aware what is stated above, students will be more receptive to the contextual
behavior of words when they first see them in texts or readings and they will be better able to manipulate the
meanings and forms of the word.
2.5 Select vocabulary
For most students, there is no special course to learn vocabulary. Vocabulary list usually appears with a
reading text. Teachers should make full use of the vocabulary list to help students to obtain the necessary lexical
knowledge. Among the words in the vocabulary list what words should be selected to spend time on is the first
consideration the teacher have to make. According to Harmer (1991, p. 154), a general principle of vocabulary
selection has been that of frequency. To focus learners’ attention on the high frequency words of the language
gives a very good return for learning effort. We can decide which words we should teach on the basis of how
frequently they are used by speakers of the language. The words which are mostly commonly used are the ones
we should teach firstly. Another principle that has been used in the selection of vocabulary is that of coverage. A
word is more useful if it covers more things than if it only has one very specific meaning. So we should select the
words with the ability to combine with other words, the ability to help to define other words and the ability to
replace the other words.
3. Techniques for presentation
3.1 Make students incorporate new words into language that is already known
The best way to help students to remember new words is to incorporate them into language that is already
known. According to Baddeley (1990, p. 145), the principle of incorporating new knowledge into the old is so
widely accepted as a basic requirement of learning, that learning itself can in some respects be considered a
“problem-solving exercise in which one attempts to find the best way of mapping new learning onto old” (1990, p.
198). Old-established words are part of rich network of interwoven associations. If new words can be integrated
into this network, those associations can strengthen the learner’s existing schemata and at the same time make the
new word more accessible. Words do not exist in isolation. Their meanings are defined through their relationships
with other words and it is through understanding these relationships that students can arrive at the understanding
of words. Words that are presented can be related by subject matter (e.g. “looking for a place to live”, “human
rights”); by similarity of meaning features (e.g., pretty, beautiful, handsome, lovely, attractive); by lexical relations:
synonyms (shallow, superficial), antonyms (cry, laugh), subordinates (anima�� �� dog), superordinate and
cohyponyms (vehicle, car, train).
Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching: Strategies for vocabulary teaching
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3.2 Make students interact with words
Experiments on vocabulary seem to suggest that students remember best when they have actually done
something with the words they are learning. There is a definite advantage in getting students to do more than just
repeat them. Tasks such as changing them to mean their opposites or making a noun an objective, putting words
together, etc. help to fix the words in the learner’s minds (Harmer, 1991, p. 160). We should get students to
interact with words. We should get them to “adopt” words that they like and that they want to use. We should get
them to do things with words so that they become properly acquainted with them.
3.3 Make students use the mental processing
Vocabulary learning needs a deep experience. The deeper the mental processing used when learning a word,
the more likely, that a student will remember it. The “Depth of processing hypothesis” states that mental activities
which require more elaborate thought, manipulation, or processing of a new word will help in the learning of that
word (Craik������Tulving, 1975). Deeper, richer semantic processing, such as creating a mental image of a word’s
meaning, judging the formality of a word, or grouping the word with other conceptually associated words, will be
more likely to enhance learning than shallower processes such as rote repetition (Schmitt, 1995).
3.4 Avoid teaching similar words at the same time
According to Nation (1982), new items are better retained if unrelated in meaning while new words sharing
features of meaning are likely to be confused. Although organization can facilitate learning, teaching words
together which are too similar can be counter-productive. With a pair like “left” and “right”, students often
confuse which word applies to which direction. In addition to learning the meanings of the two words, the student
has the additional burden of keeping them separate. This “principle of interference” applies to formal similarities
as well. If “affect” and “effect” are taught together, they are likely to become cross-associated in the learner’s
mind. Higa (1963) found that words which were strongly associated with each other, such as antonyms, were more
difficult to learn together than words which had weak connections or no relationship at all. One way to avoid
interference between two similar words is to teach the more frequent word, and only introduce the second item
after the first has been firmly acquired.
4. Strategies for self-learning
As vocabulary is an open set and not a closed system with a limited number of rules, learning all the words is
an impossible task. Moreover, some low frequency and low range words may not deserve much learning effort, as
the chance of encountering them is small. Therefore, it is also the teacher’s role to give students tools and
strategies to learn independently.
4.1 Guess in context
One important skill for the learner’s future comprehension tasks is guessing unknown words in context. The
teacher should give some lectures in which students are guided to develop the ability to guess the meaning from
the following clues.
(a) Clues in stated definitions (e.g. An epoch is a particular period in history);
(b) Clues embedded in synonyms (e.g. She is allergic to timothy, a wild but common grass);
(c) Clues defined by contrast (e.g. The twin are quite different: while Mike is indolent, George is very
energetic);
(d) Clues from the whole context (e.g., The boss was in a quandary. If he gave his staff raises, company
Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching: Strategies for vocabulary teaching
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profits would go down, but if he didn’t, some key staff members might leave);
(e) Clues from extra-textual knowledge, i.e., topic familiarity. Work on deceptively transparent words (Laufer,
1985) shows that in the case of polysemes /homonyms, idioms, synforms (words of similar form) and false
cognates, learners tend to ignore the context, immediate and wider, and rely on their perceived knowledge of the
word itself. For example, “infallible” was mistakenly interpreted as “something that cannot fall”; “since” as “from
the time when”, even though in context it meant “because”.
Knowing the problem of the deceptively transparent words, teachers may warn students not to rely on word
morphology too much and not to draw conclusions about the sentence meaning on the basis of the sum of meanings
of the individual words, as some of these words are “pseudo-familiar”, that is, they look familiar, but in fact are not.
Students should be taught not to resort to this strategy without checking the meaning against wider context.
4.2 Use the glossary
A glossary is a special kind of dictionary. Every subject area has a particular vocabulary: terms used only in
that field, like “pediatrics” (medicine), “oxidize” (chemistry) or terms used with a special training, different from
use in ordinary life. It is put at the end of a book, giving readers the specialized vocabulary for readers to
understand the text. The teacher should guide students how to use it for their reading purpose.
4.3 Use the dictionary
The problem of “pseudo-familiar” words suggests that dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual, should
be used more widely than is often advocated. If a word looks familiar but the sentence in which it is found makes
strange sense, or no sense at all, students should be encouraged to consult a dictionary.
In writing, instead of merely underlying the incorrect use of difficult words, the teacher could require the
student to look up each of them in the dictionary and practice their use. Such consistent use of the dictionary is
likely to develop in the student an awareness of the pitfalls that words may conceal.
5. Strategy training
Teachers should become familiar with a variety of vocabulary instruction tools and should train their students to
use them, so that students will be able to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Such training can best be accomplished
by weaving it into normal classroom activities. A training sequence is as follows: (1) determine learners’ needs by
exploring expectations and current vocabulary learning techniques; (2) choose relevant techniques to teach; (3) find
ways to integrate these techniques into everyday language instruction; (4) consider issues of student motivation
toward and anxieties concerning learning vocabulary; (5) prepare materials and activities; (6) conduct completely
informed training, in which learners are explicitly told how to use a particular technique to learn a given word, how
to evaluate the success of the technique, and how to transfer it to a new word or set of words.
6. Conclusion
It is now clear that acquisition of vocabulary is as just important as the acquisition of grammar. Teachers should
have the same kind of expertise in the teaching of vocabulary as they do in the teaching of structure and attach much
importance to the vocabulary teaching. Greater attention to vocabulary learning by teachers and students will result
in greater overall language progress. Powerful techniques for vocabulary growth should be explored and exploited,
so that language learners will be able to make their way more easily to their proficiency goals.
References:
Teachers’ role in vocabulary teaching: Strategies for vocabulary teaching
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Baddeley, A. 1990. Human memory: Theory and practice. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Craik, F. I. M. & E. Tulving. 1975. Depth of processing and retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 104, 268-284.
Harmer, J. 1991. The practice of English language teaching. London and New York: Longman.
Higa, M. 1963. Interference effects of inter-list word relationships in verbal learning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal
Behavior, (2), 170-175.
Laufer, Batia. 1989. A factor of difficulty in vocabulary learning: Deceptive transparency. In: Paul Nation & Ron Center. (Eds.).
ALLA reviewed 6. vocabulary acquisition free. New York: London University Press.
Nation, Paul I. S. 1982. Beginning to learn foreign vocabulary: A review of the research. RELC Journal. 13(1), 14-36.
Richards, C. 1976. The role of vocabulary teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 10(1), 77-89.
Schmitt, N. & D. Schmitt. 1995. Vocabulary notebooks: Theoretical underpinnings and practical suggestions. ELT Journal, 49(2),
133-142.
(Edited by Stella, Doris and Sunny)