1

TEFL 8

Mihaela Tănase Dogaru

Spring semester 2019

TEACHING VOCABULARY
I. Introduction. Language structure and vocabulary.
For many years vocabulary teaching was seen as incidental to the main purpose of language teaching –
namely the acquisition of grammatical knowledge about the language. Vocabulary was necessary to
give students something to hang on to when learning grammatical structures, but was frequently not a
main focus for learning itself. Recently, however, methodologists and linguists have increasingly been
turning their attention to vocabulary, stressing its importance in language teaching and reassessing
some of the ways in which it is taught and learned. It is now clear that the acquisition of vocabulary is
just as important as the acquisition of grammar and teachers should have the same kind of expertise in
the teaching of vocabulary as they do in the teaching of grammatical structures.
It is self-evident that even if you know the grammar and rules of communication, if you do not
know enough vocabulary you will not be able to express yourself adequately. While in the language
classroom the structural accuracy seems to be the dominant focus. In real life, however, it is possible
that where vocabulary is used correctly it can cancel out structural inaccuracy. For example, the
student who says “Yesterday … I have seen him yesterday’ is committing one of the most notorious
tense mistakes in English but he or she will still be understood as having seen him yesterday because
of the word ‘yesterday’. Therefore, teachers should lay as much emphasis on vocabulary teaching as
they lay on the teaching of grammatical structures. They should take more interest in how vocabulary
is being taught, learned, acquired, stored, memorised, and recalled.
If teachers take the trouble to ask their students how they feel about the teaching of vocabulary, they
– quite unsurprisingly – find out that this growing interest in vocabulary teaching is perfectly reflected
in the learners’ views. Here are a few comments made by learners on the topic of vocabulary and
vocabulary teaching:
This was really a terrible day – only two new words.
The lessons are best when the teacher gives us many new words.
I need to learn words and I need to know the translation. If I don’t have the translation, I can’t be sure
if I have the correct meaning.
Sometimes the teacher doesn’t tell us the meaning. He asks us to guess it. I don’t know why she does
this.
I keep words in my notebook. I read them every day. Then I will learn.
It’s clear to me. If I don’t know the words, I don’t understand.
 2

When asked about their language-learning needs, most learners refer to improving their speaking
and listening and to learning grammar and vocabulary. Because progress can often be seen more
clearly in terms of the number of words learned than in, for example, an unquantifiable ability to speak
a little more fluently, vocabulary expansion I often cited by learners as their central interest. The
learners quoted above seem to share the conviction that their basic need is vocabulary, and also share
the same kind of frustration when they are not presented with the opportunity to ‘learn’ vocabulary.
Apart form the desire to learn vocabulary, the above quotations also point to the individual nature of
vocabulary learning, with one learner referring to the importance (for her) of translation, another
referring to his dislike of guessing meaning, and a third indicating that her preferred learning method
is repetition and reviewing vocabulary items. Even within such a small group, significant differences
in learning preferences are revealed, pointing in turn to a number of considerations to be made when
teaching vocabulary.
If, as suggested above, vocabulary is at the centre of attention in language teaching at the moment
and if this is clearly where many learners see their priorities as being firmly based, how then do we as
teachers help our learners to acquire / learn / remember / use items of vocabulary? As a starting point it
may be worth reflecting on teachers’ attitudes to vocabulary teaching. The following are a number of
relevant attitudes volunteered by teachers on the issue of vocabulary teaching. Make a note of those
you identify with and those you disagree with:
I always try to present new words in every lesson. I think my learners expect it.
I give my students a translation of every new word they need it for their notebooks.
I present vocabulary in a context wherever possible.
Wherever possible, I present words with their collocations. I think this makes it more likely that my
students will use the word correctly.
I often show my learners the relationship between particular items of vocabulary like opposites or
synonyms. They seem to appreciate this.
I think affixes are really important and we spend a lot of time working on word-building in general.
If I use a text in class, I usually exploit the vocabulary in it. I think texts are an excellent vehicle for
introducing and recycling vocabulary.
I try to encourage my students to become more independent by making them guess the meaning of
unknown words.
I encourage my learners to use dictionaries as much as possible. I think it really helps in vocabulary
development and it can also make them much more autonomous in their learning.
I spend a lot of time giving students advice on how they can work on expanding their vocabulary in
their own time.

a. The teacher is obviously concerned with the expectations and wishes of his students. It is worth
pausing for a moment to consider the type of lessons in which you might consciously avoid teaching
 3

new vocabulary: fluency-based lessons, discussions, debates, role-play, a reading lesson where the
focus is on reading skills and strategies, etc. Of course, each lesson requires an element of new
vocabulary, but we have to consider the need to recycle known vocabulary and to reactivate previously
learned vocabulary.
b. Translation could be seen as a useful tool when it is appropriate and constructive to use it. Though
translation seems to be considered a bad thing that is to be avoided at all costs, it seems to be
timesaving. Moreover, in the case of an abstract noun, when other means have failed, translation is
useful as a means of ensuring that learners have really understood the word. On the other hand, we
sometimes find that if translation is over-used, it can make students over-reliant on the teacher’s
translation. To counteract this attitude, learners should be taught to discover the meaning for
themselves with the help of various clues.
c. Presenting vocabulary in context is very important. The context itself may trigger the recall of
lexical items linked with the context. Many language learners are able to recall vocabulary by making
mental associations with situations or contexts.
d. This, of course, will very much depend on the word. For a word like ‘large’ this would be an
impossible task because it has far too many collocations. This is a case when teaching the more
common collocations of certain words, particularly the nouns that go with certain adjectives, adverbial
particles that go with particular verbs to form phrasal verbs and the prepositions that go with particular
adjectives or nouns, e.g. heavy smoker, note down, interested in.
e. This is one way of teaching vocabulary that students usually enjoy, because it gives them a reference
point in organising items of vocabulary. If you know the word ‘hot’ you might recall, through
association, the word ‘cold’. They may be learned and remembered as a pair rather than two random
items of vocabulary.
f. English is very rich in affixes and a knowledge of their meaning and function can be of great benefit
to teachers and learners alike. Such knowledge can help learners to generalise about the meaning of
previously unknown words. For example, if a learner knows that the prefix ‘mis-‘ indicates ‘wrongly’
or ‘incorrectly’ and learns the word ‘misunderstand’ on that basis, then he or she is in the position to
deduce correctly the meaning of verbs such as ‘misspell’, ‘mishear’, ‘misinterpret’, and ‘misinform’.
g. Learners will often see the text as a vehicle for the teaching of linguistic items – words, structures,
functional exponents. But it is just possible that they may see the text as a means of acquiring factual
information and nothing else. It is also possible that they may the text as a means of practising their
own reading skills and strategies.
What often happens is that learners see a reading text as rich source of new vocabulary and they react
accordingly. Although many teachers want their learners to read ‘naturally’ in the foreign language,
without worrying too much about vocabulary, students will worry and start looking up the unknown
words. Therefore, a combination of approaches seems to be the best given the circumstances:
developing reading strategies and using the text for further developing of vocabulary.
 4

h. This approach offers the students the possibility of better memorising the words, because they arrive
at the meaning by working it out through contextual and morphological clues. However, this can be a
frustrating process for learners and can produce wrongs answers or no answers at all, having as a result
a severe demotivation. Therefore, you shouldn’t overdo it with your students.
i. As with translation, someone, somewhere deep in the mists of time began to broadcast the idea that
it was somehow wrong to use dictionaries and that it was a capital offence for learners to use bilingual
dictionaries. There is nothing wrong with using bilingual dictionaries, except that they are often bad
and students tend to become over-reliant on their mother tongue. Monolingual dictionaries are very
good – they enable students to become more autonomous in their learning. You can’t ask, however,
elementary students to completely rely on monolingual dictionaries. They have to use a bilingual one.
Gradually, they must be taught how to deal with the vast amount of information present in
monolingual dictionaries.
j. Teachers should always encourage students to experiment until they find a memorisation technique
that suits them best.

1. Ways of memorising and recalling new words

Think about the ways in which you memorise and recall words in a foreign language that you know.
What associations help you to remember and recall these words?

a. By association with a mental image or picture.

The visual element is clearly important in vocabulary teaching. Most teachers will at some stage use
pictures or realia to present vocabulary items.

b. By association with a situation, topic, or story.

Words are often remembered within the context of a particular story or situation in which they were
first encountered. Vocabulary should be presented through stories or in a topic-oriented context and it
should be stored in a topic-based way rather than at random

c. By association with a need of some kind (personal significance)

Words associated with direct personal need are usually memorable as a result of constant use or
exposure. Basic function words (push, pull, exit, danger) and classroom language (borrow, repeat,
open, write) will probably be recycled often enough for them to pass into the long-term memory.

d. By association with another word (same language / native language)

Such associations may take the form of a link with the word’s equivalent in the mother tongue or in a
third language, an association with a collocation in the target language (dense fog, fish and chips), an
 5

association with a synonym or opposite, or an association with another word in the same lexical set
(sense, sensitive, senseless)
Word origins can be extremely interesting to some learners, and if the origin of a word is particularly
striking for some reason, this too can help memory and recall (for example, assassin = eater of
hashish, zodiac = circle of little animals)
Another productive area for interest, discussion and vocabulary-building is helping learners to identify
English words that have passed into their own languages and then looking at differences between them
(in spelling, pronunciation, etc.). Students may be completely unaware of words in their own language
derived from English, and focusing on some of these words may help them to internalise the English
equivalents, e.g. Japanese sarada (salad), songu (song), apaato (apartment), furai pan (frying pan), etc.
Comparing the use of metaphor and idiom across languages can prove memorable to some learners
(English – to kill two birds with one stone, Romanian – a impusca doi iepuri dintr-o lovitura.)

e. By association with a feeling (positive / negative)

Certain words have the power to promote strong feelings and associations. Jeremy Harmer, the well-
known methodologist, reports of an experiment he ad conducted with a group of upper intermediates.
He asked them to tell him what new words they had learnt and remembered recently. They all chose
the word ‘cuddle’. They had come across it in an amusing text that had formed part of a class they had
really enjoyed. Besides, they liked the meaning of the word (It’s a nice thing to do) and they liked its
sound.

f. By association with a sound or movement.

It has been suggested that a poem, for instance, which is learned by a group of learners to the
accompaniment of physical movements (‘look round’ and the learners look around), will be
remembered more successfully.

g. By the word in question being memorable in itself for some reason.

Some words are just memorable in themselves. You probably have a favourite word in English. It may
stick in your memory because it sounds strange or, perhaps, because it sounds beautiful. Its sound may
suggest an unusual or vivid image.

But how do we really LEARN new vocabulary? There are a number of stages:
1. First, we should make a distinction between active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is
small and consists of words that we both recognise and use in speech. Passive vocabulary is large and
consists of words that we do recognise in a text but not necessarily use in actual speech. In other
words, we recognise and understand more words than we actually use – i.e. our PASSIVE
(RECEPTIVE) vocabulary, which exceeds our ACTIVE (PRODUCTIVE) vocabulary.
 6

Therefore, the first stage would be the contact with unknown words, which then pass into the passive
vocabulary and then into the active vocabulary.
2. Second, there is an incubation period. That means that we normally hear or see a word in differing
contexts before we begin to use it.
3. It is essential to give low-level students a limited active vocabulary quickly and from this a student
can build his/her vocabulary at a natural unforced speed.
4. To build his/her vocabulary a student should be encouraged to read extensively outside the
classroom and to invest in a good monolingual dictionary.

2. Selecting Vocabulary
Part of the problem in teaching vocabulary lies in the fact that while there is a consensus about what
grammatical structures should be taught at what levels, the same is hardly true about vocabulary. It is
true, of course, that syllabuses include word lists, but there is no guarantee that list for one beginner’s
syllabus will be similar to the list for a different set of beginners.
One of the problems of vocabulary teaching is how to select what words to teach. A general principle
in the past has bee to teach more concrete words at lower levels and gradually become more abstract.
Words like ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘chalk’, have figured in beginners’ syllabuses because the things they
denote are there in front of the students and thus easily explained. Words like ‘charity’, however, are
not physically represented in the classroom and are far more difficult to explain. Other criteria that are
rather more scientific have been used, among which the most important are: frequency, range
(coverage), familiarity, and usefulness.
1. Frequency
We can decide which words we should teach on the basis of how frequently speakers of the language
use them. The words that are most commonly used are the ones we should teach first.
2. Range / Coverage
A word is more useful if it covers more things than if it only has one very specific meaning. Similarly,
a word is more useful if it covers a number of different contexts. For instance, a word like book should
be an early vocabulary item, because it is frequently used by native speakers and it covers more things
than ‘notebook’, ‘exercise book’, ‘textbook’, etc.
3. Familiarity
Even if the word is not frequently used, is it familiar to everyone? E.g. ‘toothbrush’
4. Usefulness
In selecting what vocabulary to teach i.e. for active production, teachers should always consider the
students’ immediate needs. If you teach a group of adult bankers, for instance, selection of vocabulary
will considerably differ from selection of vocabulary with 10-year-old beginners.
 7

3. Vocabulary – Practical Linguistic Considerations

What do students need to know?

1. Meaning
First of all, there is the denotative / referential meaning – that meaning you get from the dictionary –
an ostensive definition that associates the word with an object.
Vocabulary items frequently have more than just one meaning. When we come across a word, then,
and try to decipher its meaning we will have to look at the context in which it is used. You should
always teach a vocabulary item in contrast with others, never in isolation.
e.g. rug / carpet
mat / rug
blanket / quilt / eiderdown / sheet / duvet
T-shirt / shirt / sweat shirt
dustbin / litter bin / wastepaper bin

Secondly, students need to know about sense relations, e.g. antonyms and synonyms, polysemy,
homonymy.
e.g. polysemy – 1 word + several related meanings: leg (person and chair)
homonymy – 1 word + several unrelated meanings: bank (river and money)
synonymy – 1000 = noughts, 1-0 = nil (football), 32064 = oh, 0 = zero
antonyms – sharp = blunt / obtuse / sweet
2. Word Use
What a word means can be changed, stretched or limited by how it is used and this is something
students need to know about. Word meaning is governed by:
Collocation – which words go with each other
e.g. X is a single woman (neutral), a spinster (older), a bachelorette (young, air-headed, attractive)
Style – level of formality
e.g. children – neutral
offsprings – formal
kids – informal
nippers – colloquial
sprogs – slang
Register – are the words job related / field related (commercial, medical, political)
e.g. penniless – neutral
broke – colloquial
insolvent – legal term
Dialects
 8

Regional dialects: British English, American English, Scots English, Irish English, Australian English
e.g. pavement – sidewalk (U.S) / fag – homosexual (U.S) and cigarette (Great Britain)
small – wee (Scots)
good – bonzer (Australian)
Social dialects: working class, middle class, etc.
e.g. Gor blimey! (working class) – crikey! (middle class)
Sometimes, levels of formality and register or dialectal forms combine:
e.g. toilet (neutral) – WC (written) – lavatory (formal) – loo (middle class) – bog (working class) –
khazi (colloquial and archaic) – head (ship) – can (U.S. informal) – bathroom (U.S. neutral)
Word meaning is frequently stretched through the use of metaphor and idiom. We know that the word
‘hiss’ describes the noise that snakes make. But we stretch its meaning to describe the way people talk
to each other (“don’t move or you’re dead” she hissed). That is metaphorical use. We can talk about
treacherous people as snakes (He’s a real snake in the grass). ‘Snake in the grass’ is a fixed phrase that
has become an idiom like countless other phrases, such as: I’m fed up, it’s up to you, he got the sack,
to pull one’s leg, etc.
3. Word Formation
Words can change their shape and their grammatical value. Students need to know facts about word
formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical context. Thus, the verb ‘run’ has the
participles ‘running’ and ‘ran’. The present participle ‘running’ can be used as an adjective and ‘run’
can also be a noun. Students also need to know how prefixes and suffixes work, how words are spelt
and how they sound. They need to know that stress can change when the grammatical value of the
word is different e.g. record.
4. Word Grammar
Just as words change according to their grammatical meaning, so the use of certain words can trigger
the use of certain grammatical patterns.
For example, we make a distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. The former can be
both singular and plural and can collocate with plural and singular verbs; the latter can be only
singular and can collocate with verbs in the singular only.

4. Exercises
What vocabulary features are exemplified in the following groups of words?
a. stride, walk, saunter, stroll, stagger, trudge
car, van, ambulance, bus, taxi, vehicle, jeep
b. blew/blue, bare/bear, peer/ pier, break/brake, plane/plain,
c. issue, rest, return, miss, fell, favour, cut
d. lead, wind, bow, record, suspect, rebel
e. difficult, hard, tough, exacting, demanding
 9

cross, irritated, furious, angry, apoplectic

slumber, sleep, nap, kip
friend, mate, colleague, comrade
f. drunk/sober; hot/cold; long/short; alive/dead; absent/present; buy/sell; teacher/student; come/go;
g. sense, nonsense, senseless, sensible, sensitivity, sensor;
h. heavy smoker, big eater, hard drinker, keen sportsman
i. bookshop, car park, teapot, guitar string, matchbox, long-distance lorry driver;
j. ship, anchor, sailor, bridge, navigate, deck, cargo

a. The words here represent superordinates and hyponyms. One word in each group is a general word
and all the others are different types of that general word. In the case of the second group, the
superordinate is ‘vehicle’ and all the others are types of vehicle. You can illustrate the relation by
means of a diagram, which may be used by students to store vocabulary.
b. These are homophones, words that have different spelling but share the same pronunciation. One
way of helping learners to cope with different spellings is to take the pronunciation as the starting
point and encourage them to store items thus:
/blu:/ blue; blew
/mi:t/ meat; meet
c. These are homonyms, words that share a single spelling but have many different meanings. The
word ‘issue’ has no fewer than 10 meanings given in The Shorter Oxford Dictionary. One way of
helping learners in this area is by encouraging them to use diagrams to store different meanings:
e.g. publication question to discuss

issue
result/outcome outgoing/outflowing
d. Words with the same spelling but a different pronunciation are known as homographs. One
important area is the noun/verb distinction with certain words, with a consequent effect on stress and
pronunciation.
e. The words in each group are, broadly speaking, synonyms. There is no such thing a s a perfect
synonym. If there are two words for something, then they normally indicate, at the very least, a
different shade of meaning. If something is ‘difficult’, it is not necessarily ‘tough’. The latter suggests
more physical effort. To help learners clarify the difference, a context or collocation is needed for each
one.
In the second group, we are concerned with points on a scale of anger. Clearly, ‘irritated’ and ‘furious’
are not at the same levels of anger. One way of introducing these differences is by getting learners to
devise their own scales. A scale for heat would look like this: boiling, hot, warm, cool, cold, freezing.
 1

The third group in this set has the added element of formality. They are, broadly speaking,
synonymous, but ‘kip’ is far more informal than ‘sleep’. Likewise, the ‘friend’ words in the last group
are differentiated both by formality and connotation. ‘Colleague’ has working associations, while
‘comrade’ is a friend in adversity or in a struggle of some kind.
f. These are all opposites. The first group shows example of gradable antonyms. These are not ‘true’
opposites, but points on a scale. The second group – true opposites. The third group shows examples
of converse actions
g. Affixation in English based on the root ‘sense’
h. Collocations
i. Compounds in English
j. Word family or topic area. The words are all connected with ‘ship’