How to teach vocabulary

How to teach vocabulary

Imagine that you are going to use the text below with your class of 14-year-old
intermediate-level learners. Read it and decide:
 which words your learners will already know
 which words you need to pre-teach.
[style text below as extract with photo]
Deserts

Deserts cover about 20% of the Earth's land. The desert has very little rain and
extreme temperatures; in fact, a desert is a region that gets less than ten inches of rain
each year. Because the desert is so dry, not many plants and animals live there. Some
deserts get very hot during the day and then very cold at night, when temperatures can
go well below 0 C. But some deserts are always cold, for example, the Gobi Desert
in Asia, and the desert on the continent of Antarctica.

Animals that live in the desert adapt so they can survive and deal with the lack of
water, the extreme temperatures, and the shortage of food. To avoid the heat of the
day, many desert animals only come out at night to eat; during the day they stay
beneath the ground or hide in the shade. Many desert animals do not have to drink at
all: they get all the water they need from their food. Most desert animals are also
small.

The biggest desert is northern Africa's Sahara Desert; it covers roughly 3,500,000
square miles (9,065,000 square kilometres). The driest deserts are the Atacama Desert
of northern Chile, South America, and the Lut Desert in eastern Iran.

Possibly your learners will not know these words in the text: extreme, region, inch,
adapt, survive, deal with, (a) lack (of), shortage, avoid, ground, hide, shade, roughly,

© Cambridge University Press 2011

How to teach vocabulary

square mile. But will you need to teach them all? The answer to this question depends
very much on the tasks about the text that your learners need to complete. Look at
these three examples of tasks:

[style 1-3 below as three tasks from the same book]

1 Choose the right answer to this question.
What topic is this passage about?
A animals B rain in deserts C deserts

2 Find the names of four deserts the text talks about.

3 Find three ways that animals survive in the desert.

To answer the question in task 1, learners just need to understand the gist or general
meaning of the text. They can do this without understanding any of the words listed
above, so you wouldn’t need to teach any of them.

To complete task 2, learners simply have to scan the text to find the names of the four
deserts, so again, they do not have to understand any of the words listed above.

The answer to task 3 is in the second paragraph of the text. The first and third
paragraphs do not talk about animals. To answer the question properly, learners need
to understand the meaning of adapt, survive, deal with, lack, shortage, avoid, ground,
hide and shade, so you would need to teach these items to them.

We can see from this that our choice of words to pre-teach (i.e. teach before learners
read a text or listen to a recording) depends on the tasks that go with the text or
recording. Learners don’t need to understand all the words in a recording or text, just
the key words related to the reading or listening tasks.

When we are choosing which words to teach learmers we also need to think about
how many we should teach. Unfortunately our brains and memory have a limit. Many
experts say we should not teach more than seven or eight new words at any one time.

© Cambridge University Press 2011

How to teach vocabulary

Let’s look again at the words from the text that our learners may not know. They are:
extreme, region, inch, adapt, survive, deal with, (a) lack (of), shortage, avoid, ground,
hide, shade, roughly, square mile.

You can see that some of these are single words (e.g. extreme, region, adapt). Others
are two or more words (e.g. a lack of, deal with, square meal); i.e. they are chunks. It
is better for our learners if we teach these words as chunks rather than individual
words because they so often appear together and their meaning comes from being
together. So when deciding which words to teach we need to consider whether we
teach words in individual units or as part of groups of words (chunks) that often go
together.

Now to another big question: what do we teach learners about new words? When they
first meet new words, learners clearly need to learn their meaning, their pronunciation
(sounds and stress), spelling and how they operate in grammar (as adjectives, verbs,
nouns, etc.). Later, when they meet these words again and as they progress in the
language, they will need to learn, for example, the lexical set the words are part of,
their collocations, the prefixes or suffixes they might take and other meanings. All
these things are part of really knowing a word and they help us to realise that learning
a word is not a one-off thing, but something that grows. Getting to know a word is a
bit like getting to know a friend – we can always learn new things about them, and
until we have learnt all these things we can’t say we know the friend very well.

So, how do we teach the meaning of words? Concrete words, which refer to things we
can see in the world, are generally easy to teach. We can show learners pictures of
these things, bring real examples of them (realia) into the classroom or even mime
their meaning. If we show the meaning of a word, ask learners to repeat it with the
correct pronunciation and write it on the board for the learners to copy down in their
notebooks, we have taught the meaning, pronunciation and spelling of these concrete
words.

However, it is more difficult to teach the meaning of abstract words, i.e. words that
refer to an idea, a feeling or a quality (e.g. extreme, survive, avoid, roughly). We can
explain, give opposites or words with a similar meaning or translate. Translation is

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How to teach vocabulary

useful when words are very hard to explain, but many people recommend using
translation as little as possible. If we explain through English, we are encouraging
learners to use their English to understand and to rely on English not their mother
tongue. But it can be useful for the teacher to use translation to check learners have
understood the meaning of abstract words that are difficult to explain, simply by
asking, for example, ‘How would you say this word in your language?’

Here is a list of some techniques for presenting the meaning of new vocabulary. Tick
the techniques you use. Think about why you don’t use the others. Are there any it
might be useful for you to try using?

Vocabulary presentation techniques

Teacher-led
Showing flashcards, photos, drawings, wallcharts or realia
 Miming or using gesture
 Explaining through giving synonyms, definitions or opposite meanings
 Translating
 Eliciting (i.e. giving learners a clue and then asking them to tell you the word)
 Discussing a topic or describing a situation using the new vocabulary

Learner-centred
Learners ask one another about meaning, pronunciation, etc.
 Learners use dictionaries
 Learners ask the teacher about key words they need for a text or task
 Learners deduce the meaning from the context
 Learners brainstorm words likely to occur in the text
 Learners predict words they expect to hear in the text

When we teach new words from a text we can pre-teach the most important key
words, i.e. teach them before learners read the text, as we introduce the theme of the
text to the class. Then after the first reading we can introduce more words that are
central to more detailed reading tasks if you intend to do some.

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How to teach vocabulary

New words in a lesson often come up through reading or listening texts, but they also
come up when we teach new language patterns or when learners try to say things they
don’t quite have the vocabulary to say. Always give learners these words they need,
as these are the words they are likely to be most interested in. Keep a section of your
board reserved for all important new words that come up in the lesson. Write only
these words there so that learners will know where to find them, and will be able to
write them in their notebooks.

When we have presented new words, our job is far from over. To really learn words
learners need to use them and to meet them over and over again. This means that we
need to use vocabulary practice activities, get learners to record new vocabulary and
use vocabulary revision activities. There are many ways of doing these things.

Vocabulary practice activities

Here is a list of some techniques we can use to practise the meaning of new
vocabulary. Tick the techniques you use. Think about why you don’t use the others.
Are there any it might be useful for you to try using?

Activities that can be designed to practise new words

 Gap-fill texts  Quizzes
 Brainstorming  Labelling
 Categorising  Finding the odd one out
 Matching tasks  Grids, crosswords
 Word-building tasks  Memory games

Activities that focus on using new words in communication

 Role plays  Project work
 Discussions  Descriptions
 Reading books, articles, songs,  Writing texts (postcards, reports,
etc. emails, essays, compositions, etc.)
 Listening to stories  Other communicative activities

Recording new vocabulary

After you have presented new vocabulary, it is important to ask learners to keep a
record of it in their notebooks. This helps them to remember it and to revise it easily

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How to teach vocabulary

for tests. A list also can form the basis for different vocabulary revision activities.
Grids are a common way of recording vocabulary. Here is an example of one:
[style as handwritten table]
New Explanation Pronunciation Part of Example of Translation
word of meaning speech word in a
sentence
survive to continue sɜˈvaɪv verb Some animals sobrevivir
to live or can survive in
exist the desert
because they
do not need
much water.
roughly about ˈrʌfli adverb I live roughly aproximadamente
three
kilometres
from my
school.

Would it be useful for your learners to complete all these columns when they meet
new words or just some or others? What columns would be useful for your learners?
Think about your answer.

Revising new vocabulary

Our memories always need help. If we just meet a word once we are likely to forget
it. So, we need to give our learners activities that help them reuse and revise
vocabulary we have taught them before.

Here is a list of some techniques we can use to revise new vocabulary. Tick the
techniques you use. Think about why you don’t use the others. Are there any it might
be useful for you to try using?
 Asking students to organise their recorded words into sets, e.g. by topic,
association, word-class, word family, synonyms
 Putting recorded words into mind maps and other diagrams

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How to teach vocabulary

 Labelling pictures
 Writing each word on a card with the meaning on the back and playing with
the cards in games or quizzes
 Revisiting the vocabulary record and adding extra/new information learnt
about the words
 Completing gap-fills of texts which contain the words for revision
 Brainstorming words related to revision topics
 Categorising
 Finding the odd one out
 Grids, crosswords and diagrams
 Word-building tasks
 Memory games
 Vocabulary quizzes
 Discussions or other oral/written work

Try to find examples of some of these activities in your coursebooks or on websites

such as http://www.oup.com/elt/students/?cc=global
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/vocabulary/football.sht
ml
Then experiment with some activities that are new to you to see how successful they
are in your classes.

To finish, let’s summarise the main points we’ve made about vocabulary teaching:

1 Pre-teach key words from texts or recordings. Choose which words to pre-
teach by looking at the words which are essential for the comprehension tasks.
2 Try not to teach more than seven or eight words at one time.
3 Teach words as chunks when they usually occur as chunks.
4 Teach the meaning, pronunciation, spelling and grammatical function of
words to learners when they meet the words for the first time.
5 Go on teaching new things about words when learners meet them again.
6 Use visual aids to teach the meaning of concrete words.
7 There is a variety of techniques for presenting the meaning of both concrete
and more abstract words.

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How to teach vocabulary

8 After learners have met new words, they need to practise them. The teacher
can choose from a variety of activities to give students the chance to do this.
9 Writing words in a notebook is a very useful way for learners to create a
record of all the new words they meet.
10 Learners need to meet new words many times in order to remember them. A
wide range of activities are available to help us give them the opportunity to
do this.

Enjoy your vocabulary teaching!

© Cambridge University Press 2011