What Do We Know about the Best Practices for Teaching Vocabulary?

Marlise Horst
Concordia University

Learners of a new language need to acquire a huge amount of vocabulary. To get a

sense of the size of the task, consider the following: Investigations of reading
comprehension consistently show that learners of English have good understanding of a
text written for native speakers only when an average of one word (or less) in every 50 is
unfamiliar. It is estimated that knowledge of as many as 8,000 (!) word families is
needed to reach that criterion. (The term “family” refers to a base word and its inflected
and derived forms. For example, the sharp family includes sharper, sharpen, sharply,
unsharpened, sharpness, and so on.) Since the task is clearly very large, it is important
that vocabulary teaching be as efficient and effective as possible. The recommendations
that follow are made with that reality in mind.

Which Vocabulary to Teach?

Teachers have always sensed that common words like leaf and tree are more useful for
their beginning learners to know than words like deciduous and birch. But thanks to the
advent of powerful computers that are able to analyze huge linguistic corpora, this is no
longer a matter of guesswork. We now have highly specific information about the words
that are the most important for language learners to know. This work reveals a striking
fact: A list of the roughly 2,000 most frequently occurring word families of a language
accounts for a very large proportion of the words that are normally used in speech and
writing. Research shows that learners of English who know the 2,000 most frequent
families will be able to recognize an astonishing 80% (or more) of all the vocabulary they
meet in texts written for native speakers. In spoken English, which is typically less
lexically dense than the written form, knowledge of 2,000 words is more powerful still.
Interestingly, the 2,000 most frequent words of French offer even greater coverage of
that language than is the case in English (Cobb & Horst, 2004). These frequency
findings have profound implications for pedagogy. It is clear that systematic study of the
most frequent words of a language offers a powerful and efficient way of getting over the
initial acquisition hump. Nation (2001) is emphatic on this point: “High-frequency words
are so important that almost anything that can be done to make sure that they are
learned is worth doing” (p. 16).

Corpus research has also identified the vocabulary that learners most need to know for
specific purposes. A notable example is Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, a list of
words that recur frequently in university textbooks across a variety of content areas, now
studied by university-bound learners of English all over the world. Recent work has also
identified the mid-frequency vocabulary that is important to acquire once the knowledge
of high-frequency vocabulary is in place (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2014). There are even
frequency lists for phrasal verbs and formulaic expressions. Much of the effort to develop
frequency lists has focused on English and a few other European languages, but corpus-
based lists for other languages are increasingly available. The Lextutor site at
www.lextutor.ca brings together in one spot several well-established lists for English and
French; the site also contains learning activities and tools for analyzing instructional
materials in terms of the frequent and infrequent lexis they contain.

Can't Learners Just "Pick Up" These Words?

Teachers may wonder whether frequent words need to be taught explicitly. It is
reasonable to expect that learners would be able to simply pick up knowledge of these
words through exposure to them in meaningful comprehensible input. If the words are
truly frequent, then surely they must be met often enough for acquisition to just naturally
happen. But vocabulary acquisition research does not support this scenario. It is true
that learners do acquire some new vocabulary incidentally through reading and listening
to their new language (and this is an argument for encouraging learners to read
extensively or to watch TV and films). However, investigations consistently show that
incidental acquisition is inefficient and slow.

Learners need to meet new words as often as eight or ten times before the words stick
in memory, and examinations of teacher-talk transcripts and textbooks show that only a
few words are repeated that often over the course of a lesson or even a whole semester.
Learners would have to be exposed to a huge amount of input in order to meet all of the
thousands of words they need to know often enough for them to be retained. This kind of
exposure is usually available only to learners who live and work in the new language
milieu for a very long time. According to research conducted across a wide variety of
second language learning contexts, in situations where the language classroom is the
main source of input learners typically pick up only three or four new words per hour of
class (Milton, 2009). Engaging students in explicit word-focused learning activities is far
more effective than this. Not so surprisingly, studies consistently show that the more
learners are asked to do with new words in learning activities, the better the vocabulary
is retained.

How Can Activities Be Designed to Promote Learning?

Anything the teacher does to single out a new word and focus attention on it facilitates
learning. So if the word sharp comes up in class, the teacher might write it on the board,
or say it repeatedly, or get students to circle the word in a text; there are many ways.
The point is that an unfamiliar word needs to be noticed before it can be learned, and
teachers serve their students well by lifting new words out of the stream of language in
ways that say, “Here is something to attend to.” Observations of classroom language
teaching show that teachers do a good job with this useful decontextualization of
vocabulary; research shows that some teachers highlight dozens of words in just a
single hour of teaching.

In clarifying new words, teachers often ask pose questions such as “Who can tell me
what sharp means?” Usually there will be a student who is able to volunteer a definition
or translation. A problem with this technique is that while it may succeed in clarifying the
word, only one student is really involved and the meaning is given away too soon. To
engage all of the students in the thinking process, it would be more useful for the teacher
to say something along these lines: “A pencil is sharp. A knife is sharp. Sharp things hurt
people. Raise your hand if you think you know what sharp means.” This could go on until
many hands are raised; the meaning should be given at the end of the episode rather
than at the beginning. (These suggestions draw on ideas from Nation [2001, pp. 60–61]).
Research shows that engaging in this kind of mental work to figure out a meaning helps
make the word memorable. Reading activities in which learners are directed to guess
word meanings from context promote this type of processing, as does asking them to
look up a word in a dictionary to decide which meaning best fits a particular context (see
Hulstijn & Laufer [2001] for research on effective word tasks).

However, a single act of inferring meaning is not enough for the word to be retained.
Learners need to reinforce new knowledge repeatedly in activities that involve expending
mental effort to make the link between a word’s form and its meaning. This insight has
prompted new interest in an old method: the study of vocabulary cards. Looking at a
definition or translation on one side of the card and trying to come up with the target
word that appears on the other side (or the other way around) takes mental effort. Of
course, after repeated trials, the form–meaning links become easier to make, and
eventually they become automatized. Admittedly, the study of word cards may seem
more like a tedious exercise in rote memorization rather than a “best practice.” However,
several points can be made with respect to vocabulary cards. First, the knowledge
obtained through this kind of study is hardly inert or useless; there is psycholinguistic
evidence that the new words become integrated into the mental lexicon in much the
same way as naturally acquired first language vocabulary does. Second, it is efficient:
Learners can acquire many new words quickly using this method. Third, study with word
cards need not be boring. Creative teachers can find ways of working with cards – paper
ones or on computer – in games and races; there are many motivating ways to review
new vocabulary. And review need not take up valuable class time; it can happen outside
of class using word-card software on computers or mobile apps such as Vocabulary
Trainer, AnkiDroid Flashcards, or Lextutor’s Mobile Flashcards. Finally, even though
tests may not be loved by teachers or their students, regular vocabulary quizzes are a
powerful way of motivating review. The point is that the review needs to happen in order
for the learning to occur. Unfortunately, examination of both textbooks and transcripts of
classroom teaching reveal that this aspect is often neglected. Few of the words that
have been focused on in a lesson are reviewed again later, and almost none are
reviewed repeatedly.

What about Using the First Language?

Some teachers worry about using the first language in the language classroom, and
particularly about using bilingual dictionaries. Teachers certainly serve their students
well by making the classroom a second-language-only zone, but there are good reasons
to make some exceptions. For beginning learners, using bilingual dictionaries and
electronic translators makes sense because they will not able to understand the defining
vocabulary of a monolingual dictionary until they know several thousand words of the
new language. Furthermore, accessing first language translations may reveal helpful
formal similarities. For instance, Dutch learners of English who look up sharp in a
bilingual dictionary will see that the Dutch equivalent scherp closely resembles the
English form, and this can make the word easier to remember. Such cross-linguistic
resemblances considerably ease the burden of learning new words. In the Canadian
context where many learners acquire French or English as a second language, teachers
would do well to highlight the many formal resemblances between words in these
languages. This is particularly useful with cognate pairs like school/école, screen/écran,
and spouse/époux where the resemblances may not be so obvious (see White & Horst
[2012] for more on cognate activities).

What Do Learners Need to Know about Words?

Highlighting the forms of words is important because the nub of the problem in initially
learning a new word is connecting an unfamiliar sound (and spelling) to a familiar
concept. Most second language learners already know concepts like sharp and do really
not need extended definitions in any language. But they do need help in remembering
the new form that is associated with this meaning. In cases where the first language
does not offer an easy phonetic reminder, teachers can help by creating a link such as
this: “To remember sharp think of a bird with a sharp beak singing sharp, sharp, sharp.”
The sillier and more vivid the mnemonic, the more memorable it will be. In the case of
more abstract words, it may be useful to highlight word parts (e.g., know in knowledge,
or the know sound-alike in diagnosis). Anything the teacher can do to make the sounds
and spellings of new words memorable is useful for vocabulary acquisition.

So far the discussion has focused on initial recognition processes and on building basic
form–meaning connections. These are crucial first steps in learning the vocabulary of a
new language, but a complete answer to the question of the best practices for teaching
vocabulary must also address effective ways of developing other kinds of lexical
knowledge. Therefore, in addition to recognizing the core meaning of sharp, learners
eventually also need to acquire both receptive and productive knowledge of its many
extended meanings (e.g., harsh in manner, mentally quick) and its uses in a host of
formulaic sequences (e.g., draw a sharp distinction, be a sharp dresser). They also need
to know its morphological variants (e.g., sharply, sharpened) and to be able to use these
forms in grammatically accurate sentences. Intelligible pronunciation and correct spelling
are obviously also important; other knowledge aspects include semantic associations,
register, and pragmatics. (For a full account of what it means to know a word, see the
second chapter in Nation [2001or 2013]). Principles outlined earlier also apply to the
acquisition of these more elaborated aspects of lexical knowledge. That is, learners
benefit from explicit attention to particular features, and activities that engage them in
effortful learning and review are important. Here, too, teachers would do well to be
guided by frequency in selecting which forms and uses are more useful for their students
to study and learn. For example, in the case of collocation, sharp distinction proves to be
more frequent than sharp dresser in a corpus of academic writing. Awareness of the
various facets of vocabulary knowledge is critical in responding to learners’ needs. While
explaining a new word’s meaning might seem intuitively to be the most useful thing a
teacher can do, the learner may actually be struggling with other problems such as
producing the word along with the right collocate in an essay or using it in a
pragmatically appropriate way in a conversation.

At the beginning of this discussion, it was noted that learners face a large task in terms
of the numbers of words they need to know; at the end, we see that the task is also large
in terms of the many kinds of knowledge that are needed. Fortunately for teachers who
seek to take on these challenges, there is a great deal of current interest in investigating
vocabulary in the second language acquisition research community. This has resulted in
a large body of carefully conducted, classroom-oriented vocabulary studies that identify
many useful guidelines for effective teaching and learning, only a few of which have
been explored here. It is my hope that this brief treatment will motivate readers to
discover much more of what this fascinating research has to offer.

References
Cobb, T., & Horst, M. (2004). Is there room for an AWL in French? In P. Bogaards & B.
Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language (pp. 15–38). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238.
Hulstijn, J. H., & Laufer, B. (2001). Some empirical evidence for the involvement load
hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition. Language Learning, 51, 539–558.
Milton, J. (2009). Measuring second language vocabulary acquisition. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001, 2013). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2014). A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in
L2 vocabulary teaching. Language Teaching, 47, 484–503.
doi:10.1017/S0261444812000018
White, J., & Horst, M. (2012). Cognate awareness-raising in late childhood: teachable
and useful. Language Awareness, 21, 181–196.

Recommended Reading
Gardner, D. (2013). Exploring vocabulary: Language in action. New York: Routledge.
Nation, I. S. P. (2008). Teaching vocabulary: Strategies and techniques. Boston: Heinle.
Schmitt, N. (2008). Review article: Instructed second language vocabulary learning.
Language Teaching Research, 2(3), 329–363.