TOPIC : LEARNING WORDS FOR

YOUNG LEARNERS
erlina
 Vocabulary Development
In Children’s Language
 When teachers & speech language pathologists talk about vocabulary, they are
referring to the set of words that a child knows.
 Vocabulary can be split into 2 types : receptive and expressive.
 A child’s receptive vocabulary consists of the words the child understands when
he/she hears or reads them.
 A child’s expressive vocabulary consists of the words the child uses when he/she
speaks.
 Learning Vocabulary

 During the first few years of life, as

babies begin to say words, it is easy to
keep track of their growing
vocabularies.
 Children typically understand or
recognize more words than they
actually use when speaking.
 For example, a toddler might only say
five different words (e.g., dada, mama,
doggie, bottle, more) but be able to
understand many others. Like pointing
to the light when mommy asks, “where
is the lights?” or beginning to cry when
daddy says, “bye-bye” as he leaves for
work.
 Learning Vocabulary

 Vocabulary development does not

stop once a child can talk.
 In fact, children learn many new
words once they start reading and
going to school.
 The chart (on next slide )shows
typical vocabulary development
across several ages, notice how
quickly vocabulary grows over the
first six years of life.
Typical Vocabulary Development
Across Several Ages
 Why Is Vocabulary Important?
 Vocabulary is the basis for learning language. Educational research shows that
vocabulary strongly relates to reading comprehension, intelligence and general
ability.
 As children learn to read, they must learn to decode (sound-out) print, but
they also must have a vocabulary base (word knowledge) in order to make
sense of what they decode.
 By third grade, however, children are reading to learn.
 For example, a child who is reading to learn about the revolutionary war
needs to know words like war, army and horses (a basic vocabulary) to
understand the history lesson. At the same time, however, the child will
likely learn new words like weapons and revolution-continuing to build his/her
vocabulary.
How to encourage vocabulary
development?
 Read to your
students, read with
them expose them
to plenty of reading
materials.
 Talk to your
students about the
environment
around you.
 Encourage students
to tell about their
surroundings.
Learning and teaching vocabulary
 Learners need to acquire vocabulary learning
strategies, in order to discover the meaning of
new words. The strategies are useful in in-class
and also in out-class situations where they
encounter new and unfamiliar words. Their
strategies also help them acquire new
vocabulary items they see or hear.
 The students can benefit from how to use
contextual clues and guessing the meaning
from content to deal with unfamiliar items.
 Vocabulary development should include both
direct instruction (teaching the words and their
meanings such as pre-teaching vocabulary
items).
 Indirect instruction (teaching the strategies to
help learners figure out the meaning
themselves).
Learning and teaching vocabulary
 Young learners should be exposed to vocabulary
items repeadly in rich contexts. We can’t
expect them to the items we teach and to
remember all in the lesson two days later.
Thus, a newly taught word should reappear
many times and in different situations for the
following weeks of instruction. The vocabulary
items should be revisited/recycled in different
activities, with different skills and for multiple
times.
 Another important component of vocabulary
teaching in yong learners classes is deep
processing, which means working with the
information at a high cognitive and personal
level. Deep processing makes it more likely to
remember the information, as the students
build connections between new words and prior
knowledge. Instead of memorizing list of words
and their meanings, personalizing vocabulary
lessons greatly helps student’s deep processing.
  When

Benefits of learning vocabulary

vocabulary
items are
taught before
an activity, the
students may
benefit from it
in two ways :
 1. it helps them
comprehend
the activity
better.
 It is more likely
that they
acquire the
target
vocabulary
words.
 I. Demonstration
Techniques in a. Visuals : magazine pictures/ flash cards/ filmstrip/
presenting the photographs/ images from TV or video

meaning of b. Real objects

c. black/white board drawings
new items to
d. Mime, gestures, acting
young learners
II. Verbal Explanation
a. Definition Lexical Meaning (requires pre-existing
knowledge)
b. Putting the word in a defining context (requires
pre-existing knowledge)
c. Translation : (This doesn’t require learner to do
some mental work in constructing a meaning for the
new foreign language word.)
 Extending
 Difficulties in learning vocabulary may result
Children’s
from that vocabulary not being sufficiently
connected to pupil’s real lives.
Vocabulary
 In order to extend children’s vocabulary
beyond textbook :
1. Working outwards from the text book.
2. Learner’s choice
3. Incidental learning through stories
Children’s vocabulary learning strategies

 Strategy use changes with age, and

succesfull learners vary in what strategies
they use and in how they use them.
 Teachers have to encourage young
learners to adapt vocabulary learning
strategies :
a. Guessing meaning
b. Noticing grammatical information about
words
c. Noticing links to similar words in first
language (cognates)
d. Remembering where a word has been
encountered before
e. World knowledge
THANK YOU
&
KEEP ON FIRE