Vocabulary - Its in the Design.... TESL 0130 -

TESL 0130 - Reading and Vocabulary - Unit #3 Reflection

It seems easy enough!  Teach all the right words, and you will know the language!  But how does one acquire said 'right' vocabulary?  Brown and Lee (2015) states that "One of the recent "hot topics" in vocabulary teaching is whether learners are better served in the long run with incidental exposure to lexical items (that is, as a bi-product of communicative activities), or with intentional, explicit focus on vocabulary."  Then goes on to say that "In fact, research shows that intentional vocabulary focus accounts for significant gains in acquisition" (Laufer, 2003; Read, 2004)

In order to learn and retain and find meaning in context, new lexical items need to be learned first, then met several times after in order for proper learning to occur (from 6-17).  The time between the vocabulary teaching is also very important; so for example, it is much more effective to split 20 minutes of vocabulary teaching over many classes, instead of teaching 1, 20 minute vocabulary session. Some strategies for the initial learning of vocabulary words are flash cards, word attack  strategies and vocabulary notebooks, however, these strategies are not useful if there is no opportunity for the students to meet up with and use the newly learned terms in a timely manner.

In a lecture called Which Words are Worth the Worry,  it was suggested that the struggle with vocabulary teaching is the fact that there are so many words our students need to learn and it takes several meetings with these words for proper learning.  The key to being an effective teacher may lie more in the planning and designing of our lessons/courses, rather than the actual teaching of the words themselves.  Therefore, we must use all aspects of language acquisition and create opportunities to learn our vocabulary while participating in speaking, listening reading and writing tasks.  Not only to learn the vocabulary words themselves, but to increase our fluency as well.

My take home message for this unit is that teaching vocabulary in the classroom is not enough, because there is a need for repetition and contextual opportunities in order for our students to retain the information and to gain meaning from what they've learned.  It will be important to plan and design your program such that new terms can be recycled in several contexts so that the teaching in the classroom is not all lost out of the classroom.

Some ideas for this are as follows:
1.  At the end of a unit, design task based activity where the students can prepare to have and interactional exchange with others students using the vocabulary taught in the class.  For example, in a unit where the vocabulary taught surrounded buying food items, money and sales, have the students set up a market where they set up and plan they're booth, and prepare their language for selling and buying items.
2.  Go to a restaurant and use vocabulary learned for ordering food.
3.  Listening to the radio for certain vocabulary terms
4.  watching television in another language
5.  keeping a vocabulary notebook and reading it daily.  Also, sharing your notebooks with classmates.
6.  Keep a daily journal

Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (Rev. 4th Ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education.

Which Words are Worth the Worry