Best Practice 21: Dealing with Vocabulary Queries

Best Practice 21: Dealing with Vocabulary Queries

Even though they occasionally feel otherwise, students know a lot more vocabulary than they think they do – and, more importantly, context can help them fill in the gaps. Thus, though they may often ask the teacher what a given word means, it is important that teacher not spoon-feed vocabulary. If a student asks for the meaning of a word on shorter activities (e.g., sentence completion) simply ask the other students if they can explain it.

On longer reading passages try the following:

1. Get the students to read the exercise completely before they ask any questions.

2. Ask them to make two lists of troublesome words. The first should be of words they think they can figure out using context and the second of words really cannot figure out. Then

1. Check the first list with them.

Chances are that, thanks to context clues, most of their guesses will be right. Not only will this make them feel more confident, but it will also prepare them for life outside the classroom (where they will be put in situations where they cannot possibly know all the words they will encounter).

2. Check the second list with them. As above, give other students

a chance to provide a definition first. If they cannot, provide a new sentence using the same word and ask them to guess the meaning from the new context. Only as a last resort should the teacher give the students an explanation of the new word or phrase.

Explaining New Vocabulary

DO: Provide explanations in English.

DO NOT: Use the students’ native language.

DO: Use a variety of tools to explain new vocabulary. Examples include

• example sentence(s) that contain the word or phrase with lots of context-clues

• physical demonstrations (or rough sketches) of nouns • miming of verbs

• synonyms and antonyms that the students already know

DO NOT: Let students look up a word in a bilingual dictionary.

DO: Ask students to look the word up in a monolingual (English to English or Visual English) dictionary, if one is available (see BP23 for further information about dictionaries).