Guidelines for teaching vocabulary

Teaching vocabulary is one of the less effective ways for learners to acquire new vocabulary because only small information about this word can be given at a time, when a cumulative process meeting with the word over and over, is necessary. These meetings are easier reached by studying deliberately, through meaning-focused input and output, and fluency development activities. The positive part of teaching vocabulary is that it is a fast solution for a particular moment during a listening, reading, speaking or writing activity. There are several ways of giving this quick attention to a word such us a direct translation, giving a well known opposite, showing a picture, etc.

The teacher, however, needs to decide if the “new” word is important enough to dedicate more teaching time, like for example, when it is a high frequency word. When this happens, the teacher needs to know that the attention given to this particular word need to be repeated again and again in a not very long period of time so the learners don’t forget what they learnt.

At teaching vocabulary, it is very important to know what needs to be taught about this word: the learning burden. The learning burden of a word can be its meaning, when the word to learn has different meanings in first language and second language; its form, when it is spoken or written differently and its affixes are different too; or its use (grammatical functions, collocation...).

Regarding the kind of exercises available to teach-learn vocabulary, we can find two different kinds:

- Exercises that require very little or no preparation such us using the dictionary, guessing from context, spelling dictation, suggest collocation, etc.

- Exercises that require a dedicated preparation. This are the typical exercises found in a course book which treat different vocabulary areas per units and make learners do rewording, matching, classifying...

By Xavier Claparols (La Salle-Figueres)