Section 2 Teaching Vocabulary

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I.Thinking

【Case Reflection】

When teaching a new unit, Mr G is used to going through the vocabulary list first, and explaining all the words on the list.

The teaching model he follows is: lead in—reading—explaining—memorizing—dictating. He explains each key word systematically by introducing the relevant Chinese meanings, collocations, and examples, and then requires students to take notes. However, most of the students still cannot comprehend and use the new words correctly in the succeeding activities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Please analyse the causes.

II.Subject Matter of Teaching Vocabulary

Generally speaking, vocabulary teaching involves four areas: meaning, basic information, usage of words and techniques to teach vocabulary.?

(I) Meaning

Learning vocabulary involves two aspects of the meaning of a word: its denotative meaning and its connotative meaning. The denotative meaning of a word refers to the meaning in the dictionary, that is, its literal meaning, which is also called its referential meaning. The connotative meaning of a word refers to the cultural notions attached to a word as well as the meaning in the specific context.

For instance, the word “dog”, has a literal meaning as an animal but it has a variety of related meanings in different contexts. For example, “dog” in the sentence “Every dog has his day.” means “Everyone has times of success.”; “dog” in the sentence “It is raining cats and dogs.” means “It is raining heavily.”; “dog” in the sentence “He that lies down with a dog must rise up with flea.” means “You pick up bad habits from people you are always with.” and so on. The different connotative meanings of a word illustrate the importance of context in vocabulary.

(II) Basic information

Basic information about a word involves, among other things, its part of speech, affixes, spelling and pronunciation. This basic information also includes lexical rules, such as, the countable and uncountable forms of a noun, the transitive and intransitive forms of a verb; the syntax structures of a transitive verb, for instance, what kind of object follows it (the infinitive or gerund, a clause or a complex object) ; and the positions of adjectives, adverbs and so on. For example, basic information about the word “like” is that it has two parts of speech. One of these is a verb and the other is a preposition. It is composed of four letters l-i-k-e, and pronounced as ［laɪk］. As a verb, it is transitive and the syntax structure is “like+n /doing; like+to do”. As a preposition, it is followed by pronouns, nouns or noun phrases.

(III) Usage

The usage of a word includes its collocations, phrases, idioms, style, and register. As for the register of a word, it could be formal or informal; complimentary or derogatory; abstract or concrete. For example, the word “children” is a neutral noun, “offspring” is used for formal occasions and “kids” for informal occasions. The meaning of the words “politician” and “statesman” can be the same, when it means a person taking part in politics, but the later has a positive meaning, and the former can be derogatory. The words “clothes” and “coat” refer to clothing, but the latter is more concrete as it refers to a particular type of clothing. In general, learning basic information about a word, such as its sound, forms and meanings, mainly depends on memorizing, but the study of the usage of a word requires a lot of practice.

(IV) Strategies

The strategies for learning a word can be divided into controlling strategies, resource strategies, cognitive strategies, memory strategies and strategies for organizing activities. Controlling strategies are part of meta-cognitive strategies, which involve planning, implementing, reflecting, evaluating and adjusting, as well as the use and monitoring of resources. Resource strategies refer to the use of skills and techniques with extracurricular reading materials, audio-visual products, Internet, dictionaries, etc to help students increase their vocabulary. Cognitive strategies refer to techniques which are adopted for completing specific learning tasks, including guessing word meaning, taking notes, and using the context as a source of information. These are mainly used in the early stages of understanding a word's meaning and forms. Memory strategies refer to the strategies which help people remember words, such as remembering a word according to word formation, contexts, and classifications. These are mainly used in the consolidation stage. The strategies for organizing activities refer to using a word in a real or simulated language environment which is organized in class, some examples of which include storytelling and communicating with others through letters. These are mainly used in the open practice stage.

III.Techniques for Teaching Vocabulary

(I) Principles of teaching vocabulary

According to the National Curriculum Standards, teachers are required to achieve the following in teaching vocabulary: vocabulary learning from the perspective of using language; an emphasis on collocations; cognitive awareness of cultural connotation of common words to improve students' competence and fluent use of language; guidance for students in mastering vocabulary learning methods and remembering strategies. The curriculum advocates learning and remembering words in discourse to increase efficiency in learning vocabulary and avoiding memorizing words in an isolated and mechanical way. Therefore, the principles of teaching vocabulary are as follows:

1.Target-classification principle

Vocabulary teaching should be based on the need for competence in using language. Vocabulary can be divided, for the purpose of learning, into active vocabulary and recognition or passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is high frequency vocabulary in the students' learning environment. There is, of course, variation internationally in what is regarded as high frequency vocabulary. For example, for Chinese students the word “panda” is definitely a high frequency word. For English learners internationally, it may not be. For language learners, generally speaking, their active vocabulary is only one-third of their recognition vocabulary. In other words, if a student's recognition vocabulary is 3000 words, his/her active vocabulary is in the order of 1000 words.

2.Word-choice principle

The selection of target vocabulary should take the following points into consideration:

●The selected vocabulary must be of high frequency for the students and must be important to them.

●The selected vocabulary must be useful for activities such as games, reading, listening, conversations, etc.

●The selected vocabulary should be to a degree representative of a kind of vocabulary and possess characteristics which can be generalized and applicable to other words, thereby helping vocabulary learning.

3.Systematic principle

The systematic principle shows students the systematic and connective features of English words. This principle can enable mastery of the rules of vocabulary transformation, something which will help students remember the vocabulary through an awareness of order. The systematic principle involves:

●The relationship between form and sound: as rules of phonics dictate how letters (graphemes) individually or in groups sound, analyzing the form of the word is an effective way to deduce how it sounds.

●The relationship between form and meaning: knowledge about word formation, such as roots, affixes, and compound words, etc.

●Paradigmatic relation: relationships that exist among words, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, help us understand and master the rules of vocabulary.

4.Cultural principle

Language is the carrier of culture; and the structure of a word and its meanings and collocations are reflective of that culture. Thus, teaching vocabulary cannot remain at the level of literal meaning, but should also guide students to understand the culture of the target language as well as developing a more general and international awareness of culture. Students should also become more aware of the origins of the word meaning in order to grasp the meanings of words more completely, and thereby add greater awareness to intercultural communication. For example, the word “crane” means “a machine used for lifting and moving heavy weights”. When teaching the word, we should associate it with its original meaning, which is a large wading bird with long legs and neck. The meaning comes from the similarities between the form of the machine and the bird.

5.Presentation principle

When presenting words, we should adhere to being intuitive, situational and interesting. “Intuitive”, in this sense, means using objects to display concrete nouns; using performance to show action verbs and using expressions to show expressive words. In addition, we should develop our students' ability to infer the meaning of words when analyzing, reading or listening. Teaching vocabulary is based on teaching reading.

6.Application principle

This suggests that vocabulary teaching cannot merely stay on the level of teaching vocabulary in isolation. Teachers should create relevant conditions and contexts for students to use the new words. In this way, students can deepen their understanding and master the usage and functions of the words, and then develop their language competence.

(II) Models of Teaching Vocabulary

Vocabulary teaching can be divided into independent vocabulary teaching and skills integration teaching. Models used in teaching vocabulary include the PPT model and the TBLT model. Skills integration in teaching vocabulary may include further related teaching models of listening, speaking and reading. Here we only introduce the PPT and TBLT models.

1.PPT

PPT is a common model of presentation, practice and testing. Generally, classroom teaching is composed of three steps:

(1) Presentation: teachers enable students to understand the meaning and usage of the words through presentation.

(2) Practice: student consolidate the words they have learnt through mechanical practice.

(3) Testing: teachers find out to what extent students have learned the vocabulary through testing the sound, form and meaning of a word.

In classroom teaching, the PPT model of teaching vocabulary emphasizes the presentation and testing of words, putting relatively less importance on practice and involves learning through rote memorization. This explains to some extent why students have difficulty in memorizing and using vocabulary.

2.TBLT Model

The National Curriculum Standards advocates the concept of “task-based language teaching (TBLT) ”. Vocabulary teaching design should therefore include tasks in accordance with the principles of TBLT. In real life, however, the occasions on which vocabulary is the main purpose or main action are rare. In accordance with the principles of TBLT, learning vocabulary does not only involve understanding the meaning and function of a word; it is more importantly about using words to complete reading, listening and writing tasks. Therefore, task-based vocabulary teaching is based on traditional PPT vocabulary teaching with the addition of application-oriented activities. Task-based vocabulary teaching is composed of the following steps:

(1) Presenting: teachers enable students to understand the meaning and usage of the word by presenting it.

(2) Tasks: teachers make full use of the words in listening, reading or writing tasks.

(3) Showing their work: representatives of each group show the products of their listening, reading and writing tasks.

(4) Evaluating and practicing: teachers evaluate students' work, closely observing the use of the new words.

Combining presentation and TBLT task-based teaching improves the teaching of vocabulary. Students can understand and master the words in the process of using them and thereby increase their productive vocabulary.

(III) Memorizing vocabulary

1.How memory works

Knowing about how memory works will improve the efficiency in learning vocabulary.

(1) Memory system

Memory covers instantaneous memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory includes maintained memory and permanent memory. Learning a language is to establish a relationship between the form and meaning of newly-learned language and a relationship between the newly-learned language form and other forms in the permanent memory. Developing new knowledge in the students' long-term memory is the key to effective teaching. The information from sense and perception is processed in the short-term memory and then enters the long-term memory. The information in long-term memory needs to be activated and transferred into the short-term memory (also known as working memory, which observes, selects and reorganizes information and then stores the information in the long-term memory) , before it can be used. The capacity of short-term memory is usually limited to up to 7±2 items. The type of item is flexible and can include letters, numbers, words, syllables or phrases. The considerable flexibility of these memory unit blocks provides a lot of opportunity for teaching vocabulary.

Figure 9-1 Memory system model (according to Han Yongchang 2001: 90)

(2) Memory and context

The context of vocabulary refers to its language environment, or its relationship with the adjacent words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. The notion of context for vocabulary covers the teaching context and the natural context. Studies have shown that learning vocabulary through context is most effective. Context can provide learners with the meaning of the target words and other related information, such as time, space, value and function. Learning vocabulary includes recognizing the part of speech of the target words and identifying the collocations of the target words, and understanding the relationship between the sentence with the target words and the adjacent sentences. In this way, students can master the target words.

Text can be a very effective context for teaching vocabulary. Teachers can guide students to construct their own vocabulary maps in teaching texts; something which will help them remember the meaning, form, and usage of words.

2.Association and learning vocabulary

Psychologists have proved that vocabulary is not stored in human memory by isolation, but by association.

(1) Similar, contrastive and inclusive association

Similar, contrastive and inclusive associations refer to the significant relationships among words. Similar association includes similarity in word form and meaning, including synonyms, near synonyms, cognate words and homophonic words. Contrastive association mainly refers to the relationship between antonyms. Inclusive association refers to the relationship between part and whole, subordination and hyponymy.

(2) Topic association

Any discourse has its own topic and each topic has its own set of associated words. Different topics require different vocabulary. A word has different meanings when used with different topics. The topic determines the register and field of language use, and also the language style. Memorizing words by topic can promote the ability to express things clearly and appropriately in discourse.

(3) Horizontal and vertical association

Horizontal association means association by word collocation in co-occurrence. Co-occurrence refers to one word appearing in the same context with another one. For example, when you hear the word “food”, you associate it with bread, apple, watermelon etc. When you see the word “apple”, you associate it with “red” etc. Collocations include nouns and adjectives, verbs and prepositions and so on, in expressions such as handsome boy, pretty girl, etc.

Vertical association means association based on the word's vertical relationships, that is, words that can be substituted in the sentence with the same structure and syntactic function. Mastering vertical relationships can increase the power and flexibility of language expression. Substitution practice, which is common in teaching, is based on the word's vertical association.

3.Dictionary-assisted memory

Learners who use both guessing skills and dictionaries in reading can memorize more words in an immediate and delayed test (two weeks later) than learners who only read or only guess. Using dictionaries flexibly and correctly in vocabulary learning not only develops learners' independent acquisition of vocabulary, but also can bring benefits to students' in-class learning. Therefore, the teacher should tailor his/her instructions based on the learning profile of students at different stages. The process mainly includes the following:

(1) Choose a dictionary suitable for the learning level.

(2) Guide students to consult a dictionary at the right time: “Do not always look up the dictionary immediately when you meet a new word. You should guess the meaning first according to the context or word-formation, and then consult the dictionary to check your assumptions.”

(3) Guide students in their understanding of what useful information is: students should identify the meaning, and also obtain information on collocations, grammatical patterns, pragmatic information and other relevant information from the examples of sentences in the dictionary.

(IV) Ways of teaching vocabulary

1.Ways of presenting vocabulary

Presenting vocabulary involves presenting the word meaning, information, usage and memory strategies. Different learning content requires different presentation skills. Generally speaking, it's better to combine vocabulary with contexts. Before listening or reading, words can be presented through reference to the topic and contextual clues. After listening or reading, vocabulary can be presented with the help of the discourse through asking questions, filling in blanks etc.

(1) Presenting meanings

Common techniques are: physical objects, movement/actions, gestures, pictures, definitions, word formation, contexts, tables, diagrams, translations, questions-and-answers, semantic maps, information gaps, etc.

(2) Presenting structures and usage

Common techniques are: examples, explanations, synonyms, antonyms, contexts, questions-and-answers, structural maps, etc.

(3) Presenting strategies

Strategies are usually presented through introductions or demonstrations on how to use them to help students develop autonomous vocabulary memory strategies. Common strategies include classification, reasoning, analogy, guessing, note-taking, consulting dictionaries and so on.

2.Ways of consolidating vocabulary

Consolidation is the key step to learning vocabulary. Students cannot truly grasp the vocabulary if they lack training on how to use it. Training will need to take into account the features of the target language and the needs or characteristics of the learners. The following vocabulary consolidation activities may be helpful to a teacher:

●Word-story: students tell or make up stories or introduce their experience with the words they learned.

●Word-travelling: teachers can make students imagine they are travelling somewhere and passing through many places, and then ask them to link the words with these places.

●Word-reason: teachers ask students to select their most or least favorite words from the words they have learned, and then explain why they chose them.

●Using pictures: teachers choose pictures which enable students to use words which they have learned and then ask students to describe the pictures in speaking and writing.

●Using word-sentence-discourse: vocabulary is introduced in sentences and discourse to help students understand and master the meanings and usages of target vocabulary.

3.Ways of testing

Generally, the following ways of testing vocabulary can be used in class: completing sentences, clozes, vertical and horizontal word puzzles and word bingo. Teachers can additionally monitor vocabulary use when students are doing fun games and activities.