PRESENTING VOCABULARY
Richard Frost, British Council
Introduction
With hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, teaching vocabulary can seem like a very daunting prospect. Remember though that the average native speaker uses around only five thousand words in everyday speech. Moreover, your students won't need to produce every word they learn, some they will just need to recognize. Selecting what to teach, based on frequency and usefulness to the needs of your particular students is therefore essential. Once you have chosen what to teach, the next important steps are to consider what students need to know about the items, and how you can teach them.
What a student may need to know about an item
- What it means
- The form
- How it is pronounced
- How it is spelt
- If it follows any unpredictable grammatical patterns
- The connotations that the item may have
- The situations when the word is or is not used
- How the word is related to others
- Collocation or the way that words occur together
- What the affixes (the prefixes and suffixes) may indicate about the meaning
Which of these areas you choose to highlight will depend on the item you are teaching and the level of your students. Now it's time to think about how we can get the meaning across.
Ways to present vocabulary
There are lots of ways of getting across the meaning of a lexical item.
- Illustration
- Mime
- Synonyms/Antonyms/Gradable items
- Definition
- Translation
- Context
Again which you choose will depend on the item you are presenting. Some are more suitable for particular words. Often a combination of techniques can be both helpful and memorable.
Alternative ways of teaching vocabulary
- Give your students a few items of vocabulary and tell them to find the meaning, pronunciation and write an example sentence with the word in. They can then teach each other in groups.
- Prepare worksheets and ask your students to match words to definitions.
- Ask students to classify a group of words into different categories. For example, a list of transport words into air/sea/land.
- Ask students to find new vocabulary from reading homework and teach the other students in the class.
Other things to consider
- Review the vocabulary you teach through a game or activity and encourage your students to do the same at home.
- Encourage autonomy in your learners. Tell them to read, watch films, listen to songs etc and note the useful words.
- Have a section of your board for vocabulary items that come up as you are teaching. Use different colours for the word / the phonemics / the prepositions / the part of speech.
- It is a good idea to teach/learn words with associated meanings together.
- Encourage your students to purchase a good dictionary and use class time to highlight the benefits of one.
- Teach your students the grammatical names for the parts of speech and the phonemic script.
- Always keep a good dictionary by your side in case a student asks about a word you don't know.
- If you don't and have never heard of the word, tell the student you will check and get back to them. Do get back to them.
- Give extra examples sentences to the students if they are unsure and encourage them to write the word in an example sentence (maybe for homework).
Source: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/presenting-vocabulary. Accessed on: September 21, 2020.
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