Autonomy and Vocabulary (part two)
As I explained in an earlier post (http://teacherdevelopment.tumblr.com/post/90787284/teaching-and-learning-vocabulary) one of my little projects this year was to innovate the way students learnt vocabulary (you’ll notice I didn’t say the way I TEACH vocabulary…). Previously, I felt they were just memorizing lists in order to regurgitate them on test day. This year, I require them to learn the “whole” word, then ask them to give me a collocation, a synonym, a word family or an example sentence for each word. I’m running this in three different ways. Some classes are continuing in the old way, learning the lists as they chose and putting words into gap fill sentences in the test. Some are learning the “whole word” but still recieving a list from me, based on words from the textbook which I think they ought to know but probably don’t. Reading classes are creating their own lists which I then mark with a code (c = collocation, es = example sentence…) which they get back on test day.
The first tests are done, and the “control” group performed significantly worse than the other two. This is not a scientifically rigorous research project; I can’t say if some tests are easier or more difficult than others, and I know that classes have different workloads in other areas. I can’t be sure that students will be able to use the vocabulary accurately and flexibly in future. However, overall I think the new way is working.
Two problems have arisen. in the self-selected group, students had a tendancy to pick words which I felt were too easy, or too hard. I think it was clear to the students how they could learn more about each word than just a translation, and even why it is a good thing to do. But I have had to reiterate the importance of picking the right words in the first place. We went through a few dictionary exercises looking at the handy codes that many supply these days (S1 = spoken English first 1000 words) at the beginning of the course and in again feedback after the test.
Some thought provoking stuff over here on the theory of teaching vocabulary…. I’ve joined in the discusion with a few more ideas too http://teachingaffordances.tumblr.com/post/109604213/on-teaching-well
