teaching and learning vocabulary
I teach classes mostly focusing on reading and oral communication, sometimes to english majors and sometimes not. Last year was my first full time at my university, and most of the year was spent figuring out how things work. It went fairly smoothly, and I was able to try out a few new things in the second semester. However, I am very excited about this year as I now have a better understanding of what the students can do, what worked, what didn’t, and where I want to go.
One of the things I want to work on is vocabulary. Last year, I tended to pick lists from the textbooks we were studying and test students every other week or so, for a few points towards their final grades. This was unsatisfactory for several reasons. First of all, it’s a bit arbitrary. Are the words really useful to the learners? If not, not only is the exercise somewhat pointless, but it will be harder to learn a bunch of random words anyway…it also adds to the feeling that English is a compulsory memory task, rather than a living skill connected to the outside world. I want the students to learn the words, too, not just remember aspects of them for a test and then forget them.
So, how to make the vocabulary meaningful? I read a very interesting book last year, a collection of papers on the good language learner. Jo Moir & Paul Nationwrote an excellent chapter on their vocabulary project, working with learners choosing their own lists of vocabulary and taking tailored, individualised tests. It’s a bit tougher on the teacher, but allows the learner to pick what is relevant to them. In addition, the student has to learn all aspects of the word (meaning, form, collocation etc). Schmitt and Schmitt describe the mechanics of such a project in this article;
Schmitt, N. and Schmitt, D. (1995). Vocabulary notebooks: Theoretical underpinnings and practical suggestions. English Language Teaching Journal, 49, 2: 133-143.
Which you can read here (about halfway down the page)
I’m going to start off with my reading classes in the first semester. Firstly, because they are a bit smaller - English majors only 20 students. And secondly because they read very widely (extensive reading) and select most of their own materials. They already have different vocabulary needs, and I have already had them teach one another new vocabulary, so it seems a natural progression.
As Moir and Nation found, students can be reluctant to take responsibility - ironically, autonomy often has to be forced on language learners. Many of the learners chose words they saw as useless (even though they chose them themselves!), and still just memorized them for the test.
But let’s see how it goes ; )
Any suggestions or experiences with this kind of thing?
