5.Teaching Vocabulary


  • AIMS:
(1) to empower Students.
(2) to make Ss distinguish between passive/receptive & active/ productive vocabulary.
(3) to encourage Ss read widely outside the classroom.
(4) to encourage Ss to invest in a good monolingual dictionary.

  • KNOWLEDGE ABOUT VOCABULARY
  1. Definition: The potentially infinite number of words in a language.
    1. word / morpheme / derivatives
  2. Classification: (A) active/use; (B) passive/recognition
    1. Core vocabulary: 2,000-3,000 words > 80% of a text.

  • KNOWLEDGE OF ELT
  1. Students’ needs.
    1. Comprehension: understand / store / recognise.
    2. Production: retrieve / use them in contextually adequate situations
  2. To deal with a cline / continuum of approaches:
  3. Staging and grading learning and teaching.
    1. Spoken form first.
    2. Introduce new words in context.
    3. Revise.
  4. Ways of teaching meaning
    1. ostensive (realia; visual representation; demonstration; mime.)
    2. translation
    3. explanation (definition; examples; semantic fields.)

  1. Approaches of teaching vocabulary
    1. system-oriented
    2. topic-oriented
    3. strategic-oriented / coping strategies.
      1. using contextual clues (formal and semantic)
      2. using knowledge of related forms
      3. analysing internal structure
      4. using knowledge of cognates
    4. discourse-oriented

  1. Ways of facilitating learning
    1. review: interaction with visual aids; physical response to commands; games; vocabulary notebooks; group activities.
    2. review: and extension: reading; oral composition; writing exercises (e g. dictionary use; affixes; collocation; style/register awareness; scales/semantic clusters)

  1. Criteria for selecting what words to teach:
    1. frequency
    2. range: # of contexts
    3. familiarity
7.4 usefulness: Students’ needs.


  • CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: LEXIS

The following are a number of areas you could consider when observing a class.
They will not all be relevant.
Lesson objectives

1. How far does the lesson appear to have specific lexical objectives?
2. If it does have lexical objectives, how would you express them?

Reading/Listening Activities

1. How does the teacher prepare for anticipated lexical difficulties?

2. During ‘while’ and ‘post’ listening/reading phases, what lexical issues arise and how does the teacher handle these ?

3. What techniques does the teacher use to explain/clarify/extend lexis (e.g. explanation, definition, synonym, paraphrase, example, etc.)?

Students’ role

1. What instances are there of students’ misuse of lexis?

2. How are these handled by the teacher/students?

3. What systems of storing lexis do students appear to be operating? Do these systems appear to be teacher guided/student initiated?

4. Is there evidence of use of reference materials (dictionaries, etc.)? What is used? How is it used? Does this use seem to be teacher guided/student initiated?


Post-lesson reflection

Was the approach to lexis different from the way you normally deal with it with your own learners? If so, what were the differences?

Reflection as Exercise:

Try to identify learners’ problems in coping with vocabulary in text.

2. Review the arguments for and against teaching vocabulary in/with: Semantic sets/bilingual word lists, context/sense relations and collocations.
3. Look at Lesson X. Textbook X/Y/Z. Comment on the way vocabulary is taught. Refer to Teacher’s Book and see how it helps.
Choose the most important words, which you would focus on as active vocabulary and decide how you would teach them.
4. Discuss the guiding principles any teacher and teaching materials should submit to when dealing with vocabulary work.
  • Organization of vocabulary around topics
  • Distinction between vocabulary for ‘productive’ use and vocabulary for ‘receptive’ recognition.
  • Focus on form/spelling, meaning and pronunciation
  • Guessing/inferring meaning from context
  • Use of tasks of graded difficulty (e.g. matching words with their definitions, Word charts, etc.)
  • Systemic attention to word formation
  • Revision and checking activities
  • Encouragement of students’ self study skills
  • Distinction between formal and informal language registers.
  1. Formulate the basic criteria for an efficient policy concerning vocabulary learning and teaching.
  2. Guess at what a multi-layered work on new vocabulary might mean and find examples from the textbooks in use.
  3. Design the vocabulary work session of a current language class on a topic you select from any language course book. Age, level, number of students to be mentioned.
  4. Approve or disapprove of the idea that practice of vocabulary for active use, at the lower level, is more integrated in the communicative activities meant to develop skills.
  5. Comment upon the decision of textbook writers to include word lists at the back of Student’s Books 5-8 (Pathway to English Series)
  6. Make a list of the most widely used lexical activities for testing students’ verbal power.