Skmen Explicit Vocabulary Teaching

1. Build a large sight vocabulary

Learning the 2000 most frequent words in English can be productive.
Difficult words need attention as well.
Priming/prompting glosses
Motivating, letting students choose the words they want to learn.
2. Integrate new words with the old
Lexico-semantic theoryhumans acquire words first and the, as the
number of words increases, the mind is forced to set up systems which
keep the words well-organized for retrieval. The human lexicon is a
network of associations, a web-like structure of interconnected links.
Memory theory organized information is easier to learn
3. Provide a number of encounters with a word
Richards: knowing a word = knowing how often it occurs, the company
it keeps, its appropriateness in different situations, its syntactic
behaviour, its underlying form and derivations, its word associations
and its semantic features.
4. Promote a deep level of processing
Better learning will take place when a deeper level of semantic
processing is required because the words are encoded with elaboration.
What is it? technique
Underlying meaning technique (students are given a polysemous word
in 2 contexts)
5. Facilitate imaging and concreteness
Dual coding theory of human memory the mind contains a network
of verbal and imaginal representations for words.
pictures, illustrations, diagrams, personal experiences, past experience
later recall will be easier
6. Use a variety of techniques
a. Dictionary work (highlighting, copying, paraphrasing)
b. Word unit analysis (essential affixes and roots, ask student to
analyse words)
c. Mnemonic devices aids to memory (verbal, visual or both,
songs, poetry, images, rhyme)
d. Semantic elaboration
i. Semantic feature analysis (Students are asked to complete
a diagram with pluses and minuses as a way to distinguish
meaning features)
ii. Semantic mapping (brainstorming associations which a
word has and diagramming the results)
iii. Ordering or classifying words
iv. Pictorial schemata (creating grids or diagrams)
e. Collocations and lexical phrases
f. Oral production (dialogues have the advantage of putting words
directly into productive vocabulary)
7. Encourage independent learning strategies (Help student how to
acquire vocabulary on their own. Their active participation is needed,
classmates can help each other, etc.
(vocabulary plan, self-assessment activities, notebooks)