9.

TEACHING VOCABULARY
For many people, the question What is vocabulary? has a simple answer: Words. But
which words? Are am, is, was, had and of vocabulary items, or are they something else?
On the other hand, we may wish to say that such words as am, is, was, has, etc. are part
of our vocabulary in a general sense. What is a word? Is put up with (tolerate) one word or
three? It has three parts, certainly, but only one meaning. Beat, on the other hand, has several
meanings; is it one word or more?
One way of avoiding this dilemma is to refer to items of vocabulary with a single meaning
as lexical items, whether they consist of one word or more. The term word can then be
reserved for a group of letters preceded and followed by a space.
Whatever linguistic distinctions we choose to make, however, it is clear that our pupils
need to know both lexical items and grammar words in order to communicate in English.
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

explain what vocabulary is and what role it plays in the system of a language and
its culture

explain how vocabulary itself is systematic

set up, apply and monitor a variety of interactive classroom tasks for developing
vocabulary

offer a theoretical justification for each of these tasks

explain and illustrate using a dictionary and the phonemic symbols

integrate vocabulary activities with the development of one or more of the four
skills

have reconsidered and improved your own repertoire of skills in the area of
language teaching

assess the learning outcomes of classroom vocabulary activities

have some ideas for developing pupil autonomy in vocabulary learning.

Knowing a Word
To know a word is to know much more than just its stress, its spelling and its most
commonly accepted meaning. It is to know its grammar: is it a verb? an adjective? a noun? Is it
followed by a gerund, an infinitive or a clause? What is its range of meaning (e.g. head of a
school, head of a bed, etc.)? its diversity of meaning (e.g. light weight; light literature, light food;
light: illuminate; lamp, etc.)? its collocations (e.g. keen on; interested in; to gamble on; raw
materials; heavy traffic), and its connotations (e.g. dustman vs. refuse collector; chairman vs.
chairperson; trendy vs. fashionable)?
Harmer (1991: 158) suggests that, in order to know a vocabulary item, we must be aware
of its:
meaning: many words have more than one meaning. For the noun face, for
instance, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English lists fourteen meanings.
use: a word may carry information about register or style. Both Good morning and
Hi are greetings, but they indicate different levels of formality. A words meaning can also be
extended in metaphor and idiom*.
formation: words change shape according to the affixes attached to them, and also
according to their function, e.g.: lie, liar, lying, lied.
grammar: nouns may be countable, uncountable; adjectives and adverbs may have
degrees of comparison, etc.
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In addition to all this, as Penny Ur suggests (1996: 61, ff) we need to know what a lexical
item sounds like and what it looks like: that is its pronunciation and spelling. We also need to be
aware of its denotation*, connotation* and collocations*.
Denotation and connotation both reflect the meaning of an item. However, while
denotation refers to the usual dictionary definition, connotation is concerned with socio-cultural
factors, with the feelings associated with the item. For example, thin and slim have roughly
the same denotative meaning: they are the opposite of fat. But when used to describe people,
slim has favourable connotations while thin is unflattering. Learners need to appreciate this
kind of differences.
To conclude, to know a word is to be able to use it accurately in all its possible usages.
Many of us advise their pupils to write new words in special vocabulary notebooks.
However, these are of little practical use unless some indication is given of how the new lexical
item is used. Words do not have meaning in isolation. If we see the single word beat, for
instance, we have no way of knowing whether it is a noun meaning rhythm, an area for which
a policeman is responsible, or a verb meaning defeat. Similarly, round may refer to the shape
of something, but it is also another name for a bullet, a type of song and a number of drinks.
Words take their meaning from the context in which they occur. It therefore makes sense to
teach new vocabulary as part of a sentence or utterance that makes the meaning clear.
Coming to know a word is to absorb all the elements of its usage over time. In other
words, during the first few encounters with a word the pupils will acquire a rough idea of what it
means and the way it is used. This rough idea will become more accurate with each new
encounter of the word in context.
Certain words tend to go together. We make coffee, we make the beds, but we do
the dishes and the shopping We speak of sweet and sour taste, but the opposite of sweet
wine is dry wine. We say that wine collocates with dry, that coffee collocates with make
and that the shopping collocates with do. Pupils therefore need to learn not only new items of
vocabulary but also the words and phrases that collocate with these items. The collocations of a
word are the combinations that it regularly makes with other words.
There is a fundamental difference between the native speakers process and the foreign
language learners process of learning vocabulary. This is to do with the semantic networks that
each of them carries in his/her mind. To the native speaker, a new word is simply a new way of
referring to something in an already very familiar cultural setting. To our pupil, a new word in
English is a way of referring to something in an unfamiliar cultural setting. So the pupil tends to
incorporate the meaning of the new word into his/her own familiar cultural and semantic system.
The meanings, both semantic and cultural, of the forms of a new language are most
readily and precisely learned in the milieu where the language is spoken. Failing this, we need
to surround the learner in the classroom with as much authentic speech, writing, aspects of the
cultural environment, and contacts with native speakers as possible. Why? Because a language
can only be truly and thoroughly absorbed in conjunction with its culture.
To what extent can you aim at accuracy in the use of vocabulary
in the classroom?

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The Importance of Vocabulary: Comprehension and Production

How important is vocabulary to the pupil? Scrivener (1994: 73) claims that, as a means
of communication, vocabulary is much more powerful than grammar. Without a substantial stock
of vocabulary items the pupil will be unable to communicate much at all.
Here are some points about teaching vocabulary, on which theoreticians are in general
agreement:
1. Like grammar, vocabulary can provide an effective vehicle for conveying meaning.
2. Vocabulary for recognition purposes (i.e. passive vocabulary) is acquired in
significantly greater quantities than vocabulary for productive purposes (i.e. active vocabulary).
This is true for native speakers and foreign language learners alike.
3. The vocabulary of a language reflects the semantic systems of conceptual meaning
that have developed within the culture and history of that language. The semantic systems of
English and Romanian will therefore be different. The amount of difference between two
languages depends on the degree of divergence between the two cultures. For instance, the
semantic systems of Chinese and English will differ far more from those of English and
Romanian.
4. Vocabulary in the mother tongue is acquired unconsciously and via active interaction
with adults and other children.
5. Vocabulary is stored in the memory in different ways by different learners. Learners
own strategies for vocabulary acquisition should be encouraged and developed so that they can
continue to acquire vocabulary independently of the teacher and the classroom.
Even native speakers can rarely say they know the meaning of a word, because there is
often a new use of a new collocation to learn that they haven't encountered before.

Active and Passive Vocabulary

Whatever methods are employed, we need to think in terms of active and passive
vocabulary. Active vocabulary is made up of those words the pupils will be expected to use, to
produce, and passive vocabulary of those words they will merely have to
recognise/comprehend when they hear them or see them in print. The distinction between
active and passive vocabulary assigns priority to comprehension. Comprehension should
precede production. The object of a vocabulary lesson is to enhance the different strategies for
comprehension and production. Thus, when considering active and passive vocabulary, three
principles are important to bear in mind:
(i)
you need to teach any lexical item either for active production or passive
recognition.
(ii)
the memory processes involved in assimilating passive vocabulary are less
demanding than those involved in assimilating active vocabulary.
(iii)
pupils can easily learn passive vocabulary independently of both you and the
classroom.
As active vocabulary, you may look for high frequency words, and words with wide
coverage. Such a high-frequency and wide-coverage word is for example get. English nativespeaker primary school children are discouraged by their teachers from using get because
they tend to use it too frequently: I got up, I got washed, I got dressed, I got ready, I got to the
bus stop, I got punished, I got ill, etc. This simply shows what a very useful word get is,
particularly for pupils in the early stages or where ability to communicate is seen as a highly
motivating factor.
However, as Harmer warns, the distinction between active and passive vocabulary is not
always clear cut, particularly at intermediate levels and above. A word that has been active
through constant use may slip back into the passive store if it is not used anymore. On the other
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hand, a word that pupils may have in their passive store may become active of the situation or
context provokes its use (Harmer, 1991: 159).
Consequently, you need to spend more time on active vocabulary, with examples and
questions, but to present passive vocabulary briefly and allow pupils to guess the meaning from
context where possible. Not all pupils will start guessing automatically, so you need to invest a
little time in training this skill.
Vocabulary is only learnt if it is understood. Nothing can be learnt unless it can be
incorporated into an existing mental picture of the way things are, a sort of framework of
perceptions and associations. Pupils therefore need careful guidance about the meaning of
lexical items, and about their grammatical use, before they can place them in their internal
networks of meaning.
A problem, however, may be one of interference from concepts in Romanian and English
that seem to have associations with the target item. This is unavoidable, and has to be
countered with clear examples of how the English word is used (or not used) in that context and
in comparison with other words.
The vocabulary that pupils encounter will only be assimilated if it has relevance to the
messages they want to understand or to the messages they want to convey. Only those lexical
items are learnt that are perceived as having personal significance for the pupil. Personal
significance can take many forms, e.g. I need it to understand this text, I need it to
understand a letter from my English pen-friend, I need it to understand the instructions in my
grammar book, etc.
In your own words, try to formulate the classroom implications of
these views of vocabulary. Think of what is taught versus what is
learnt, of the pupils motivation for learning vocabulary, and of the
strategies you may want to use in teaching vocabulary.

Classroom Vocabulary
It is not always easy to decide which lexical items should be part of the active
vocabulary. However, it is fairly clear that classroom vocabulary is a high priority. By this we do
not simply mean the names of classroom furniture, although it is obviously important for the
pupils to know and use desk, board, wall, picture, book, chalk as well as write, read,
draw. Classroom vocabulary includes the key words we use in instructions to the learners.
Here are some of the more common ones:
true/false
get into pairs/groups
tick/cross
grid/chart/map/form
regular/irregular
fill in/cross out/leave out/underline
gaps/blanks
top/middle/bottom
offer/accept/refuse/invite
instructions/description/suggestion/opinion

How Much Vocabulary?

How much new vocabulary do you think is appropriate for a
one-hour lesson in a lower secondary school? Is this more, less, or
the same as the textbook you are using expects? Does this apply to
all vocabulary, or are some items more difficult to learn than others?
If so, which and why?
Opinions vary on the amount of new vocabulary that pupils can be expected to absorb.
Suggestions range from five to twelve new items in a one-hour lesson. Many teachers might
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feel that a number between five and eight would be more reasonable. A great deal depends on
the aims of the lesson, the pupils level of ability, motivation, aptitude and so on. Nor can we
expect that the pupils will remember all the vocabulary they are taught. In fact, they will not
remember very much of it at all unless the items are recycled* in later lessons.

Pedagogic Considerations
Your decisions about what to teach will be affected by considerations referring to the
pupils, the resources and the linguistic components, but also by pedagogic ones, that is by the
factors that affect how you teach, and which choice you will make. These considerations are:

teachability/learnability
You will teach according to the level of your pupils, and to how easy is an item to put
over. Even at low levels, you can teach:
i) international words (e.g. taxi, television, hotel, cinema, weekend)
ii) cognates, that is words which are similar in both form and meaning in the two
languages (e.g. the names of many school subjects like chemistry, geography, biology,
mathematics, etc., or verbs such as obtain, admire, insult, form, etc.). These are obviously very
easy to learn.
Can you think of any other words of Romanian which are similar
to English words in both form and meaning (cognates), and of any
others which are false friends (similar in form, but not in meaning)?

extendability
Some words allow the use of prefixes and suffixes; others enter various combinations or
include the meaning of other words (their hyponyms):
i) word families: photo graph, -graphy, -graphic, -grapher.
ii) combinable items: hand bag, home work, guitar string
iii) cover words: (at early levels): seat for chair / stool/ sofa / bench, nice with people /
weather / events, house for house / flat / home / building, etc.

concrete vs. abstract

Those words that show concrete entities will be taught before the more subtle or abstract
words, e.g.:
i) beautiful before responsible
ii) cant stand before not keen on
iii) Could you? / Yes of course before Would you mind ing? / Not at all.

amount (learning load)

A rough guide according to level, mood and motivation of the learners is:

maximum 6 for beginners

maximum 9 - 10 for intermediate
for advanced students, it is up to the students themselves.

Difficulty of concept and pronunciation, etc. will also be factors to consider.

active production/passive recognition

This is a crucial decision which affects your entire approach. Are the pupils to learn it in
order to recognise it or in order to produce it?
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if only to recognise, concentrate on pronunciation, spelling, context and

meaning;
if to produce, concentrate on pronunciation, spelling, context, meaning and
practice.

Writers distinguish between the acquisition and the learning of vocabulary. Vocabulary
can be acquired or picked up, through exposure to authentic samples of the target language. It
may also be consciously learned, and this process may depend to a great extent on your
presentation and learner techniques. Memory is aided if the pupil is encouraged to make as
many cues or memory triggers as possible when committing the vocabulary item to memory.
These cues can take the form of:

a visual reminder such as a picture or diagram (the use of colour can be very
effective)

the sound and rhythm of the word (this is why repetition practice is helpful)

the inclusion of the item in a sentence which is bizarre and/or personal

a translation of the item in Romanian.

Most importantly, the association of one item with another item aids memory.
Pupils will remember best those lexical items in which they have an interest, or which
they can associate with other words, objects, colours and so on.
One obvious way of adding to ones vocabulary store is to search for words in English
which are similar to ones in Romanian. Pupils should be encouraged to do this, but they should
also be warned to watch out for false friends, that is, words which look or sound similar but
which have rather different meanings and uses. For example, the English library does not
mean the same as the Romanian word librrie.
Match the following false friends with their Romanian
equivalents. A few Romanian words have no English equivalents in
this list!
1. accommodation
2. argument
3. (to) assist
4. commodity
5. conservatory
6. industry
7. interest
8. (to) resume
9. spectacles
10. sympathy
11. vacancy

a. comptimire
b. gol, vid; loc liber; rgaz
c. a relua, a rencepe
d. spectacol
e. ochelari
f. vacan
g. marf, produs
h. cazare, gzduire
i. hrnicie
j. comoditate
k. a ajuta
l. discuie, controvers
m. dobnd
n. ser

Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary

The current concern in teaching vocabulary is to offer a cocktail of techniques. Several
writers suggest various mnemonics* to aid the memory process. Others advocate grouping
lexical items into various categories, associating items with pictures, colours or events, and so
on.
Various textbooks provide activity questions encouraging pupils to look at the way words
share affixes, how they are arranged in lexical sets or word families, and in phrases. Pupils play
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with words to increase their language awareness by experimenting with homophones,

homonyms, idiom and imagery, collocations and cultural cues.
Other textbooks offer activities requiring pupils to predict which words they are likely to
find in a specified text, or to draw their own pictures as frames for learning and remembering
new words. Yet others use pictures to stimulate vocabulary acquisition. (One such activity
requires the pupils, in groups, to study six pictures of single items and create a narrative which
will include all these items. The stories are then read out to other groups who have to guess
what the six pictures were).
Most textbook writers try in one way or another to make vocabulary learning an
interactive process, using pair, group or teamwork, competitions and games.
Recent approaches to teaching vocabulary do not totally reject rote learning*. This is
generally accepted as a valid method of dealing with new lexical items. But it is only one
method, and like any other method, not suitable for all learners at all times.
Penny Ur (1996: 65 67) shows that lexical items are learnt more easily if:

they have clear, easily comprehensible meanings;

they can be linked to other items though meaning or sound association;

they are taught and reviewed for brief periods in several different parts of the
lesson;

they have personal or emotive significance.

There are four approaches to the teaching of vocabulary:
1. In lexical groups / sets / fields;
2. Pre-teaching:
before presentation of structure
before elicited dialogues or narratives
before reading or listening activities
before discussion, games or role-play activities;
3. As it crops up (e.g. from a listening or reading text, or during a discussion);
4. Through students own mini-research (from dictionaries, texts, projects, etc.)

Presenting New Vocabulary

How do you present new vocabulary items in class? Various techniques are available.
These include:

definition: a simplified version of a dictionary entry

illustration: a picture or a blackboard drawing

context: using the item in a sentence

mime: acting the meaning

synonym: using a word or phrase with roughly the same meaning

antonym: using a word or phrase with roughly the opposite meaning

superordinate: using a more general category, of which the new item is a

member / hyponym (e.g. chair, table, stool, wardrobe, sofa are all hyponyms of the
category furniture. Furniture is the superordinate term.

translation: often the simplest way to present a new item is to translate it.
Which techniques you choose will depend upon circumstances and type of item being
introduced. Concrete items are often best introduced through pictures or translation. Asking the
pupils to suggest synonyms and antonyms is a way of extending vocabulary by considering
various shades of meaning and of expanding the range of the pupils command of English.

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Teaching Vocabulary Using Sets

Think of three different ways in which new words can be
grouped for learning purposes, and write your suggestions in the
space provided below. Look for more ideas as you are reading this
section.

The view that vocabulary is in some way systematic has been partly responsible for the
idea of teaching vocabulary in lexical sets where this is possible and appropriate. Hence, you
may use sets such as:
types of transport
English money
rooms in a house
professions
services
weather, etc.
or sets such as:
degrees of fear (e.g. anxious / petrified)
ways of walking (e.g. stagger, tiptoe)
degrees of raining (e.g. drizzling / bucketing down)
opposites in food description (e.g. disgusting vs. delicious; savoury vs. sweet), etc.
personal characteristics concerning people (e.g. sociable)
There are, however, areas of vocabulary where it might not be appropriate to teach in
sets:
1.
where a word has multiple meaning, you would want not to teach all the
meanings of that word at the same time.
2.
collocations are by nature one-offs.
3.
connotation: for instance, youths is used to mean something different from young
people; and slim is used to mean something different from skinny. The connotational meaning of
words can be taught in contrasting pairs, but other than this they are not systematically
teachable.
4.
idioms: these are more likely to occur in informal language than in formal
language. Idiomatic language includes such commonly used phrases as as well (e.g. He took
out an insurance policy as well) and such uncommonly used phrases as between the devil and
the deep blue sea. Clearly, we cannot teach idiomatic language systematically; what we must
do, however, is systematically select what aspects of it are worth teaching to our pupils.
To summarise, the knowledge that lexis does (to a certain extent) have a system should
help you to make decisions about how to select and organise vocabulary for teaching purposes.
The basic principle of lexical meaning is that: the meaning of a word is in its use and in
its relationship with other words, so, when teaching vocabulary, contexts are better than
definitions and network diagrams of lexical relationships are useful too.

Pupils Own Vocabulary Extension

As the emphasis on learner independence deepens, you may also think of the amount of
time and number of activities that you spend on learner training in class, aimed at helping your
pupils to develop autonomy in vocabulary learning. The skills concerned, once acquired, will
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enable your pupils to become independent learners of vocabulary outside the classroom. There
are a number of ways of fostering learner independence in the area of vocabulary:

Brainstorming*
A useful technique is getting pupils into the habit of brainstorming around a topic area
that is being focussed on. This helps them to reactivate known vocabulary and also warm them
for a particular topic. In class, for example, ask your pupils in groups to note down every item of
vocabulary that relates to, say, bedroom. This can work particularly well at later levels and can
be made competitive.
The visual element in brainstorming can reinforce learning. The pupils may be given a
key word and asked to put it in a box in the middle of a piece of paper. They then think of all the
associated words they can. Each of these branches off on a line drawn out from the key word
and is written in its own circle. Each word may itself become a minor key word with branches
going off it.
If you give them the word bedroom, for example, ask them to think first of the large
items in a bedroom, then of the small ones, and finally of the things that surround them.
If you were asked to draw the network of associated words for
bedroom, what words would you contribute, and how would you
organize them? Draw your meaning network for the word bedroom.

The point of the exercise is that the pupils are creating their own word associations, and
the information collected is visually striking and thus they likely to be remembered more easily.
Out of class, they may mentally run through or note down any words they can think of
related to, for example, the topic of a film they are about to watch on TV, or of an article they are
going to read for homework. It can be done in preparation for a task (e.g. writing about a
particular topic; explaining areas of interest or hobbies, etc.)

Pupils find words in the text which mean

This activity can be done in pairs or groups. Deducing meaning from context is a
skill which needs to be practised in class, with emphasis on the contextual clues that can help
your pupils deduce meaning (e.g. part of speech, synonyms elsewhere in the text and so on).
This is a fairly standard activity in many textbooks nowadays.

Dictionary work
Pupils must be trained in this and there are a number of exercises in many textbooks.
Once the pupils have acquired this skill, dictionaries can lend themselves to a number of useful
classroom activities:
Can you remember any classroom activity that involves the use
of the dictionary?

A lot has been said about the use of dictionaries. While all EFL teachers will agree that a
dictionary, properly used, is a valuable tool for the language learner, it is also recognised that
there are potential problems. Sensible use of a good dictionary can lead to learner autonomy;
that is, the learner will be able to continue learning outside the classroom. Over-reliance on the
dictionary, on the other hand, can slow down the learning process. The meanings of many
words can be guessed form the context in which they occur, and if pupils automatically reach for
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the dictionary every time they come across a new word, they are denying themselves genuine
learning opportunities.
Dictionary work is helped if pupils are familiar with the names of the parts of speech and
their dictionary abbreviations, as this allows them to become immediately familiar with the new
words function in an utterance.
The dictionaries themselves vary in their value to the learner. At one end of the scale are
the small bilingual dictionaries which provide one-word Romanian equivalents. As the meaning
of a word tends to change according to the context in which it is used, the chances of getting
the wrong meaning with this type of dictionary are fairly high. At the other end of the scale, we
find dictionaries where the definition of the word is written in language too complex for the pupil
to understand. It is probably better to choose a dictionary specially produced for pupils, which
recognises this problem and tries to simplify its definitions. In this type of dictionary, definitions
are not reduced to note form: they usually consist of a full sentence showing how a lexical item
is used in a particular situation or for a particular purpose.
By facilitating the pupils use of dictionaries and other skills concerning vocabulary, you
are helping them become more independent and more in control of their own learning outside
the classroom.

Use of the phonetic script

Another element that most EnglishEnglish and English Romanian dictionaries offer is
the phonetic script / transcription of the words. You may think that asking your pupils to learn
the International Phonetics Association (IPA) symbols is asking too much. As with any aspect of
language teaching, there are arguments both for and against this point of view. Here are the
reasons why some attempt to introduce the IPA system should be made:

If knowing a word means, among other things, knowing how to pronounce it

acceptably, then the ability to transcribe it in phonemic symbols is obviously a valuable
teaching/learning aid. The phonemic transcription avoids the perils of English spelling, as here
one symbol equals one sound.

Although a symbol chart looks rather frightening at first glance, it is really quite
easy to learn the phonemes of English. There are only 44 of them, and half of these are the
normal English letters, with others very close.

Knowledge of the IPA symbols is extremely helpful to dictionary work. Problems

with awkward words such as cough and bough disappear if the learner can discover in a
dictionary that cough is pronounced /kf/ and bough /bau/.
It is worth mentioning that, if the phonetic script is taught imaginatively, pupils enjoy it.
Many see it as a secret code they can use for their messages and become quite proud of their
skill once they have learnt the symbols.
An ability with the phonetic script helps to give you and your pupils a knowledge of what
happens generally to sounds as they move from their decontextualised form to their
contextualised form. This knowledge will help you to appreciate the difficulties your pupils face,
especially in listening. This will benefit the preparation of your lessons and the anticipation of the
difficulties that your pupils are up against. Teaching and practising the phonetic script with pupils
will also facilitate knowledge of the most obvious phonetic differences between Romanian and
English, which will help you in anticipating and dealing with errors (both reception errors and
production errors) in the classroom.

Awareness of the role played by prefixes and suffixes

This can help your pupils to expand their vocabulary store. You can ask pupils, in groups,
to think of as many words as they can which end in ship but have nothing to do with water, and
then write sentences showing how each word is used. A group scores one point for each word
none of the other groups has thought of, plus one point for each word used correctly in a
sentence.
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10

 Use of games
Puzzles always entertain, and word puzzles develop vocabulary at the same time. Tell
your pupils you are going to get from sick to well by changing one letter at a time so that
each new formation is an acceptable word. Demonstrate as follows: sick silk sill sell
well. Then ask the pupils in pairs to get from cold to warm in the same way (cold
cord word worm warm).
Ask your pupils to find hidden words in a text. For example, ask them to find six capital
cities in the following text. The answers are highlighted here for easy reference, but would not
be in the pupils text, of course.
I needed to call on Donald last week and found the trip a risky one. I went on my horse
and had a mad ride along the street charging at hens and cocks, boys and girls. Go slowly, I
shouted. Was I brave? A hero? Me? Never.
Young learners also enjoy taking words to pieces and making new words out of the
letters. This is an activity which is simple to prepare and mark, can be made into a competition,
and provides an opportunity for them to experiment and be creative with language in group
interaction. The word tempo, for example, yields met, pot, toe, mop, mope mote,
me, pet, top and poem.
These are just a few ideas for developing vocabulary. Many others can be found in
methodology books and textbooks. What you need to do is to develop a clear programme for
the systematic development of your pupils vocabulary, as vocabulary acquisition is much too
important to be left to chance.
Bear in mind, however, that vocabulary should be taught:
regularly
in balance with all the other aims of your syllabus
whenever the pupils express a desire to know.
It is your job to establish priorities and make choices.

Learning Vocabulary from Context

Vocabulary teaching cannot account for all the words our pupils actually learn. Some
authors hypothesized that successful learners use a guessing approach: as readers or listeners,
they look for clues in the text and build a mental representation of what they think the text says.
This has been called the top-down model of reading and listening. In contrast to this approach,
the more traditional approaches view reading and listening as decoding of letters into sounds
and ultimately meaning (the bottom-up approach). More recent theories claim that both
approaches are important.
Typically, our pupils are poor decoders (readers and listeners) since their vocabulary is
poor. At the same time, they are already literate in Romanian, and are familiar with top-down
processing. When a pupils vocabulary is poor, this needs to make big efforts to recognize
vocabulary. Her/his short-term memory is so taxed that s/he cannot take full advantage of the
context. However, a good reader or listener, who has sufficient command of the language,
recognizes words automatically or in context.
But the pupil also has background information of the subject matter of a given text the
general context. Good readers and listeners take advantage of such background knowledge in
processing the text, and in creating expectations about the kind of vocabulary that will occur.
The context offers clues to the meaning of an unknown word. (Is the word a verb? A
noun? An adjective? Does it refer to a being? A thing? A concept? etc.) The same unknown
word may occur a number of times in the text, and the variety of contexts in which it occurs, the
importance of the word to understanding the text all these contribute to facilitating or hindering
the use of these clues.
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Those pupils who are able to follow the general ideas in a text (based on their sufficient
command of vocabulary, grammar and reading/listening skills), and who bring relevant
background knowledge to the text, can use a specific strategy to ensure that they are making
good use of the available context clues. The strategy consists of five steps.
Can you arrange the steps of this strategy from the first to the
last? Use numbers from 1 5 to arrange the steps in an order that
makes sense to you:
guessing the meaning of the unknown word
checking that the guess is correct
looking at the relationship between the clause containing the
unknown word and surrounding clauses
and sentences
finding the part of speech of the unknown word
looking at the immediate context of the unknown word and
simplifying this context if necessary
The aim of such a guessing strategy is to make pupils aware of the range of information
available from context so that after practice they have no need to keep to any rigid guessing
procedure.

Summary
This unit explores aspects of the lexicon and vocabulary teaching within the framework of
the communicative approach to language pedagogy. It does not claim to say all there is to say
about vocabulary or vocabulary teaching. In spite of the long history that vocabulary teaching
has, applied linguists and language teachers are paying now renewed attention to it after
decades of relative neglect. There is still much work to be done and many perspectives to be
considered and tried in the classroom. In this unit, we looked at the difference between active
and passive vocabulary and at the pedagogic considerations that you need to take into account
when dealing with vocabulary. We described many techniques for the teaching of vocabulary,
discussing their advantages and disadvantages, including both new and old activities.
In more traditional textbooks, new vocabulary appears as columns of words to be
learned, with the Romanian translation provided. Often there is no general pattern to the words:
it is simply a matter of rote learning. This does not mean that rote learning is to be condemned.
For many pupils it is a valuable learning tool. We do however need to be aware of its limitations
and introduce a variety of techniques in our teaching.

Key Concepts

Anca Cehan

comprehension vs. production

active vs. passive vocabulary
cognates
vocabulary acquisition vs. learning
vocabulary sets
learning from context

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Further Reading
1. Carter, R. and McCarthy M., 1988, Vocabulary and Language
Teaching, Longman, pp. 39-60, 62-83, 97-111, 181-201
2. Ur, P., 1996, A Course in Language Teaching, CUP, pp. 60-69

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