Learning vocabulary in an English-language classroom is a major challenge for many students as it is an essential part of foreign language learning

Teaching vocabulary.Methods of Teaching Vocabulary in the Classroom
However many theories about vocabulary learning process were written , it still remains the matter of memory. Thus, there are several general principles for successful teaching , which are valid for any method. According 1988 the principles are: aim what is to be taught, which words, how many need - target vocabulary should respond students' real needs and interests frequent exposure and repetition - meaningful presentation clear and unambiguous denotation or reference should be assured Learning vocabulary is a complex process. The students' aim to be reached in learning vocabulary process is primarily their ability to recall the word at will and to recognize it in its spoken and written form. Generally, knowing a word involves knowing its form and its meaning at the basic level. In deeper aspects it means the abilities to know its: 1) Meaning, i.e. relate the word to an appropriate object or context 2) Usage, i.e. knowledge of its collocations, metaphors and idioms, as well as style and register (the appropriate level of formality), to be aware of any connotations and associations the word might have 3) Word formation, i.e. ability to spell and pronounce the word correctly, to know any derivations (acceptable prefixes and suffixes), 4) Grammar, i.e. to use it in the appropriate grammatical form.
Unlike the learning of grammar, which is essentially a rule based system, vocabulary knowledge is largely a question of accumulating individual items. The general rule seems to be a question of memory. And during the process of teaching and learning vocabulary an important problem occurs: How does memory work? Researchers into the workings of memory distinguish between the following systems - short- term store - working memory - long- term memory Short - term store Short-term store is the brain capacity to hold a limited number of items of information for periods of time up to a few seconds⁷. It is the kind of memory that is involved in repeating a word that you have just heard the teacher modelling. But successful vocabulary learning involves more than holding words for a few seconds. To integrate words into long - term memory they need to be subjected to different kinds of operations. Working memory Working memory means focussing on word long enough to perform operations on them. It means the information is manipulated via the senses from external sources and/or can be downloaded from the long- term memory. Material remains in working memory for about twenty seconds. The existence of articulator loop enables this new material processing. It works a bit like audiotape going round a round again. It assures the short- term store to be kept refreshed. The ability to hold a word in working memory is a good predictor of language learning aptitude. The better ability to hold words in working memory the smoother the process of learning foreign languages is.
While sentence structure and grammar are the foundation of the English Language, vocabulary is the glue that holds it together. An expansive vocabulary allows students to feel confident in their abilities and communicate more effectively. There are many methods of teaching vocabulary and in each class, the teacher may need to use different methods. This is because each class will be made up of different students each with their own learning style.
Vocabulary is important to teach in the very first lessons because it is how students will be able to understand the words they need to use for basic communication. Vocabulary is found in every stage of an ESA lesson. In addition, vocabulary can be taught several ways. Pre-teaching and reviewing vocabulary in the study stage and then using that vocabulary in the activate stage is a good way to scaffold a lesson. However, before vocabulary can be taught it needs to be properly selected to ensure it is relevant to the lesson and at an appropriate English level. Some of the most effective ways of teaching vocabulary are using visuals and planning engaging activities. Visuals such as pictures can be used to pre-teach vocabulary for the daily lesson and review vocabulary from previous lessons. Other engaging activities include games and role plays. It is also important that teachers use multiple methods to teach vocabulary to keep students engaged in the learning process. The more students use the vocabulary, the higher the chance that they will remember it. Therefore, incorporating relevant vocabulary in every lesson is crucial
Lesson structure:
All lessons should have some focus on vocabulary. Lessons should check to understand previous material, pre-teach new material, have students practice reading, writing and speaking, using the vocabulary. A sample lesson could entail the following.
Sample Lesson Plan:
Engage: Students talk about their weekends focusing on vocabulary learned the week before.
Study: Teacher pre-teaches vocabulary that builds on previous knowledge that is relevant to the lessons.
Students do a worksheet that requires them to match words with definitions or pictures. Students are given a picture and asked to write a story about what they think is happening.
Activate: Students are asked to present their story to the class
Depending on students’ age:
The method of teaching vocabulary also is dependent on what level the class is. The sample lesson above is an example that would be more suited to intermediate to advanced classes. An advanced class can understand more directions to activities than beginner classes. For beginner classes, visuals are more effective than activities because they require less understanding of English.
An example of a more beginner class could entail:Engage: Students play a game of Simon says as a warm-up to review the previous vocabulary.
Study:
Pre-teach vocabulary using pictures. Have students do a worksheet of matching vocabulary with pictures.
Activate: Have students create a drawing labeling all of the vocabulary that was taught.
Also, teaching vocabulary online versus in a classroom looks different. In a classroom, there is more room to interact, while online the teacher is limited by the computer and what can be seen on the screen. This means the teacher has to be creative with visuals. This could include making games out of the visuals to keep it engaging.
We have seen that learning vocabulary is a challenge for learners, partly because of the size of the task, and partly because of the variety of vocabulary types to be learned, including single words, phrases, collocations, and strategic vocabulary, as well as grammatical patterning, idioms, and fixed expressions.
To these we could add whether a word has a strategic use and if it has any special uses that are different in registers such as conversation or academic writing. So we can already see how important it is to use a corpus in order to give our learners all the right information they might need to master a word or phrase.
It would be unrealistic to teach everything there is to know about a word the first time it is presented to students – and any such attempt would make for some very tedious lessons. Obviously we need to make choices about how much we teach on a first presentation. For example with the word like, in addition to its sound and spelling we might choose to teach only one of its meanings (to enjoy, find something to be pleasant), with one grammatical pattern (I like + singular or plural noun) and some associated vocabulary (I like football/cartoons; I can’t stand game shows). At a later date we can add other meanings such as to be similar to (I have a car like that) or add more grammatical patterns such as like + to + verb (I like to play tennis). Thechoices we make are influenced by factors such as frequency, usefulness for the classroom, and “learnability” – how easy the item is to learn (and teach!).
We can also take each type of knowledge from the list above and make students aware of its importance and usefulness in building up their knowledge of a word, we can focus occasionally on how to express opposite or similar meanings for a set of vocabulary we are teaching, show students what is useful to learn about the forms of nouns or verbs, or how prefixes and suffixes can help build vocabulary knowledge quickly. Giving students practice in manipulating these different areas of knowledge teaches useful learning strategies they can apply to learning other vocabulary. We should also encourage students to look at learning the various meanings of an item of vocabulary as a gradual, incremental process, and show them how they can come back to a word they have previously “learned” to add more information about it, such as other meanings, or how to create an opposite meaning using a prefix.
Another issue to consider is which vocabulary we want students to be able to use when they speak and write (their active or productive vocabulary) and which we want them to be able to recognize and understand but not necessarily produce (their passive or receptive vocabulary). Students often feel frustrated that they can understand more than they can produce, but explaining this issue of active versus passive knowledge as a normal part of learning can be reassuring. When you assign vocabulary lists to learn, why not include some passive vocabulary items and discuss with students which items they need to learn “for understanding” and which they need to learn really well so that they can use them. (But be sure that in practice or testing activities, students are required to remember and use only the active vocabulary productively.)
Additionally, even from the elementary level, it is important to include in vocabulary lessons not just single words, but also larger “chunks” such as collocations, phrases, or expressions, even whole sentences, as well as strategic vocabulary. By building up a stock of expressions as well as individual words, students can assemble the language they need to communicate more fluently.
How can we help learners learn vocabulary?
As we said earlier, there is a lot to learn about vocabulary in terms of its range, the sheer number of words and phrases to learn, and the depth of knowledge students need to know about each vocabulary item.
Materials can help students in two broad areas: First, they need to present and practice in natural contexts the vocabulary that is frequent, current, and appropriate to learners’ needs. Second, materials should help students become better learners of vocabulary by teaching different techniques and strategies they can use to continue learning outside the classroom. There is a vast amount of research into how learners learn best and how teachers might best teach. The next section presents some key principles that we can follow to help students learn vocabulary more effectively.
Teaching vocabulary in class.
Focus on vocabulary .
Give vocabulary a high profile in the syllabus and the classroom so that students can see its importance and understand that learning a language isn’t just about learning grammar . It may be worth teaching students an easier formulation of Wilkins’s view that “without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.”
One of the first vocabulary learning strategies for any classroom is how to ask for words you don’t know in English, and how to ask the meaning of English words you don’t understand, so phrases like “What’s the word for in English?,” “How do you say ?,” and “What does mean?” are useful to teach at the basic levels.
An important vocabulary acquisition strategy which calls “noticing” is seeing a word as something to be learned. In this view, knowing what to learn is a necessary prerequisite to learning. Teachers can help learners get into the habit of noticing by making clear in classroom instruction and homework assignments: which items should be learned, what each item is (a single word, a phrase, a collocation etc.) and for what purpose (active use or passive recognition). And materials can help teachers in this in the following ways:
Providing clearly marked vocabulary lessons
Making the target vocabulary set stand out, including focused practice and regular review .
Giving lists of vocabulary to be learned for the lesson
Structured vocabulary notebook exercises which are designed to make students focus on a particular vocabulary set or feature are a good way of developing this noticing strategy.
Offer variety Tomlinson suggests a number of principles for developing successful materials. The first of these is that “Materials should achieve impact.” He suggests that this can be done with unusual and appealing content, attractive presentations, and variety. Teachers can use different ways to present vocabulary including pictures, sounds, and different text types with which students can identify: stories, conversations, web pages, questionnaires, news reports, etc. In each of these contexts, topics should be relevant to students’ interests. Similarly, practice activities should vary and engage students at different levels. These should range from simple listen-and-repeat type of practice through controlled practice to opportunities to use the vocabulary in meaningful, personalized ways. Offering variety also means catering to different learning styles, and as Tomlinson notes, some students may use different learning styles for different types of language or in different learning situations. So this means offering activities that sometimes appeal to learners who are more “studial” and “analytic” (those who need to analyze the language and to be accurate in their use of it) as well as learners who are “experiential” and “global” (those who are less concerned with accuracy as with learning whole chunks of language) and catering to students who prefer to learn either by seeing, hearing, or doing something.
Repeat and recycle:
Learning vocabulary is largely about remembering, and students generally need to see, say, and write newly learned words many times before they can be said to have learned them. Some researchers have suggested various numbers of encounters with a word for learning to take place, ranging from five to up to twenty.
Some suggest that an impressive amount of learning can take place when students learn lists of paired items (English word and translation equivalents); others suggest that this method of learning does not aid deeper understanding of the words or help develop fluency. However, most agree that repetition is an important aid to learning and that having to actively recall or “retrieve” a word is a more effective way of learning than simple exposure or just seeing a word over and over . Researchers also agree that repeating words aloud helps students remember words better than repeating them silently. Another area of research is how long students can remember words after first learning them, and again researchers agree that forgetting mostly occurs immediately after we first learn something, and that the rate of forgetting slows down afterward. The implications for the vocabulary classroom are self-evident: Review vocabulary as often as possible in activities that have students actively recall words and produce them rather than merely see or hear them.
Provide opportunities to organize vocabulary
Organizing vocabulary in meaningful ways makes it easier to learn. Textbooks often present new vocabulary in thematic sets as an aid to memory, but there are other types of organization and these can be described under three broad headings: real-world groups, language-based groups, and personalized groups, examples of which are given below⁸.
Real-world groups occur in the real world, such as the countries within each continent, parts of the body, the foods in each food type (carbohydrate, protein, fats, etc.), activities that take place for a celebration (e.g., at a wedding), expressions people typically use in everyday situations (e.g., when someone passes an examination, has bad luck, etc.). Students can draw on their general knowledge to group English vocabulary according to concepts with which they are already familiar.
Language-based groups draw on linguistic criteria as ways of grouping, for example, the different parts of speech of a word family; words that have the same prefix or suffix, or the same sound; verbs and dependent prepositions; collocations of different kinds (verb + noun; adjective + noun, etc.).
Personalized groups use students’ own preferences and experiences as the basis for the groups. It might include grouping vocabulary according to likes and dislikes, personal habits or personal history, for example, foods that you like and don’t like, or eat often, sometimes, rarely, or that you ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday. Making vocabulary personal helps to make it more memorable.