Table of contents introduction Chapter I: Vocabulary as a base of acquiring language skills

The Meaning and form
There are many ways how to use the meaning and form of a word for teaching. I suggest several simple tasks here that I came up with. The tasks can be assigned for work in the lesson or as homework.
- referring to the meaning
- think up at least two synonyms of a verb book, a noun request and adjective boring
- think up at least eight hyponyms of vegetable and fruit
- think up (or look up in monolingual dictionary) a word having more than two different meanings and tell them to others in the class
- find the word that appears in at least three unknown collocations and explain them to others
- match the words or phrases that collocate with do or make:
homework, mistakes, apologies, someone a favour, nothing, one’s best, the bed, a noise, somebody a service, an offer, a note, a job, a move, a joke of, history, something on your own responsibility, business, good time, a wash, fun of, the shopping
- do usually mean to perform the activity or job
- make usually means to create or produce something³⁸
- for following task, you will need a list of groups of words that are semantically relating to each other in some way:
- find hypernymy and match the appropriate hyponymy to them
- find holonymy and match the appropriate meronymy to them
- it is necessary to explain terms ‘hyponymy’, holonymy’ etc.
- the types of required relations depend on the words that are given in the list
- a task in pairs: one new vocabulary item is given to every pair.
They should look it up in monolingual dictionary and then prepare themselves to describe it, either by oral explanation or any demonstration.
- referring to the form
- find or think up two or three words that can be joined with the prefixes non-, auto-, bio-, super-, pre-, uni-, sub- and de- and try to explain their meanings and meanings of the prefixes.
Choose the correct negative form:

• 
  inpredictable X unpredictable weather
  
• 
  impersonal X inpersonal manner
  
• 
  illegal X inlegal action
  
• 
  nonregular X irregular activity.
  

Revision and testing of vocabulary
It is not needed to remind the importance of testing of learned stuff. It is a kind of motivation for learners to review vocabulary. If the pupils did not know that they could be tested they would have not be forced to learn. Thornbury points out that “vocabulary covered in the previous lesson should be tested at the beginning of the next one. If not, the chances of retaining the new vocabulary are greatly reduced.”³⁹ I can say from my own experience that most frequent used vocabulary testing is dictating of words in the mother tongue to be translated to the second language and vice versa.
Other tasks that are widely applied for revision are matching, filling in the blank, multiple choice, use in sentences or guessing meaning from context.
According to McCarten 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. Richards and Nation list the different things learners need to know about a word before we can say that they have learned it. These include:
1. The meaning(s) of the word
2. Its spoken and written forms
3. What “word parts” it has (e.g., any prefix, suffix, and “root” form)
4. Its grammatical behavior (e.g., its word class, typical grammatical patterns it occurs in)
5. Its collocations
6. Its register
7. What associations it has (e.g., words that are similar or opposite in meaning)
8. What connotations it has
9. Its frequency
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). The choices 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. For example, 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.
Establish that there are many ways to learn words and phrases and there are many factors affecting this process: personal feelings at the time; need to communicate; availability of a resource; context; language intuition and so on. Say that one of the most important factors for learning words is context and that you would like participants to explore it.
There are different ways to know a word or phrase. However, the main distinction is between passive and active vocabulary – related to receptive and productive skills (or recognition and use) respectively. Average native speakers of English have 6 to 7 thousand words in their active vocabulary and about 25 thousand in their passive vocabulary. However, the current estimate of the English vocabulary resource is over one million words. Establish that the ratio between active and passive vocabulary with English learners is similar to that of native speakers and that learning vocabulary entails two interdependent objectives:
- To increase passive vocabulary, the number of words students can recognize, understand and remember.
- To increase active vocabulary, the number of words students can confidently use in speaking and writing.
There are different types of vocabulary learning activities:
- open/banked gap-filling exercises
- comparing synonyms in context,
- replacing nonsense words in a text
- multiple matching
- analysis of words and word combinations in a text
- using word combinations and phrases
- labelling and describing objects in a picture
- using texts with thinking questions
Teaching vocabulary should be based on context and teachers should focus on exploring the relationship between words, phrases and the meanings they convey in different contexts. It is possible to design simple vocabulary tasks using authentic texts accompanied with thinking questions or other task types.
Two things you might cut down to make room for vocabulary work: