Teaching and learning vocabulary

← Course contents · Using LLMs in this course

The key to learning vocabulary is repetition of useful words with variety and attention

Repetition

Learning typically requires multiple repetitions, and it is best if those repetitions are spread out in time.

Useful words

The previous topic is all about what words are useful. In general, those are the most common 2,000 words plus another 1,000 or so which might focus on one genre, such as academic vocabulary .

Variety

Students need to see the word and hear the word. It's great if they can connect an image to the word. If the word has different forms, it's useful if they are encountered. Seeing the word in and out of context in various sentences or definitions is also helpful.

Attention

It is not merely enough to encounter the word while your mind is somewhere else. The more attention and engagement you can bring to the word, the better.

The barriers to learning vocabulary

Barriers to repetition

  1. The main barrier to repetition is simply motivation. It is completely reasonable and understandable that people do not enjoy drilling themselves on flashcards or reading lots and lots of books. There's probably some goal that you have that you're not making progress towards. I know I have many things I'd like to learn, but I lack the motivation.
  2. Time is another major barrier. This one's pretty obvious. It's important, however, to view your students as people with lives. Many of them have jobs and families that demand a lot of their time, leaving them little time to study. In many cases, they have not "chosen" to learn English in the way one chooses to complete a TESL certificate, so we have to be respectful of their decisions about how to use their time.
  3. Every encounter with a low-frequency vocabulary item eats up the time and motivation that could have gone into learning something useful. We can't avoid them all, but we can limit them and discourage our students from studying them.
  4. Making sure you get a lot of repetitions of the words you're studying requires a certain amount of organization. Software, such as Linguatorium, helps to relieve that organizational barrier.

Barriers to useful vocabulary

  1. Most people agree that frequent vocabulary is more important than infrequent vocabulary, but many people have bad intuitions about what vocabulary is common, usually dramatically overestimating the frequency of words and phrases. Sometimes, this is because the words are seen as children's vocabulary (e.g., zoo animals) and sometimes it's just because they're quite familiar to expert users of English (e.g., gambling idioms like hit the jackpot). If you think about it, though, giraffe doesn't appear very often in conversation, movies, news, or novels. And hit the jackpot is actually quite rare. If you don't believe that people overestimate these things, check out this blog post I wrote in 2007.
  2. Some people believe that they need to "learn the hard words" in order to improve their vocabulary. This is not entirely wrong, but learning the "hard words" before learning the "easy words" is a bad investment of time and money.

Barriers to variety

  1. Drilling with flashcards is a very efficient way to learn a basic meaning of a word. I strongly encourage it, but flashcards all by themselves do not provide variety.
  2. Most teachers and learner are focused on accuracy instead of fluency. This means that they tend to limit themselves to very short texts. As a result, students are unlikely to see the vocabulary they are learning in various contexts. This can be overcome by making sure that students also spend a lot of time on fluency-building activities like extensive reading. If students read one graded reader at their level each week, they will dramatically increase the variety of vocabulary encounters without reducing the number of repetitions or including a lot of low-frequency vocabulary.

Barriers to attention

  1. I think we're all familiar with barriers to attention, so I won't say much here.
  2. Some students believe that repetition, on its own, is enough. They waste time, writing out the same word a hundred times. Meanwhile, after the fifth or sixth time, their mind has drifted to questions about what's in the fridge or how many likes their recent Instagram post has.

Deliberate practice

Deliberate practice (DelP) is the key to learning almost anything. The reason I specifically bring it up in our discussion vocabulary learning is that

  1. DelP only works for skills that other people have already figured out how to do.
    (There are good English-X bilingual dictionaries for many languages.)
  2. It involves well-defined, specific goals. Once a goal is met, a new goal is set. (Vocabulary learning is easy to quantify)
  3. It requires regular, accurate feedback. (This is fairly easy to do with vocabulary)
  4. It requires effective mental representations. (Often possible in vocabulary)
  5. It usually involves building on or modifying previously acquired skills. (A key feature of vocabulary)

As you can see, DelP is a good fit for learning vocabulary, while it's not as easy with grammar and pronunciation, which are often much fuzzier, harder to get feedback on, harder to explain and understand, and hard to make and check goals about.

DelP has two other features, which are important, but not particularly suited to vocabulary learning.

  1. It requires you to constantly push beyond what's comfortable and familiar. "It demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable."
  2. It requires your full attention. You must notice problems and correct them.

DelP differs from naive practice and purposeful practice.

Naive practice

This is what most people do when they practice. It's not bad to get from zero to something, but it will only get you so far. Here are some examples of naive practice.

Purposeful practice

This is much better than naive practice, and sometimes, it's the best you can do, but it's generally not as effective as DelP. The main difference from naive practice is that people who are practicing purposefully have a SMART goal.

The main difference between purposeful practice and deliberate practice is in the immediate, specific feedback.

Explaining the meaning of words

Meaning is dealt with in the branch of linguistics (and of philosophy) called semantics. Explaining the meaning of words, specifically, as dictionaries do, is dealt with in lexicography. (The authority of "The Dictionary" is covered in module three.)

The first part of this video is a good, basic introduction to the meaning of words. The rest of it is interesting but not especially relevant to ELT.

Notice the idea of categories, which we looked at in the first module comes up again here. Finding and explaining meaningful categories is central to language and to language teaching.

The easiest and most efficient way to explain the meaning of a word is to translate it. Many language teachers are prejudiced against the use of the first language. It is certainly possible to go overboard in using the L1, and you may have been in classes that predominantly use the L1 to teach an L2. But the use of the L1 is well justified on both empirical and philosophical grounds. It is vanishingly rare for an L1 translation to ever a perfectly capture the meaning of a word, but that problem applies to any method for conveying meaning. Translation is especially useful for low-frequency items that would otherwise take up too much class time to deal with.

When you don't translate, you should

Nobody is naturally good at explaining the meaning of words, but that's a lot of what language teachers do, and if you want to be a good language teacher, it's useful for you to be able to describe the meaning of words. This requires deliberate practice (see above). If you expect your students to do deliberate practice (and you should), then you should also be willing to engage in deliberate practice. The best way to do this is to

  1. choose a high-frequency or AWL word
  2. try to explain it
  3. check a good dictionary such as the LDOCE
  4. revise your explanation
  5. repeat 10 times
  6. wait until the next day and repeat
  7. stop after you rarely need to revise, likely requiring hundreds of repetitions

I did my deliberate practice on the Simple English Wiktionary, where you can see thousands of my definitions and examples.

Vocabulary learning techniques

I'm not going to try to be systematic about vocabulary learning techniques. Rather, I'll focus on those that I think are most effective:

  1. Self testing with spaced repetition ("flashcard drill")
  2. The keyword technique
  3. Guessing from context
  4. Classroom activities
  5. Extensive reading

Self testing with spaced repetition ("flashcard drill")

This is by far the most efficient way to learn a form-meaning pairing. In fact, a very recent meta analysis shows that the average person can learn a word a minute using this technique, and that's on a delayed post-test (Webb, Yanagisawa, & Uchihara, 2020).

BUT...

There are people for whom these work, but most people lack the motivation and self-control.

Also, this is by far the most efficient way to learn a form-meaning pairing. It is less effective for learning other aspects of vocabulary (e.g., register & collocations).

Usually this involves some kind of paper or computerized flashcards.

At the simplest, use a word and its L1 translation

トイレ (toire)

toilet

わかりません (wakarimasen)

(I) don't understand

やめて (yamete)

stop (it/doing that)

英語 (eigo)

English

服 (fuku)

clothing

Much better is to use a simple sentence that exemplifies the word well, along with its translation.

トイレ は、どこですか？

Where's the toilet?

日本語が わかりません 。

I don't understand Japanese.

話をやめて ください。

Please, stop talking.

英語 ができますか？

Do you speak English?

その服 が合わない。

Those clothes don't match.

You can also add the lexical category or other information, and, if the word has multiple forms, then it might be useful to add them to your word card, as in the following case:

I'm too busy to go to the movies.
They (the girls) are too busy to go to the movies.

Je suis trop occupé pour aller au cinéma.
Elles sont trop occupées pour aller au cinéma.

Adjective

Steps

  1. Put the L1 on one side of a word card and the L2 on the other side. (Or do the equivalent in some software).
  2. Set a goal for new words and review words.
    (At 15 new words per day, in a year you can learn > 5,000 form-meaning pairings.)
  3. Sort your cards so that the new vocabulary appears first and the review vocabulary comes later.
  4. Decide if you're studying for production or reception. (We'll assume production.)
  5. Start studying.Continue until you've reached your goal.
    1. Look at the first card in your L1 (L2 for receptive learning).
    2. Try to think what is on the other side. If possible, say it aloud.
    3. Check the other side.
    4. Note any discrepancies. (very important!)
    5. Judge your success.
    6. Replace the card in the pack based on success
      (Complete failure goes two cards from the front. Easy success goes right at the back.)

The keyword technique

This technique has excellent results when it is used. Unfortunately, it is challenging to execute, and so it is not often used.

Steps

  1. You wish to learn the Indonesian word for ditch
  2. Look it up (parit)
  3. Think of an English word with a similar sound (parrot). This is your keyword.
  4. Imagine a parrot and a ditch together. a parrot near water
  5. Make the image vivid
  6. You wish to learn the Japanese word for happy
  7. Look it up (嬉しい　ureshii)
  8. Think of an English word with a similar sound (relish). This is your keyword.
  9. Imagine them in an image together. a bottle of relish with a happy face
  10. Make the image vivid.

Guessing from context

Teachers should

Learners should

  1. Guess what syntactic category the word belongs to
  2. Read beyond the word and come back
  3. Analyze context
  4. Guess the word's meaning
  5. Check

Classroom activities

Classroom activities should (Yousefi & Biria, 2018) encourage

and should make use of the fact that students are together in the classroom. In other words, gathering a bunch of people together in a room and then getting them to work individually on what is a very social skill - language - is a wasted opportunity.

Extensive reading

Extensive Reading usually means reading a lot of self-selected, easy, interesting texts and doing few or no exercises afterwards.

Reading requires automatic recognition of words. Learners become able to do this only through massive amounts of practice. By reading extensively, learners encounter vocabulary (and grammar) repeatedly and in varying contexts.

Extensive reading is a good complement to word cards which mainly help form-meaning pairs. Successful individual reading experiences promote learner autonomy which leads to "learning success and enhanced motivation".

Studies show that by reading a lot of interesting texts, foreign language learners learn a little new vocabulary and learn more about old vocabulary. They improve their attitude toward reading and language learning. They improve their writing ability and read more fluently (Jeon & Day, 2016; Liu & Zhang, 2018; Nakanishi, 2015).

Some minor difficulties are that teachers can feel they have no role. Administrators may similarly wonder what a teacher is doing. To overcome this, the teacher can conference with individual learners while the others are reading. Also, it may be difficult to develop or access a library of readers, though there are paid online options, such as XReading.

Do you remember?

How do you say ditch in Indonesian and happy in Japanese?

References

Jeon, E.-Y., & Day, R. R. (2016). The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis. Reading in a Foreign Language, 28(2), 246-265. https://doi.org/10.1017/SOI42716411000932

Liu, J., & Zhang, J. (2018). The effects of extensive reading on English vocabulary learning: A meta-analysis. English Language Teaching, 11(6), 1. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n6p1

Nakanishi, T. (2015). A meta-analysis of extensive reading research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(1), 6-37. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.157

Webb, S., Yanagisawa, A., & Uchihara, T. (2020). How effective are intentional vocabulary‐learning activities? A meta‐analysis. The Modern Language Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12671

Yousefi, M. H., & Biria, R. (2018). The effectiveness of L2 vocabulary instruction: a meta-analysis. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education , 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0062-2

Grouping vocabulary

Russian honor guard at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Alexander Garden welcomes Michael G. Mullen 2009-06-26 2

It seems obvious that you would teach related words together. This is useful in some ways but actually can cause problems in certain cases.

Imagine you're learning a language called Verdic, and your Verdic teacher introduces the following three words:

  1. Vord "mandarin orange"
  2. Verd "clementine orange"
  3. Vird "navel orange"

When you come back the next day, your teacher asks you if you remember the topic of yesterday's lesson. Of course, you do, it was about citrus fruits. "Great," your Verdic teacher says. "Do you remember which fruits we studied?" Again, you do: mandarine, clementine, and navel oranges. "Wonderful," your teacher exclaims. "So, how do you say navel orange in Verdic?"

Of course, all you can remember is that it starts with v and ends with rd.

Studying a semantic set like this makes it very easy to recall the list of things for which you learned words, but the words get all mixed up. And, of course, when the words themselves are similar, it becomes even harder.

Many textbooks and language teachers introduce new vocabulary in groups like this: things you find in the kitchen, the months of the year, free time activities, colours, etc. This is counter-productive. It makes it easier for students to remember the topic, but harder for them to remember which word applies to which case.

You also tend to see new vocabulary listed alphabetically. Thus, you get lists like comment, commit, committee, common, community, company. This is how an evil genius would teach English. Don't be an evil genius.

On the other hand, it can be fine to group words by word families. In other words, when you introduce bake, you could also introduce baker, and maybe even bakery. These are unlikely to be confused, and they mean that bake gets more repetition and variety.

In general, it's best to focus on words that are not closely semantically related (kinds of orange, days of the week), but it's fine to have some general topical similarity. For example, you could have going out for coffee as your theme, and you could include words like table, friend, chat, pay, and spill.

Above all, make sure that your vocabulary is USEFUL, and that it is grouped by frequency, for example: first 500 words, 501-1,000; 1,000-2,000 and AWL. These frequency bands can be quite broad and they can be flexible around the edges. It would be pointless to avoid putting word #450 together with #540 because they're in different bands. But you should wonder about the wisdom of putting #45 together with #1,450.

In short, group thematically and frequentially (new vocabulary). Feel free to teach word families instead of individual lexemes, but avoid words that are otherwise similar in terms of meaning, spelling, or pronunciation.

For more, see

Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(3), 369-383. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716403000195

Higa, M. (1963). Interference effects of intralist word relationships in verbal learning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 170-75.

Schurgin, M. W., Wixted, J. T., & Brady, T. F. (2020). Psychophysical scaling reveals a unified theory of visual memory strength. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00938-0

Waring, R. (1997). The negative effects of learning words in semantic sets: A replication. System, 25, 2, 261-74.

The vocabulary lesson plan

Vocabulary should be an element in most lesson plans, but I see no role for a "vocabulary lesson". Consequently, I see no role for a vocabulary lesson plan. The question, then is how to fit vocabulary into a general lesson plan.

Preteaching

Some vocabulary should be addressed before a lesson. Target vocabulary can be dealt with in an activity such as matching or peer teaching with with flashcard exchange. Topic-essential low-frequency words can be provided in a list with a gloss, but very little time should be spent focusing on or "teaching" these items.

During the lesson

Target vocabulary can be identified in any printed materials through typographical features such as bold, underline, or colour. Glosses or translations can be provided nearby in the text or on a separate page. Before a first listening, the teacher could ask students to count the number of times a particular word (or two) appears. During a listening activity, the teacher can pause before the occurrence of a target word and ask student to guess which one might appear. Alternatively the teacher can pause after an occurrence and review the meaning and pronunciation.

After the main part of the lesson

Review is crucial. Activities like dictogloss or cloze summary can be used to focus both on the core lesson goals and on target vocabulary at the same time. Students can be given homework on sites like Linguatorium.

Strategies for the student

Learners need strategies for the following:

← Course contents