TEACHING VOCABULARY

A. What is Vocabulary
Vocabulary can be defined roughly as the words we teach in the foreign language. However, a new item
of vocabulary may be more than a single word for example, post-office and mother-in-law, which are
made up of two or three words but express a single idea. There are also multi-word idioms such as call it a
day, where the meaning of the phrase cannot be deduced from an analysis of the component words. A
useful convention is to cover all such cases by talking about vocabulary items rather than words.

B. What Needs to Be Taught

1. Form: pronunciation and spelling
The learner has to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation) and what it looks like (its
spelling). These are fairly obvious characteristics and one or the other will be perceived by the
learner when encountering the item for the first time. In teaching, we need to make sure that both
these aspects are accurately presented and learned.
2. Grammar
The grammar of a new item will need to be taught if this is not obviously covered by general
grammatical rules. An item may have an unpredictable change of form in certain grammatical
contexts or may have some idiosyncratic way of connecting with other words in sentence. It is
important to provide learners with this information at the same time as we teach the base form.
When teaching a new verb, for example, we might give also its past form, if this irregular and we
might note if it transitive and intransitive.
3. Collocation
The collocation typical of particular items are another factor that makes a particular combination
sound right or wrong in a given context. So this is another piece of information about a new
item which it may be worth teaching. When introducing words like decision and conclusion,for
example, we may note that you take or make the one, but usually come to the other. Collocations
are also often noted in dictionaries, either by providing the whole collocation under one of the
head-words, or by a note in parenthesis.
4. Aspect of meaning (1): denotation, connotation, appropriateness

The meaning of a word is primarily what it refers to in real world, its denotation is the often the
sort of definition that is given in a dictionary. A less obvious component of the meaning of an
item is its connotation: the association, or positive or negative feelings it evokes, which may or
may not be indicated in a dictionary defitnition. The word dog for example as understood by most
British people has positive connotations of friendship and loyalty whereas the equivalent in
Arabic as understood by most people in Arab countries has negative association of dirt and
inferiority.
5. Aspect of meaning (2): meaning relationships
How the meaning of one item relates to the meaning of others can also be useful in teaching.
There are various such relationships:
- Synonyms
- Antonyms
- Hyponyms
- Co-hyponym
- Super ordinates
Translation
6. Word formation
Vocabulary items, whether one word or multi-word can often be broken down into their
component bits. Exactly how these bits are put together is another piece of useful information,
perhaps mainly for more advanced learners. You may wish to teach the common prefixes and
suffixes. Another way vocabulary items are built is by combining two words to make one item: a
single word, compound word, or two separate, sometimes hyphenated words.
C. Ideas For Vocabulary Work In The Classroom
We should apply sharing ideas that consist of three stages, they are preparation, presentation, and
discussion. First is preparation, each participant prepares a vocabulary activity which they think is
effective. Teachers with some experience may bring activities they have used. Other may recall
ideas from their own language-learning experience or that they have observed or find suggestion
in books or simply create new ones. Second, The activities are presented to the group. This is the
best done by actually performing them, the presenter role-playing the teacher and the others
students. In this way you get the feel of the procedure and remember it well. Third, a discussion

should follow each presentation, on question such as: What was the main objective of the
activity? What particular aspects of vocabulary did the activity focus on?
D. How Can We Help Learners Learn Vocabulary?
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
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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 isnt just about learning grammar (ODell 1997). It
may be worth teaching students an easier formulation of Wilkinss (1972) 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 dont
know in English, and how to ask the meaning of English words you dont understand, so phrases like
Whats the word for in English?, How do you say ?, and What does mean? are useful to teach at the
basic levels. As students progress, another useful strategy they can use is to paraphrase: Its a kind of ,
Its like a , and Its for -ing X etc. Focusing on these strategies puts vocabulary learning firmly on the
classroom agenda.
An important vocabulary acquisition strategy which Nation (2001) 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.
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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. 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 (Skmen 1997). 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.
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Make vocabulary learning personal

Related to the point above, materials should provide opportunities for students to use the
vocabulary meaningfully, to say and write true things about themselves and their lives. Students should be
encouraged to add vocabulary they want to learn, too. And if the experience of learning is also enjoyable,
so much the better! One note of caution is that personalization may be more appropriate for some students
than others. In a large study of vocabulary learning strategies used by students at different ages, Schmitt
(1997) reports that younger (junior high school) students found that personalization was less helpful to
them than the older students in university and adult classes.
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Dont overdo it!

Another important point is not to overload students there are limits to how much vocabulary

anyone can absorb for productive use in one lesson and this will be affected by how difficult the words
are and how much students are required to know about them [on the notion of difficulty. If vocabulary
sets ever seem too daunting for students, allow them to choose which items they want to prioritize.
E. Testing Vocabulary
There are many vocabulary testing techniques, selected examples of which are shown some are
written out as they would be presented to the learner. For example the teacher dictates the mother-tongue
equivalents of the words and the student write down the target language version. This checks if student
know meaning and spelling only. There is a problem that the mother-tongue translation may be inexact or
misleading but if it is a reasonable equivalent, then this is a very quick, easy and convenient test to
administer and check.

E. Method to Teaching Vocabulary

The Silent Way

Another prominent humanistic method is the silent way, devised by Gattegno (1972). It is a
fictionalized account rather than a genuine piece of interaction. Nonetheless, it purports to reflect
what happens in an initial silent way lesson. While the silent way differs significantly from

community language learning, it does share an belief in the importance of the inner state of the

learner in the learning process.

Community Language Learning
One of language learning method that focus on student participation. The classroom consist of
several small groups, that sit in a circle. The teacher stay in the outside of the circle and when
there is a student that need the teacher help to translate some word in the target language that is
the time for teacher to give student a help. In this case the teacher has role as a counselor and the
student as the client. This method emphasized the student to be independent from the teacher.

REFERENCES
Nurnia, Detif, and Israfian, (2015). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching: Teaching grammar,
Halu Oleo University.
McCarten, (2007), Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus Lessons for the Classroom,
Cambriddge University.