3Teaching vocabulary

The role of memory is significant for vocabulary acquisition. There are two main types of memory: short-term memory and long-term
memory. Short-term memory STM (also called working memory) is a term applied to the retention of small amounts of material over
periods of a few seconds, whereas long-term memory LTM is a system assumed to underpin the capacity to store information over long
periods of time. In STM as well as in LTM forgetting and backsliding can occur. That is why vocabulary remembering and retrieval is a
constant struggle We also need STM to recognize the connection between the new things and the ones we know. Once the new vocabulary
items are presented to language learners and the connection between them and the words in mother tongue is made either verbally or
visually, the next step is to transfer the items just learned to the LTM. When a new vocabulary item has eventually been placed in LTM, it is
never going to be forgotten. However, the learner can have a problem with “finding” it in the vastness of his memory.That is why the learner
should revise the acquired vocabulary in a specific manner, lenghtening the periods between revisions until he is able to recall vocabulary
items anytime he wants.

What’s in a word: spoken and written form; grammatical behavour; meaning; derivation; frequency; connotations; register (spoken
vs written; informal vs frozen); collocations

Some techniques for remembering words

• Repetition

• Retrieval eg using words in a new context

• Spacing - distributed practice (testing implications) – spaced reviews of learned material can dramatically reduce the rate of
forgetting

• Pacing (different learning styles)

• Use (productive)

• Cognitive depth (rhyming pairs/ parts of speech/ sentence completion)

• Personal organizing

• Imaging (mental pictures of word)

• Mnemonics (tricks for retrieving items or rules which are not yet automatic)

• Motivation

• Attention/ arousal (high degree of attention)

• Affective depth

Implications for teaching vocabulary

• Learners need tasks and strategies to help them organize their mental lexicon by building networks of associations.

• Teachers need to accept that the learning of new words involves a period of “initial fuzziness’.

• Learners need to wean themselves off a reliance on a direct translation from their mother tongue.

• Words need to be presented in their typical contexts, so that learners can get a feel for their meaning, register, collocations,
syntactic environment.

• Teaching should direct attention to the sound of new words, particularly the way they are stressed.

• Learners should aim to build a threshold vocabulary as quickly as possible.

• Learners need to be active in the learning of words.

• Learners need to make multiple decisions about words.

• Memory of new words can be reinforced if they are used to express personally relevant meanings.

• Not all the vocabulary that the learners need can be taught: learners will need plentiful exposure to talk and text as well as training
in self-directed learning.
 Teaching methods

Vocabulary should be taught by combining both implicit and explicit methods to maximize the effectiveness of lexis teaching. A variety of
activities should be employed to help learners raise their consciousness for developing self-learning strategies.

Implicit teaching

The importance of using the context for implicit vocabulary learning has been emphasized because words have a habit of changing their
meaning from one context to another. First-language learners pick up most vocabulary from the context, and the acquisition of multi-
meaning words is accounted for by this incidental learning. Learners can develop skills in guessing meaning from the context by using
gapped text or by using words with English affixes.

It is important for teachers to reflect on what kinds of activities can actually raise learners consciousness of the significant lexical elements,
such as fixed expressions, collocations, and lexically-dependent patterns. There are three types of activity: getting learners to identify
patterns in texts, encouraging learners to identify groups of the same meanings in word lists, and asking learners to look for a certain pattern
(e.g., phrases and collocations). .

There are several aspects of lexis that need to be taken into account when teaching vocabulary.

Boundaries between conceptual meaning: knowing not only what lexis refers to, but also where the boundaries are that separate it from
words of related meaning

Polysemy: distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely related meanings Homonymy:
distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form which has several meanings which are NOT closely related

Homophyny: understanding words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings

Synonymy: distinguishing between the different shades of meaning that synonymous words have

Affective meaning: distinguishing between the attitudinal and emotional factors which depend on the speakers attitude or the situation.

Style, register, dialect: Being able to distinguish between different levels of formality, the effect of different contexts and topics, as well as
differences in geographical variation.

Translation: awareness of certain differences and similarities between the native and the foreign language

Chunks of language: multi-word verbs, idioms, strong and weak collocations, lexical phrases.

Grammar of vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students to build up different forms of the word or even different words from that
word

Pronunciation: ability to recognise and reproduce items in speech.

DEALING WITH MEANING The most important aspect of vocabulary teaching for advanced learners is to foster learner independence so
that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Guided discovery involve asking
questions or offering examples that guide students to guess meanings correctly. Contextual guesswork means making use of the context in
which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning. Knowledge of word formation, e.g. prefixes and suffixes, can also help guide
students to discover meaning. Students should start using EFL dictionaries as early as possible, from Intermediate upwards.

USING LANGUAGE Another strategy for advanced learners is to turn their receptive vocabulary items into productive ones. A lexical
item is most likely to be learned when a learner feels a personal need to know it, or when there is a need to express something to accomplish
the learner’s own purposes. Production will depend on motivation, and this is what teachers should aim at promoting, based on their
awareness of students needs and preferences.

NOTICING COLLOCATIONS AND DEALING WITH MEANING Students will have many problems in understanding most of the
collocations, as they contain vocabulary which they probably know receptively.