GRAMMAR VOCABULARY

 Rod Ellis  Hunt and Beglar

 PRACTICE (procedural knowledge):  APPROACHES TO VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING:
- Grammar is taught to help students internalize structures. × Incidental learning: words learned incidentally by plenty of
- Directed at the acquisition of implicit knowledge (procedural ) needed to exposure (extensive reading and listening). It occurs while
use structures effortlessly for communication. improving reading and listening skills.
- Students are provided with opportunities to practice the form first × Explicit instruction: Focus on important vocabulary selected by
under controlled conditions and then under more communicative ones. the teacher (high frequency words) through translation,
- Some attempt to isolate the form. vocabulary lists, vocabulary cards. More than form
- Types: (pronunciation, grammar, pattern, collocations).
× Mechanical practice: rigidly controlled practice. × Independent strategy development: guessing from context,
× Contextualized practice: still controlled but students are using the dictionary, association.
encouraged to relate form to meaning by showing how the  STRATEGIES:
structures are used in real life situations. × Discovery:
× Communicative practice: Learners engage in authentic - Determination:
communication while paying attention to structures.  Guessing meaning from structural knowledge (parts of
 CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING (declarative/explicit knowledge): speech, roots, affixes)
- Equip the learner with an understanding of a grammatical form (to  Guessing meaning from an L1 cognate
develop explicit/declarative knowledge)  Guessing from context (pictures, gestures, surrounding
- Raises students’ awareness of what is correct. words)
- Students are expected to use intellectual effort to understand the target  Using dictionaries
feature.  Wordlists and flashcards.
- Attempt to isolate a specific feature for focused attention.
- Can be: - Social strategies:
× Deductive: students are supplied with a rule which is then used  Asking somebody else
to carry out some task  Groupwork
× Inductive: students are provided with data and asked to
construct an explicit rule to describe the grammatical feature. × Consolidation: process through which an item moves from short
- It requires minimal production term memory to long term memory
- Opportunities to apply rules in the construction of personalized  Social strategy: teacher checks accuracy, groupwork to
sentences (not intended to practice but to promote its storage as practice, interaction with native speakers.
explicit knowledge).  Memory strategy: relating word with previous learnt
 C-R AND PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE: knowledge
- C-R activities contribute indirectly to the acquisition of implicit - Pictures and images
knowledge. It involves 3 processes: - Related words
× Noticing: The learner becomes conscious of the presence of - Unrelated words (memorizing a rhyme)
linguistic features. (ignored before) - Orthographical/phonological form (studying spelling, pronunciation,
× Comparing: The learner compares the linguistic feature noticed underlying the first letter)
to his/her own mental grammar, registering to what extent  Cognitive strategy:
there is a gap between input and grammar. - Written and verbal representation
× Integrating: The learner integrates an explicit representation of - Organizing word lists
the new linguistic feature into his/her mental grammar.  Metacognitive strategy: to help students understand the
- The learner can subsequently access to it and explicit knowledge helps
 the learner to continue to notice the feature in the input, thereby
facilitating subsequent acquisition.
!! Practice and C-R are not mutually exclusive, grammar teaching can
involve a combination of both. Practice work must be preceded by a
presentation stage to ensure that learners have a clear idea about the
targeted feature. C-R can occur without practice.
 Richards
 Addressing the grammar gap: Grammar can be addressed at different
stages:
× INPUT: Language sources in which students have to focus on
particular forms. They become conscious of what they have
previously ignored. (NOTICE)
× INTAKE: Subset of the input which is comprehended and attended
to.
× ACQUISITION: Processes by which the learner incorporates a new
learning item into his/her developing system or interlanguage.
Processes involved:
 Noticing
 discovering rules
 accommodation (in order for intake to be internalized, data
have to fit in, be re-organized, try new hypothesis),
 experimentation (hypothesis used to try out in a tentative
way)
× ACCESS: Learner’s ability to draw upon their interlanguage system
during communication.
× OUTPUT: Production of language.
 DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACH (focus on grammar through discourse):
- Focuses on form, meaning and use within the larger discourse context.
- The focus is on the function of the grammatical form (what we can do
with the language) and its pragmatic meaning in context. Learners have
to understand the form, the proposition and the illocutionary force (the
intention)
- Aim: to develop the discourse competence: ability to process and create
coherent discourse.
way they learn.
- Maximize exposure
- Interact with native speakers
- Testing oneself
- Schedule and organize practice time
 PRINCIPLES:
1. Provide opportunities for incidental learning of vocabulary (by
plenty of exposure: listening and reading)
2. Diagnose which of the 3,000 most common words learners need to
study
3. Provide opportunities for the intentional learning of vocabulary.
(explicit instruction further than form)
4. Provide opportunities for elaborating word knowledge (knowing a
word is more than knowing the translations and synonyms)
- Receptive knowledge: being able to recognize one of the aspects of
knowledge through reading and listening.
- Productive knowledge: being able to use it in speaking and writing.
Expanding the connections between what students already know and
new information.
5. Provide opportunities for developing fluency with known
vocabulary: recycling already known words in familiar grammatical
patterns so students recognize words and use them without
hesitation, while practicing the 4 macro skills.
6. Experiment with guessing from context
7. Examine different types of dictionary and teach students how to
use them.
 KEY ISSUES
1. A large vocabulary is needed to function in an L2: Between 2000-
3000 word families to communicate in daily conversation and to read
authentic materials.
2. Various kinds of word knowledge are needed to use a word well:
Meaning, spelling (written form), pronunciation (spoken form),
grammatical characteristics, collocations, register, frequency,
associations.
3. Vocabulary learning is incremental: Learners need multiple contacts
with words to acquire them. Incidental learning, intentional
techniques, words explicitly taught.
4. Vocabulary learning requires consolidation:
- Decay theory: how the mind forgets information while learning new
one and most forgetting occurs after the learning session.
- Principle of expanding rehearsal: Learners should review material
soon after the initial meeting and then at gradually increasing
intervals.
 Cross association: words taught together are typically crossassociated,
especially antonyms.
 Compound words: misinterpreted. E.g.: outline (out of line)
 Synformy: words similar to each other are problematic (adopt/adapt)
5. Vocabulary learning requires enhancement of partial knowledge:
the initial learning of a word is likely to establish only its form-
meaning connection and perhaps a little of knowledge of its
grammatical characteristics. Additional exposures are necessary to
promote contextual facets of word knowledge.

 SUGGESTIONS:
 Teach semantically unrelated words
 More effective to study words regularly over short overall
sessions than to study them for one or two longer sessions.
 Study 5 or 7 words at a time.