ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Setsuko Toyama

Rob Waring

Panelists: Marc | Setsuko | Peter
Guest panelist: Rob Waring
Date: February 2001

Topic: "How should teachers incorporate vocabulary teaching into their classes?"

Setsuko Toyama

I think vocabulary should be learned in context. Otherwise, how can we use the vocabulary naturally in real situations? What I can contribute here is a Japanese learner's notion of "learning vocabulary".

There was little concept of "communication" back when I was in a school uniform and memorizing words. Yes, it's memorizing words and not learning vocabulary for us. I think I can safely say that I'm one of the few successful learners of English, who has survived the memorization of vocabulary for exams and still been able to retain it and use it in real context. First thing in high school, we were made to purchase a thick book of TANGO (English words) from Obunsha and were told to memorize the whole book in three years. Every week there was a test of a certain number of pages. We started at "abbey", ended at "xylophone" and then went back to "abbey." Nobody questioned what good came from that memorization but there were the tests, in which we had to write a Japanese translation to English words or vice versa. We were also given a thick book of structures and were told to memorize that, too. I don't think there are many people from my class who are able to use that massive knowledge of English in real communication.

When you have gone through this kind of education, memorization becomes the ultimate goal and you don't think about actually using what you have input unless it's tested. We have to be aware that most students we get to teach have had some experience of the above ordeal. Vocabulary learning for these students is lists of words to memorize along with a single translation to be tested later. When a student asks you, "How can I enlarge my vocabulary?", he or she is expecting a miraculous list of words from you, which, if memorized, will help him or her to get better results in the upcoming tests or real situations when they speak English. There's no such thing! I give my students the following activities but I make a point of telling them, "this is a vocabulary exercise," and they are reassured and work seriously.

1) Review the unit you have taught and pick out new words and put them in a different context. Short sentences will be good. Cloze (______) the target words and have students work in pairs to search the unit for appropriate words. Students working in pairs learn so much from each other while searching for words. Walk around the classroom and help any weak pairs.

2) On a small card, give a small list of words in one category to one student and have him give hints for the rest of the group to guess the correct words.
(Elizabeth Claire's "ESL Teacher's Activities Kit" is meant for elementary school teachers but it has quite a few activities that you can use in communication classes with beginning students at college. It has Teacher Reproducible pages, including Just-A-Minute! with a hundred small cards, each one with 8 words categorized as "Words That Begin With A" or "Things in a City." This activity has been a good warm-up to get my sophomores and juniors actually speaking and working with "words".)

3) Make a crossword puzzle using the new words the students have learned. Better still, make the crossword puzzle into a pairwork. Student A has all the across words and Student B has all the down words and they give each other hints to solve the puzzle together.>

4) Give a list of basic verbs to one student in a pair or a small group. The student makes a sentence using the verb but says "beep" instead of the verb.
Example: I beep a bike to school every day. (ride)
When they are used to beeping verbs, use the same activity for adjectives and adverbs.

5) Collect tricky sentences and give them as a reminder that one translation for one word can lead to total misunderstanding. It's more awareness raising than vocabulary building but I think it's important for our students who have been memorizing only the first translation word in the dictionary. One example from last fall... "Did Bill trip over the dog?" Guess what my students thought it meant. They thought Bill left his dog at the pet hotel and went on a trip...

Panelists: Marc | Setsuko | Peter
Guest panelist: Rob Waring

Setsuko Toyama, Toyama English House

Co-author of Journeys: Listening and Speaking & Development Editor of SuperKids

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