Teaching Vocabulary
When we think about language learning in the classroom, it is useful to think of ways in which people learn vocabulary outside of school. (often such learning is successful among children learning their mother tongue). Foreign language words for familiar objects/ persons are important to teach in a beginner’s class but not easily learnt by students. Teaching such words will require some skills as students are likely to feel that words for familiar objects are not needed when the foreign language is not used for communication outside of class. Having said that, while teaching vocabulary, we should become aware of the followings: 1. Vocabulary is learned when someone feels a certain need. When the student feels no REAL NEED to learn something, this feeling must be created by the teacher. 2. To create in the student’s mind a sense of personal need, it is not enough to say “Here is a word to learn” but “Here is what it means” or “This word will be useful to you someday” or “Here is what you can say when you are at the airport….”. 3.Drilling exercises are a good way to practice vocabulary. However a great deal of time should be spent on the meaningful use of words. 4. To make words necessary, we should engage students in activities that require them to use particular words/expressions. By practicing/exchanging information/using language in a particular context, their feeling of need would increase.
Written by Diana Tërshana
I totally agree that students absorb new vocabulary easily if they feel real need to learn something and that this feeling must be created by the teacher. This is what I did in one of my classes at Lincoln:
I started telling my students a very interesting story I had read in a book. Their task was to take down notes if necessary because they would have to answer a few questions later. When I reached the climax (and I could tell that I had all my students’ attention by that time), I deliberately replaced some simple words with their synonyms, words that students had never come across before. At that point you could easily see their frustration and their eagerness to understand what had really happened to the main character in the story. When I finished my part I asked them if they were ready to learn a list of 10 synonyms and they laughed. They were ready to learn even more than that and quickly because the story was still a mystery to them.
After asking them to work in pairs and figuring out the meaning of the new vocabulary, I checked their comprehension and was really glad that they had absorbed every single new word.