Notes on vocabulary teaching

Students need to take an active role and link language with its function. It helps to look at the context of which the vocabulary is part: the situation (purpose and readership of the text) and the co-text. They also need to learn technical words.
So it is important to choose texts:
• For their functional purpose.
• For the technical words they contain

Students should be helped to:

1. Observe/ notice
2. Check understanding and function within the text/categorise
3. Experiment
4. Do exercises based on the texts they need to use
5. Recycle several times

Students know individual words but lack collocational competence.
So tasks must be designed that offer opportunities to do so.

Noticing
Produce materials that get ss to identify and become aware of lexical items through exposure to texts that contain them. One of the central activities in ESP teaching is to encourage students to identify language items in authentic materials.

1) Highlight in different colours: causes in blue, problems in red, solutions in green.
2) recording vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way: use tables or mind maps
3) gapfills using gapmakers
Focus on:

- Collocations
- academic/technical words
- Prefabricated lexical items (‘The ability to chunk language successfully is central to understanding of how language works' (Lewis, 1997).
- Functions

To check understanding, find meaning by:
A) Making sense of the new words by relating them to the topic you are reading about. The word field, for instance, has a different meaning when talking about agriculture, football or education.
B) Find words you already know that are related to the new words you are learning.
C) Use a concordancer to see example sentences which contain the word you want to learn more about.
D) Use a monolingual vocabulary
E) If English is not your first language, find a translation in a bilingual dictionary

2) Record highlighted vocabulary in an organised, personalised and meaningful way. This will help improve your understanding and also memorisation.
Group vocabulary in categories that you find useful. You could categorise by topic (accounting, marketing, products, services..) by function (cause and effect/ compare and contrast, causes, problems, solutions) or grammatical function (noun, verb,adverb,preposition). You can categorise vocabulary using a mind map or a table.
Place vocab on a cline according to strength of meaning, hedging positive/negative connotations
Record in terms of : what you can do, never do, want to do….
Record signalling words and link them to the info they refer to ( cause-signal-effect)
Keep a dictionary .

3) Experiment and re-use
Write some sentences in which you use the new vocabulary.
Write a summary that uses the new words.
Write a parallel text that about some aspect of the topic of which they have learned the vocab
Use to complete a task in which that vocabulary is needed:
matching pairs, sorting exercises, pictorial schemata, problem solving tasks, values clarification, discussion, posters, flashcards, games, role-play, including oral presentations and writing summaries
Collocations
Fixed phrases (in demand)
Nominalisation using abstract entities (the analysis reveals, this essay will examine, this research aims to, the data show…)
Use of metaphors (to tackle an issue, launch a company, branch)

Useful academic language:
• Cause and effect
• Compare and contrast
• Similarity and difference http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u3/pg61ex2similarityanddifference.htm
• Beliefs, opinions attitudes
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/U4/beliefs_opinions_attitudes.htm
• Change and continuity
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u5/pg110ex6nounsandverbs.htm
• Formal vocabulary
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u6/pg137ex2idioms.htm

• Importance and unimportance
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/2004/u6/pg138ex6importanceandunimportance.htm
• Describing trends
http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/exercises/trends.htm




References
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/teachingvocabulary.html
Lexical approach in ESP:
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Kavaliauskiene-LA.html
Alexander, , Argent, S and Spencer,J (2008) EAP Essentials. Reading: Garnet