Overview of Vocabulary Teaching & Learning
Introduction
Vocabulary plays a core role in language teaching and learning. It lays a basis for speaking,
listening, reading and writing. If one has not an extensive amount of vocabulary and good strategies
to acquire new words, learners usually accomplish less than their potentials.
In the first section I illustrate the difficulties or challenge met by language learners and take
Chinese students for example, including the influence from the amount of English vocabulary as well
as some intralexical factors. In Section Two this essay mainly illustrates some strategies to meet
this challenge for beginners, intermediated and advanced respectively. Then I deliberatively explain
the rich instruction, also called directive teaching of vocabulary.
Section One
Teaching and Learning Vocabulary
Why do we emphasise a large amount of vocabulary? Some people believe how many words we
have learned is a symbol of people’ s status. The size of vocabulary symbolizes the degree of people’s education and intelligence. It also indicates the quantities of books you have read. People regard it as
something very valuable. Therefore, the first biggest obstacle for English- learners is exactly the large size of vocabulary.
As a second language learner of English, how much vocabulary do we need? The size of vocabulary
we need is related to the purposes of language study. For different purposes people need to grasp
different sizes of vocabulary. English has a large amount of vocabulary because its composition is very
complex. As a very open language English absorbs or borrows quite a lot of words from Anglo-Saxon, Norman or French, Latin, Greek. According to Webster’s Third International Dictionary of English which is the largest non-historical dictionary of English when it was published, English has a vocabulary of 54,000. This amount doesn’t embrace compound words, archaic words, abbreviations, proper names, and alternative spellings and dialects
forms. In fact, words are classified into families consisting of a base word, inflected forms, and transparent
derivations. Do English learners have to grasp such a large amount of vocabulary, 54,000? Then what about native
speakers? Do they know all these words? How much vocabulary do they know? At present the most conservative
figure is up to 20,000 for native speakers. It means that a pupil in his or her fifth years in a primary school should
have a vocabulary of 4,000 to 5,000 word families. A graduate from university will have a size of 20,000. A word family
only takes it into account that a base word, its inflected forms and some reasonably regular derived forms. According
to different purposes and education levels second language learners need different sizes of vocabulary. For example,
a traveller in another country he only needs some basic words about asking the way, buying things. But most students
want more than this. They want to communicate with native-speakers. Then, they need more words. I will explain in the following parts in details.
Although nowadays vocabulary learning procedures are still somewhat a mystery, one thing we are very sure is
that words are impossible to acquire immediately, at least not for adult L2 students. Instead, it is gained step by step
over a period of time and needs a lot of exposures to the object language. Thus, vocabulary learning needs patience
and persistence.
Besides the first challenge English-learners often meet the second barrier, according to Batia Laufer (1997), some intralexical factors of English.
1. Pronouceability
1) For Chinese, most students only look at the translated equivalent in the dictionary without inferring to the pronunciation
when they look up a new word which they meet in reading. So they can just know what the word means rather than
the sound and the usage. This kind of language learning method not only leads to their poor pronunciation but their
spoken and listening English becoming worse and worse.
2) Due to the large land distribution in China and a large population there is a variety of dialects used. Different dialects,
especially the southern dialects, exert a great effect on their pronunciation of English words. Seventy percent of
Chinese population living in the north or the middle of China speaks Mandarin whereas the remaining part of the population
uses other dialects which are completely different from what most Chinese can understand. In some northern parts of
China, local people cannot tell the difference between [s] and [ʃ]. However, in the south, for some people it is impossible
to pronounce [l] which never shows up in their dialect. Instead, they usually replace [l] with [n]. This replacement is
wrong not only in English but also in Mandarin Chinese. Both of the above cases are typical ones happened on Chinese
learners. But for all Chinese the most difficult English sounds are the inter-dental fricatives [θ] and [ð] because they don’t even exist in Chinese language system.
3) Most Chinese characters are monosyllables and end with vowels. Mandarin speakers usually add an [r] sound at the end of
many words, which contributes to the fact that many Chinese learners habitually add [r] sound at the end of consonants.
Take ‘big’ [big] for example, Chinese learners like to pronounce it as [bigэr].
4) Correct pronunciation of an English word requires stress on the proper syllable. Chinese is a language with 5 tones which is
distributed respectively on each character. At this point Chinese is again fully different from English which has its own
intonation in sentences varying according to the change of stresses in words and phrases. Therefore, it is a hard job for
adult students in China to show intonation in sentences because Chinese intonation is presented by those five tones on
characters rather than sentences.
2. Orthography
A different L1 writing system can also be responsible for some learning problems. Chinese language doesn’t belong to Indo-European Language family but Sino-Tibet Family which use characters to show the meaning instead of letters. Usually from primary schools Chinese students learn the
Pinyin system which is symbolized by letters. There are two reasons for China to create Pinyin. One lies in unifying the dialects all over
China and establishes standard Chinese pronunciation. The other one is to make Chinese characters easier for foreigners to learn.
However, in daily life we only use characters instead of letters to communicate. Thus, it is like a totally new field for Chinese to use
letters to listen, speak, read and write.
3. Length
By instinct, it seems that the longer the new word is the more difficult it is to remember. In fact, every experienced learner finds the
opposite. Schmitt (1997) believes some longer words have characteristic of ‘morphological transparency’. It means a long word can
consist of some familiar morphemes like root, prefix and affix. If learners are acquainted with these components there is no impossibility
to comprehend or memorise easily. Another misunderstanding is that short words are easier to remember. In English, in deed, most
short words are Anglo-Saxon origin used quite often in daily life compared to the longer ones from Latin origin. The case of being short as well as frequently
used does not happen in every language. So, the learnability of a word does not rely on the length but the frequency. It is the numerous
exposures to the target language that affect the learnability of vocabulary. In other words, the quantity of input contributes to the successful
learning of the short words in English.
4. Morphology
The inflectional and derivational forms of words cause some other difficulties. For example, cases of nouns, irregular forms of verbs, number
of nouns are complicated for beginners of English. We can even find a lot of mistakes made by Chinese intermediate and advanced learners
like using ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ a lot, because the sounds of the third person are the same in Chinese and the subjective and accusative of the
third person are also the same in Chinese. Generally speaking, it is very helpful to separate words into morphemes in order to remember them
but sometimes there are many tricky words called ‘deceptive transparency words’ by Schmitt (1997). Take ‘outline’ for example. It seems that
‘outline’ is composed of two parts, ‘out’ and ‘line’ but ‘out’ does not mean ‘out of’. Thus, this word does not have the surface meaning of ‘outline’ at all.
5. Similarity of lexical forms
On one vocabulary recognition test, Henning (1973) found that learners, particularly of lower proficiency, chose sound-similar words rather than meaning-similar ones. This indicates that the language learners were experiencing acoustic encoding interference. I often make this kind of mistakes, especially
when I talk fast, even though I have learned English for many years. For example, sometimes I say ‘parrot’ instead of ‘carrot’ in which there is only one
consonant difference.
6. Grammar – part of speech
Some scholars argue that certain grammatical categories are more difficult to learn than others. However, Odlin and Natalico (1982) report lexical errors
which show that, even though learners acquired the semantic content of some words, they confused their part of speech. There is no reported evidence
for prevalence of nouns or verbs over adjectives.
7. Semantic features of the word
Laufa (1997) says semantic properties also influence word learnability in aspects of abstractness, specificity and register restriction, idomaticity and
multiplicity of meaning.
Section Two
How should we meet the challenge?
As a teacher of English we should be well aware of the word learnablity so that we can design good teaching syllabus, and present proper vocabulary, practice
and testing. We can use rich techniques or skills to teach English.
Although English has a large amount of vocabulary it doesn’t mean that we have to remember every word because not every single word is useful in our daily life. Teachers and linguists usually use word frequency to measure
the usefulness. Some words occur frequently in daily life, such as ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘I’ and so on. These words occupy a large proportion of English spoken and written texts. We
only need to know enough of them so that we could have a good degree of comprehension of a text. The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) claims that
15,000 words cover 95 per cent of the running words of their corpus. With a vocabulary size of 2000 words, a learner could understand 80 percent of a text. Clearly,
learners need to get 3,000 frequent words to get through daily conversation. Teachers should not teach more than this amount until they are well learned. Thus, according
to different studying aims of students’ teachers have to choose proper word lists for them. Vocabulary in word lists is the essential for beginners.
For beginners:
Some teachers prefer reading aloud and ask students to repeat what they have heard without looking at the word list in their textbooks. One very common way is
that students just read after the teacher with the book open. Others simply ask every student to repeat each new word one after another. All these methods have some
advantages, but when students spend too much time on repeating new words instead of doing some other helpful activities these methods don’t seem very good. So these methods are not very favourable in good vocabulary teaching. But rote memorization, bilingual translation and glossing can be valuable
in assisting learning of the phonetic and graphological shapes and patterns of words.
In books without translations of a foreign language, the teaching needs particular skills. Allen (1983) suggested three ways that teachers could try to use during
teaching vocabulary. First of all is to use pictures, actions and diagrams to show many meanings of one word. Teachers can use students’ own language to explain it
as well (bilingual translation). If the students know some simple English teachers may give some definition in vocabulary the students already know, like paraphrasing.
Most beginners find word cards and word lists are very helpful for memorizing the high frequency words. In kids’ lessons, especially when I teach ‘days of a week’ and
‘months of years’ I enjoy telling students stories of those words and they are fond of this way very much. But don’t forget teachers’ jobs. Before telling a story we have to give them some tasks to do. Then after the story we have to give them opportunities to practice themselves.
Although this method performs slowly it is pretty useful and helpful to a long-term memory. The key point is that they love stories. Another mnemonic technique is key word technique with which the learners create an unusual association between
the word form and its meaning. But teachers should know sometimes it is difficult to think of keywords that sound like the foreign word. The more imagination you have, the
more useful the technique.
According to my teaching experience, word cards are more effective than word lists. Since words lists are lined alphabetically, students are liable
to learn in the same order. Without remembering anything they can easily guess what the next is. It is better for teachers to use word cards or word banks.
Teachers select key words for students to remember and then design relative activities. I usually type down key words for them and present a good example
as well. Students’ job is to fill in blanks such as parts of speech, pronunciation, and their own examples. Sometimes I will leave a blank for them to
write their native language.
For intermediate:
At the Intermediate level, in fact we teach many of the same kinds of words that Elementary students need. Like lessons for beginners, the Intermediate vocabulary lessons
include many words for things and persons in the learners’ daily lives. Compared with beginners, however, intermediate students have one advantage. They have learned a large
number of English words which can now be used by the teacher for defining new vocabulary. Defining/Explaining English words by means of other English words is particularly
needed by teachers of intermediate classes, for two reasons. One is for the practice of their listening ability. Intermediate students should hear only English words from their teachers.
The classes for Intermediate students should be conducted entirely in English. Teachers should use simpler English words to define English words but it is not an easy way. Skill
in the use of the technique generally requires considerable experience in teaching English to speakers of other language. There are many types of defining new words such as synonym,
antonym, analytic definition, taxonomic definition. We can also make full use of examples, function, grammatical definition, association and classification as well.
At an intermediate level, usually I suggest students writing down words in their word cards or notebooks according to different categories, like plants, animals, buildings, furniture,
and office equipment and so on. Once they want to talk about a topic the notebooks are the most useful thing. I also prefer using morphological method to teach students. In fact, this
method is mainly for advanced learners. However, teachers could introduce this way gradually. This is a good way towards developing their independent learning strategy. This method
demands teachers to be familiar with Latin affixes and roots. Some Latin prefixes occur in many different words like ad-, al, -ness and so on.
For advanced students:
In advanced classes, teacher should have two aims in mind. One is to prepare students for the English words used by native speakers. The other aim is to foster students’ independent
learning strategies for dealing with unknown words.
Advanced language learners are almost beyond the end of the language program. If learning is to continue beyond the end of the course, the students will have to depend on their own efforts
and habits of study. Advanced students must be taught to use them well. The more reading materials students meet the more words students need to know. Teachers are impossible to explain
all those words in class. Dictionaries therefore become especially important. Like what Allen (1983) believes ‘Dictionaries as passports to independence’, teachers should encourage students
to use dictionaries instead of depending on teachers’ interpretation in class. We have to admit that the most common dictionary for students is the twolanguage dictionary although in some aspects
bilingual dictionaries are not as satisfactory as what we expect. Since bilingual ones are less expensive and more easily obtained than allEnglish dictionaries, most students often choose them.
Allen (1983) recommends two helpful dictionaries: the Oxford Student’ s Dictionary of American English and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. This kind of dictionary could
show teachers how to explain new words by means of using the familiar English words of students. Secondly, it contains some good examples besides definitions. These example sentences
sometimes are more helpful than simple definition.
One indirect or incidental means is guessing in context. From the former section we know that 3,000 of vocabulary is the basis of about 80 percent of texts. But there are still 20 percent
of words we don’ t understand. And most of those words are key words for understanding the passage. Carter (1998) pointed out that the more advanced the learner becomes, the more ‘inferential’
or ‘implicit’ and learner-central vocabulary learning strategies will have to become. It means the more advanced the learner, the more likely they are to benefit from learning words in context. Provide that we cannot be memorized
a word in a direct way then they will be learned through an indirect way like in context. Some writers have given us various ways of clues to help us in guessing meanings of words in texts. However, most
of the information they give depend much on the teacher’ s choice of questions (Nation, 1990). Only Clarke and Nation’ s (1980) strategy is basically very simple. The first step is to ask the learners to find
the unknown word and then look at its close context. Furthermore, learners will have a much broader view of the clause including the unknown word, such as the formation of the clause, how it relates itself
to other clauses, sentences, or paragraphs. Next, students will take a guess and then there is a simple check system to confirm the guess is the most suitable and possible. Once learners have mastered
the steps of the strategy and have practiced guessing words by systematically going through the steps, it is no longer necessary to apply all the steps. That is, according to Nation (1990), the strategy is just
a means of acquiring the unconscious skill that an efficient reader already has.
Extensive reading is also a good way to enhance word knowledge and get a lot of exposure to the most frequent and useful words. At the early and intermediate levels of language learning, simplified
reading books can be of great benefit. Other sources of incidental learning include problem-solving group word activities and formal classroom activities where vocabulary is not the main focus.
The last strategy of vocabulary learning suggested by some linguists is through word sets and grids. The organizing principle is on semantic structure of words in conceptually related domains.
Psycholinguistic support for this method indicates that individuals tend to recall words according to the categories or semantic fields in which they are conceptually mapped.
The above involves the specific learning strategies. One thing bringing linguists’ attention is taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies usually as part of a piece of research into learners’ strategy use.
Schmitt (1997) developed an extensive taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies organized depending on both the Oxford system and the Discovery/Consolidation distinction. It is divided into two categories,
discovery strategies and consolidation strategies. Many detailed strategies are involved like cognates, guessing from context, looking at referential materials such as dictionaries, word lists, flash cards,
social strategies, mnemonics, pictures or imagery, grouping, metacognitive strategies and so on.
Some other taxonomy tries to separate aspects of vocabulary knowledge (what is involved in knowing a word) from sources of vocabulary knowledge, and learning processes.
According to Nation (2001), there are three main processes that lead to a word being remembered.
Noticing means simply giving attention to the individual words. There are many techniques for teachers to use in reading and writing activities, like pre-teaching words, highlighting words in text, glossing words, putting words in a vocabulary notebook or a word card, orally repeating the word. Retrieving is related to recall of previously met items. Generating
strategies are to establish vocabulary knowledge includes many kinds of generation: receptive/productive, instructional, overt/covert, in context/decontextualised.
Rich instruction
Here, we should mention the rich instruction named by Beck, McKeown and Omanson (1987). When an unknown word has become an obstacle for the achievement of a performance or understanding of a
text teachers have to use this direct vocabulary teaching way, guide students to look at a range of its meanings and collocations. Generally speaking, rich instruction is suitable for high-frequency words and words for which the learner has special needs.
Teachers use rich instruction in order to ascertain the word as a comprehensible and easily reached vocabulary item. Rich instruction comprises: spending time on the word; overtly and specifically dealing with
several aspects of comprehending a word; and involving the learners in contemplatively and actively managing the word. Rich instruction can be a teacher-led activity or it can be student-led; teachers can use group work or give students a chance to do individual work.
There are some disagreements against the direct teaching of vocabulary for first language learners. Nation (2000) cites three essential cautions and provides several ways of using rich instruction. Those three
concerns are applied to the use of rich instruction with learners of another language.
Conclusion
In this essay I illustrate more information about difficulties faced by second-language learners and learning strategies. Especially for the strategies part I make some statements according to students’ levels. In fact, I hope I could talk more about the taxonomy of vocabulary strategies and rich
instruction. However, due to the word and time limit it is impossible to clarify more definition like retrieving and generating strategies and some activities of rich instruction. To conclude, I hope there will be more research
made and more accurate and helpful strategies of vocabulary learning and teaching for students as well as teachers.
Reference
Allen, V. F. (1983). Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary. Oxford: OUP.
Baxter, J. (1980). ‘The dictionary and vocabulary behaviour: A single word or a handful?’ TESOL Quarterly 14 (3): 325-36.
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G. & Omanson, R. C. (1987). ‘The effects and uses of diverse vocabulary instructional techniques’, in McKeown and Curtis 147-163.
Carter, R. (1998). Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives (2nd). London: Routledge
Clarke, D. F. and Nation, I. S. P. (1980). ‘Guessing the meanings of words from context: Strategy and techniques.’ System 8 (3): 211-20.
Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. (1987, 1995). London: HarperCollins.
Gu Yongqi and Johnson, R.K. (1996) ‘Vocabulary learning strategies and language learning outcomes’, Language Learning, 46, 643-679.
Henning, G. H. (1973). ‘Remembering foreign language vocabulary: acoustic and semantic parameters.’ Language Learning, 23 (2): 185-96.
Ilson, R. (1983). ‘Etymological information: can it help our students?’ ELT Journal, 37, 76-82.
Laufer, B (1997) ‘What’s in a word that makes it hard or easy: some intralexical factors that affect the learning of words.’ In Schmitt, N. & McCarthy, M. (eds) 1997
Nation, I.S.P. (1990). Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Boston: Heinle and Heinle Publishers.
Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Odlin, T. and D. Natalico. (1982). ‘Some characteristics of word classification in a second language.’ The Modern Language Journal 66: 34-8.
Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Teaching. Cambridge: CUP.
Schmitt, N. and McCarthy, M. (eds) 1997 Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge: CUP.
Sokmen, A. J. (1992). ‘Students as vocabulary generators’, TESOL Journal, 1, 16-18.
Tomaszczyk, J. (1979). ‘Dictionaries: users and uses.’ Glottodidactica 12: 103-19.
