Teaching vocabulary: Going beyond the textbook

Does your textbook … No Yes …show lists of target vocabulary each unit? … provide a reasonable number of items? …include ‘chunks’ in these lists? …distinguish between useful, frequent items and less useful, infrequent ones? …provide activities that teach new vocabulary? …provide plenty of activities reviewing vocabulary? 2: This would mean about 200-300 a year in Primary, from 500 – 1,000 a year in secondary.

If vocabulary lists are inadequate… … then we have to make, or rather supplement, them ourselves. Often a matter of supplementing: the book thinks your students know something they don’t, or an item comes up during the lesson which isn’t in the book but you want them to learn. Remember the target is about 20 items a week in middle school, 30 in upper, but less if you have a 3-4 point class. Primary – 10-15

What is ‘adequate’? About 1,000 items by the end of 6th grade At least 5,000 items by the end of 12th grade

Which means… Elementary school: between 10-15 new items a week Junior high: 15-20 new items a week High school: at least 20 new items a week Is this a reasonable requirement?

Tips: Keep a list of all the vocabulary you teach the class. If there aren’t enough items, then add them (from texts, from activities, from incidental sources, even deliberately taught)

If there aren’t enough ‘chunks’ … then the teacher needs to add them and draw students’ attention to them

Recommended procedures : look out for obvious ‘chunks’, e.g. all over the world, mobile (or cell-) phone notice also flexible collocations , e.g. have/be/turn on when you teach any single word, look out for items that go with it (e.g. verb + preposition, adjective + noun, very + object) and teach them together (e.g. take + photograph)

If the book doesn’t prioritize useful over less useful items… … then the teacher needs to do it him/herself. Corpus-based frequency lists can help. For example: ‘Lextutor’

If the book doesn’t introduce new items efficiently … then the teacher needs to do it. mnemonic: smell, owl, taste

If the book doesn’t provide enough review …then the teacher needs to supplement. Review activities need to be cumulative. They need to include deepening as well as consolidation of knowledge. And they need to be effective learning tasks. Techniques other than ‘make a sentence with…’

Deepening of knowledge Learning more about items whose form and basic meaning you already know. Subtle meanings and connotations? Grammatical connections? Derivatives? Collocation? Appropriateness? Translation?

Summary Vocabulary is crucial for our students’ success in English. Many coursebooks do not teach it adequately. It is important for coursebook writers to be aware of the issues and to try to provide solutions. It is important for teachers to be aware of where they may need to supplement the course materials provided.