1. Vocabulary teaching

2. General approaches that teachers and teaching materials can adopt
Traditional direct approach: Teach vocabulary items
Indirect1, learner training approach: Teach conscious vocabulary-related strategies
How to help a poor man?
Indirect2, natural approach: Create opportunities for spontaneous acquisition via communicative tasks . The three hypotheses.

3. Direct teaching Selection and ordering Amount and rate Presentation
Practice
Production
Assessment
TASK Which are in the teacher’s hands?

4. Selection and ordering… the vocab syllabus
Who does it?
What criteria are relevant?
TASK

5. Importance, aka utility
Frequency lists e.g.
Ministry lists
Other student needs
Ease, aka learnability, teachability
Interlingual, intralingual, extralingual
Interest

6. Amount and rate
What would be the ideal amount of vocabulary to be learnt overall in a course?
What is a suitable rate per hour of new words?
TASK

12. Presentation
What actually is a pedagogically useful vocabulary item to present?
Words?
Word families?
Lexical chunks aka lexical phrases, formulae, readymades…?

13. Beyond phrasal verbs (e. g. bring up), multiword compounds (e. g
Beyond phrasal verbs (e.g. bring up), multiword compounds (e.g. hard disk) and idiomatic phrases (e.g. pull someone’s leg) to:
polyword at any rate, by and large, as well [= ‘also’]
frame or slot the [adj.]-er the [adj]–er, as [adj]….as,
so [adj]…that… ,
Little did…realize that…
sentence head Could you....., God only knows wh-…
sentence tail …, if you would., …and so on.
cliché There's more than one way to skin a cat.

14. What is there to present about a lexical item?
..beyond the basic ‘form – one meaning’ link
How can presentation be done?
Traditional deductive presentation
Inductive presentation

15. Deductive presentation
Three basic ways to present word meaning
Extension to other aspects of words like collocation
E.g. More Words You Need (Rudzka et al., 1985, MacMillan)

16. Inductive presentation, requiring learner strategies
To present word meaning
Teacher provides a ‘pregnant context’ , e.g. a situation or story from which the meaning of the word can be easily guessed
For other aspects of words like collocation, grammatical behaviour, stylistic value
Students work on corpus concordance lines or statistics e.g. at

17. Practice… Production
Any repetition / practice of vocab has some at least minimal value… but
….there are many types of vocab exercise/task
Teacher needs to choose suitable ones in the light of what kind of work needs to be done on vocab that has been presented
So what are the functions of exercises / practice?

18. Confirm that X has been correctly learnt
X = what the teacher presented about the lexical items
Confirm that X has been correctly learnt
Reinforce prior learning, i.e. aid memory of X
Recycling, repetition
Establishment of associations
Deepening of processing
Activation: automatise /proceduralise what has been learnt of X so that learners access it more fluently
Activation: extend knowledge of the items beyond X
Activation: turn passive/receptive/recognition mastery of X into active/production/recall ability

19. Recycling… or lack of it

21. Exercise types in P and W
Selective attention: Make students identify/notice wordform (e.g. underline the word wherever it occurs in the text) a
Recognition: Make students show recognition/receptive knowledge of meaning (e.g. match word with picture) b
Manipulation: make students show wordformation knowledge (e.g. change word from noun to adjective)
Interpretation: make students show knowledge of collocation and syntactic properties (e.g. guess meaning from context, give grammatical function of word in text)
Production: make students show recall/production word knowledge (e.g. open cloze) c

22. Communicative practice/production
Often seen as ultimate goal of vocab teaching
‘Deep end’ approach… reverse PPP
Indirect 1 approach needed here

23. Indirect1 teaching Vocabulary related strategies potentially to teach
To help learner where (s)he does not know vocabulary, esp. in real communicative use: Coping
Some of those involve learning: Discovery
Some involve managing without the needed vocab
To help learner remember vocabulary previously met/taught: Consolidation
TASK… think of examples

24. Coping Consolidation Skip/avoid
Make do with existing L2 resources (and maybe Discover)
Appeal (so Discover)
Consolidation
Self-selection and note keeping
Repetition
Association
Integrative practice

25. What the teacher needs to check
What strategies do students already know from L1?
What strategies have been already taught, maybe implicitly, through direct teaching?
For more demanding strategies, check if students have the threshold language prof to be able to exploit them / transfer them from L1

26. Three general approaches:
Allow or encourage them (e.g. ‘Use your dictionary’, ‘Try guessing it’, ‘Why not put that in your vocab notebook?’)
Teach them overtly as opportunities arise during a reading task, on specific instances
Inductively: e.g. ‘What did/could you do here to get the meaning?’
Deductively: e.g. ‘Look at the phrase after the word and guess’
Teach them overtly and separately from reading task
Inductively: e.g. ‘What do you do when you meet an unknown word?’, ‘What do you do to try to remember words?’
Deductively: e.g. ‘I am going to show you how to use your dictionary properly’. Note: examples used may be known words

27. After strategy teaching…
Implement ‘deep-end’ approach
Indirect2 should work better now

28. Indirect2 teaching
Incidental spontaneous learning in extensive communicative language use
The three hypotheses claiming major sources of this
Input (Krashen)
Output (Swain)
Interaction (Long)

29. What really occurs? Incidental learning/acquisition
..but is it unconscious/implicit?
The need for noticing
So consciousness is involved
… but the teacher does not teach vocab or strategies in this approach/phase

30. Conditions the teacher needs to create
Interesting communication opportunities
Motivated students
?Input modification
Incidental learning may be planned to be
Vocab acquisition tasks: required vocab at i+1… but not i+2
Vocab fluency tasks: required vocab at i or i-1
Strategy development tasks?

31. References
Thornbury, S How to Teach Vocabulary. London: Longman.
Gairns, R. and Redman, S Working with words: a guide to teaching and learning vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M Vocabulary and language teaching. London: Longman.
Sökmen, A ‘Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary.’ In Schmitt, N. and M. McCarthy (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press
Hatch, E. and C. Brown Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (parts only)
Nation, I.S.P Learning Vocabulary in another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series, CUP
Read, J Assessing Vocabulary.