Reception

• It is impossible for students to reach near native speaker competence for reception. They (learners) should try to memorise only about 3.000 – 4.000 words for reception because the effort required to learn more will not be rewarded.

• Students are bound to meet low frequency words that they will not know, so they must develop the skill of guessing words from context.

Production

• It is possible for students to learn enough productive vocabulary to reach near native speaker competence.

Students who are not specialising in English, over their whole school career should learn about 1.500 – 2.000 words for production and a further 1.500 – 2.000 words for reception. This will give them a total receptive vocabulary of about 3.000 – 4.000 words. The remaining words they will have to guess.

Which words should the students know?

Now we know how many words the students need to know but you can’t just teach any words. A general principle for vocabulary selection has been that of frequency. We can decide what words to teach on the basis of how frequently they are used by the speakers of the language. The words which are most commonly used are the ones we should teach first. There are a number of published lists available that give guidelines to which words should be taught at what levels. However be careful! Word lists do not take into account the interests of your students. For example, the word ‘install’ maybe not included in the list but if some of your students have computers at home it is a word that will be useful to them. Therefore use such lists as guidelines only.

Another principle that has been used in the selection of vocabulary is that of coverage. A word is more useful if it covers more things than if it has only one very specific meaning – so the argument goes.

The decision about what vocabulary to teach and learn will be heavily influenced, then, by information we can get about frequency and use. But this information will be assessed in the light of other considerations such as topic, function, structure, teachability, needs and wants.

Teaching new words

Students usually have few problems understanding the presentation of new words; their problem is in remembering the word and the best way to remember the word is to meet it and use it in different contexts. Therefore the teacher should nor spend much time on the Presentation stage and get on to Practice and Production stages as soon as possible.

What to present?

As you can see from the list below, there is much more to knowing a word than just knowing its Russian translation and spelling.

• M

  Students should know these three items for ANY word

  eaning

• S pelling

• Pronunciation

• Grammatical information (part of speech, irregular plurals/tense forms; prepositions to use with)

• Word formation. Students need to know facts about word formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical contexts (run - running – ran; a run). Students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. How can we make the words opposite in meaning? Why do we preface one with im- and the other with in-? Word formation, then, means knowing how words are written and spoken and how they can change their form.

• Collocations

• Connotations (e.g. You are slim sounds as a compliment; You are skinny may sound offensive)

• Appropriacy (formal/informal; used more with men or women, etc.)

What we have been saying is that knowing a word means far more than just understanding its meaning(s). We can summarize ‘knowing a word’ in the following way:

MEANING

Sense relations

Meaning in a context

Metaphor and idiom

WORD USE

Collocation

Style and register

WORDS

Parts of speech

WORD INFORMATION

Prefixes and suffixes

Spelling and pronunciation

GRAMMAR INFORMATION

(Taken from: Harmer J., 1991. – P.158)

We have said that vocabulary teaching is as important as the teaching of structure, and in the following examples we will look at a range of activities which are designed to teach and practise words and their various uses. We will look at Presentation, Discovery techniques and Practice.

Which words to teach together?

There is some controversy in this area. Many coursebooks present related words together. For example we find lists of days of the week, and opposites are often taught together. However, there is some experiential and personal evidence that words taught together are often cross associated. For example, many learners confuse Tuesday and Thursday, and you probably think of examples from your own learning.

To avoid cross referencing it is better to teach words you think may cause problems separately, weeks or even months apart.