From a million words, pick the best | Bangkok Post: learning

TEACHER - 2 - Teacher

When we went through our own education, did our teachers identify, present and ensure that we retained the vocabulary we use as adults?

Teachers and students carefully select key vocabulary words, which in English read, clockwise from top left, ‘buffalo’, ‘goat’, ‘horse’ and ‘cow’. PURICH TRIVITAYAKHUN

The answer is, "It depends", as some teachers are very good at selecting vocabulary to learn while others are not so efficient, especially in the case of educators limited to teaching primarily from textbooks.

I always remember a comment I heard once about textbooks: "Written by old people to be used by middle-aged people to teach young people." Makes you wonder how anything of interest will get into a textbook or become part of what is learned in class.

Concerns

There is no doubt that language students need to learn useful vocabulary. They need effective words to discuss activities they enjoy, to identify with accuracy the things they want to talk about and to be able to express their true feelings about things.

However, there is a limit to how many words students should be expected to learn in terms of both active and passive knowledge. With over one million words in English, 20,000 to 30,000 in our passive vocabulary and perhaps 2,000 used on a daily basis, we, as native speakers of English, still have mastered only a fraction of the available vocabulary words.

It should be the same for our students. There are many words that naturally come up in class, through classroom activities and exercises or are heard outside of class that teachers can avoid adding to a vocabulary list, unless they become truly necessary for students to focus on.

Four questions

This will not be easy for students to accept as many believe that they must know every word encountered. With this in mind, it becomes the teacher's job to reduce this massive learning load by carefully selecting words to present and a smaller list of words that students will be expected, in time, to learn.

To do this, answers to four questions can help to decide what new words should be taught or learned.

First, is this word needed to understand the material being read or studied? If not, then spend time on other more important items.

Second, will it be possible to learn the meaning of the word from the context? If the answer is yes, then it might be a good idea to learn it this way. This will help to improve this important skill while learning the meaning of a new item.

Third, can the word be used to improve context, structural or dictionary skills? If yes, then learning it ahead of time will have two benefits: It will help you learn the word, and it will strengthen very useful generative skills. For example, teaching or learning the word "depopulate" will be useful as it might lead to the learning of the prefix "de", which will be useful with many new vocabulary items.

Fourth, how useful is this word outside the selection being worked on at the time? The answer will probably be based on word frequency. The more likely it will be encountered in the future, the greater is the need to assign it to a vocabulary list where it can be studied and reviewed.

Although a word might not appear to need review at this time, often, a judgment call is needed to decide if it would be better to overtly teach its meaning. Experience, available time, or perhaps a desire to reduce frustration, might lead to a particular word being taught.

Knowledge or an understanding of how an individual likes to learn new vocabulary should also be considered. Some students might like the challenge of learning words on their own; others might like to know what a word means before moving on so that the context can be used to reinforce the meaning.

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