Обучение лексике

Teaching Vocabulary

Aims

• To raise your awareness of some principles underlying the activation of vocabulary

• To experience a sequence of tasks designed to activate vocabulary

• To introduce some recent research results on teaching vocabulary

Lead in / warm-up

Choose one type of book to take to a country where you don’t speak the language

• A dictionary
• A grammar reference book
• A phrase book

Stage 1 Statement implications

• • The importance of activities that require learners to retrieve words from memory.

• • The importance of ‘deeper processing’ tasks – that is, increasing degrees of ‘cognitive depth’, such as manipulating them, relating them to words they know, and personalizing them.
• • The importance of activities that require learners to produce words (rather than simply recognize them) if the words are going to become part of their active vocabulary.
• • The importance of meeting (and re-meeting) and using words in new contexts.

• kereru = pigeon
• makimaki = monkey
• hipi = sheep
• kaka = parrot
• tuna = eel
• kiwi = kiwi
• kuri = dog
• ruru = owl
• mako = shark
• wheke = octopus
• poaka = pig
• tohora = whale

1 Eliminate the three words that weren’t included at the learning stage.

2 Put the remaining words in the order that they were originally presented on the board.

3 Match any pairs that rhyme.

4 Group the twelve words into three sets of four words each, so that each word in the set has something in common.

5 Decide which could be the odd-one-out in each set of four – and why.

6 Choose one member of each set of four that the group agrees would make a good pet – and why.

7 Choose one set of four and rank the four according to the probable results of a race i.e. Who would win, come second, etc.?

8 Then, individual members of the group take turns to either draw or imitate the sound or gait of one of the items, while the others try to guess which one it is – using its Maori name.

9 Finally, each group member chooses one of the 12 words and writes a true / false sentence (in English, but using the relevant Maori), which he or she then reads out to the group, who decide if it is true or false.

Making conclusion:

• from form-focused to meaning-focused tasks,

• from recognition to production tasks,

• from tasks involving low processing demands to tasks involving relatively high processing demands.

Agree or disagree?

• Teaching vocabulary means teaching words.

• You need to know about 85% of the words of a text in order to understand it reasonably well.

• The most efficient way to learn new words is through extensive reading.

• It helps you remember if you learn items in semantic sets (e.g. colors, animals).

• Translation is a useful strategy in vocabulary teaching.

• Learners need to review a new item about four or five times in order to remember it.

Teaching vocabulary means teaching words.

• 90% correct.
• Much recent research on lexical chunks / phrasal expressions, and their importance.
• Biber & Cortes, (2003), Dongkwang, S., & Nation, P. (2007), Koprowski (2005), Liu (2003, 2011), Martinez & Murphy (2011), Martinez & Schmitt (2012), Nation (2006), Schmitt (2003).

Compositionality

• It is useful to teach compositional phrases such as I don’t know, in the past, talk about, every time.
• It is essential to teach non-compositional ones such as go on, of course, make sure, by and large.
• These should be part of any vocabulary syllabus: probably about 10% (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012).

1. Multi-word constructs

Phrases, or ‘chunks’: combinations of words that go together to make a single concept, retrieved as a single unit from memory: of course, as well, take advantage of, right away…

Collocations: words that ‘prefer’ specific other words with them: do + homework (not make ); a high (not tall ) mountain ; rosy + cheeks

often a synonym or translation that is a single word

Practical implications

• Look out for lexical chunks and collocations in texts, draw students’ attention to them.
• When teaching a new word, teach also the commonest collocations (e.g. afraid + of ).
• Make sure any list of vocabulary to learn includes multi-word combinations as well as single words.

You need to know about 85% of the words of a text in order to understand it satisfactorily.

• Wrong.
• 85% not only does not ensure understanding the main ideas: it also does not provide sufficient evidence to help guess the unknown words.

Extract from Obama’s speech

• That is the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we renewed our focus on the __________ who __________ our nation. We have made substantial __________ in our homeland __________ and disrupted _________ that threatened to take American ____________.
• (86%)

• That is the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we renewed our focus on the _________ who threaten our nation. We have made substantial __________ in our homeland security and disrupted plots that threatened to take American lives.
• (95%)

• That is the work we began last year. Since the day I took office, we renewed our focus on the terrorists who threaten our nation. We have made substantial investments in our homeland security and disrupted plots that threatened to take American lives.

So how much of a reading text do you need to know?

• Researchers estimate 95%-98%.
• Ho et al. (2000), Huckin & Coady (1999), Schmitt et al. (2010), Staer (2009),
• The most recent studies suggest nearer 98% (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2012).
• But probably less for informal spoken discourse.

2. You need to know 95-98% of the words of a text in order to understand it

• In order to understand unsimplified texts, students will need by the end of their schooling to know something like 8,000 word families (+ ‘chunks’).
• This means if they learn English for 8 years, they need about 1,000 items a year.

Practical implications

• Don’t expect students to be able to understand texts where they know less than 95%.
• Invest classroom time in vocabulary expansion.
• Make sure you cover the commonest and most useful items (check with English Vocabulary Profile http://vocabulary.englishprofile.org ).
• Use vocabulary expansion activities as well as vocabulary from texts .

The most efficient way to learn new words is through extensive reading.

• Wrong.
• We learn new items very slowly through extensive reading. By ‘picking up’ through extensive reading or listening: learners appear to learn only one new word per 2,000 - VERY slow! So we need deliberate teaching and re-teaching of new items.
• Bill Grabe found he learnt about 350 new items after reading 3 hours a day for 5 months, i.e. about 450 hours (Stoller & Grabe, 1997)

Further studies

• Waring & Takaki (2003): Learners learnt about one word for each hour of reading.
• There is a 50% chance of recognizing a new word 3 months later if it has been encountered in reading 8 times. Items encountered only once will be forgotten.
• Schmitt & Sonbul (2010): The importance of direct teaching of vocabulary during / after a reading text.

3. Students can’t learn enough vocabulary only through incidental encounter in reading

• Extensive reading is important for:

• consolidating items already learnt
• increasing reading fluency
• enjoyment and motivation

• But extensive reading texts should therefore be easier than the reading texts in their coursebooks (‘i-1’).

Practical implications

• We need to supplement extensive reading by vocabulary activities: both presentation and review, both in class and for homework.
• It is suggested that about 1/3 of classroom time should be devoted to focused vocabulary-teaching activities.

It helps you remember if you learn items in semantic sets (e.g. colours, animals )

• Wrong.
• Learning lists of words that all mean the same sort of thing and are the same part of speech is not conducive to good learning.

Research on learning semantic sets

Does it help learners to master a new set of lexical items if they are all members of a semantic set (same part of speech, same kind of meaning: e.g. clothes, animals)?

The learners consistently learned the unrelated items better .

Words linked to each other syntagmatically are learnt well.

• e.g. blue + sky is better learnt than blue + red + yellow…

Waring: did the same with Japanese learners: meanings given in Japanese. Had to change a bit to make sure that sounds and items were familiar to Japanese learners, but same results.

4. Semantic sets

• Presenting new items in ‘semantic sets’ does not lead to good learning.
• But many elementary textbooks do in fact include these (convenient to teach).

Practical implications

• Teach items thematically linked, not lists of similar words.
• If your book teaches semantic sets …
• Choose which are the most important and link them to other parts of speech in contexts:

• What things can you see in this room that are red? What can your hands do that your feet can’t?
• What things can you see in this room that are red?
• What can your hands do that your feet can’t?
• Skip the rare items in the larger sets e.g purple in colours, toes in parts of the body

• Try to avoid teaching together as new items: near-synonyms (ceiling, roof ) , antonyms ( buy, sell ), homonyms ( bear, bear ) , words easily confused ( except, accept ).
• But you CAN use such combinations – and lexical sets – as a basis for
• a) teaching a new item (if the synonym, for example, is already well known)
• b) review

Translation is a useful strategy in teaching vocabulary

Right.

• Laufer (1997b): L1 glosses tend to produce better remembering than L1 glosses.
• Laufer and Girsai (2008): words practised using translation techniques into/from L1 were consistently better retained than those practised through L2-based exercises.

gapfills and sentence-completions as opposed to translating to and from.

Translation is a useful vocabulary-teaching strategy

• It can be used for practice or for testing; But its main use is in initial introduction of meaning.
• Translation

• Is quick
• Is likely to be accurate
• Provides a feeling of security
• Is a natural strategy

• Why avoid it?

Learners need to review a new item about four or five times in order to remember it.

• Not enough.
• The evidence is that learners usually need at least ten (maybe more) meaningful encounters in order to acquire a new item.
• Horst & Meara (1999), Waring & Takaki (Webb (2007), Zahar et al. (2001)

The importance of review

• A new item will only be remembered after it has been reviewed 10 or more times. But coursebooks do not usually provide this.
• The best review is through retrieval , provided this is success-oriented (i.e. students can, with an effort, retrieve the item they’ve been taught) (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008)
• Vocabulary notebooks are an excellent basis for review (Walters & Bozkurt, 2009).

Techniques other than ‘make a sentence with…’

To recap:

• Vocabulary is crucially important for language learning.
• Learners need to learn a large amount of vocabulary
• ‘ Chunks’ need to be taught as well as single words.
• Vocabulary has to be deliberately taught.
• Common items have highest priority.
• New items need to be taught efficiently and impact-fully.
• Multiple review of new items is vital.