The Importance of Vocabulary
In my experience, students, teachers, and textbooks alike tend to overemphasize the importance of grammar. Don’t get me wrong. Teaching grammar is important. However, words are the very building blocks of our language. Without a comprehensive vocabulary, no matter how well your students understand grammar, they will struggle to communicate. No matter how well versed your students are in parts of speech, irregular conjugations, or word order, if a student doesn’t know the word for laundry detergent, they can’t ask what aisle it’s in.
Do you want to help your students progress? Never sacrifice attention to vocabulary! Trust me, your students will thank you.
As you teach your students, remember to help your students develop both their receptive and productive vocabularies. Words in a student’s receptive vocabulary are words that students can recognize and understand when reading or listening. Words in a student’s productive vocabulary are words that students can actually produce on command when speaking or writing. A matching or multiple-choice task would test a student’s receptive vocabulary, while a fill in the blank recall task would test their productive vocabulary.
What does it mean to know a word?
Knowing a word is so much more than matching a vocab word with a one-word definition. Below are some other elements of word knowledge you can think about as you plan your vocabulary instruction:
Phonology: How is the word pronounced?
Think about how hard it may be to learn the difference in pronunciations of thought, though, and cough.
Orthography: What does it look like? How is it spelled?
I still struggle to spell common words like nauseous or asthma.
Morphology: Does the word have prefixes? Suffixes? Key roots?
Denotation: A word’s textbook definition.
Connotation: The associations or feelings connected to a word.
Although drug and medication may have similar textbook definitions, when someone says they use drugs, we wouldn’t usually think of items you would find at your local pharmacy.
Synonyms: What other words mean the same thing?
Antonyms: What is this word’s opposite?
Hyponyms: Is this word a part of a larger category?
For example, dog is a hyponym of mammal which is a hyponym of animal.
Syntax: What part of speech is this word? What kind of words can it come after? What kind of words can it come before?
This list is not exhaustive, but I hope that it can help you to think of word knowledge as so much more than a definition. With this in mind, however, I am not suggesting that you should try to teach everything there is to know about every word on your list. Teaching a simple definition may be all your students need at the moment. Just remember, there is always more that your students can learn.
Word Lists
It may be overwhelming to think about all of the words in the English Language that your students need to learn. Where do you start? Luckily, there are some useful vocabulary word lists that prioritize common words to guide your instruction. Here are a few of the most famous word lists:
Dolch Word List (1936): This list is a little old, since it was created in 1936, but it lists the 220 most frequent words in the English language, most of which are function words. This is a great list for site words that every learner should know!
General Service List (1953): This list has the 2,000 most frequent words in the English Language. These words are essential in a learner’s basic vocab foundation.
University Word List (1984): This list was created specifically for students hoping to go to an English-speaking university. It has the 808 most frequent words in academic texts.
Academic Word List (1998): This list also focuses on vocab important in academic contexts. It has 570 word families that frequently occur in academic settings.
Academic Vocab List (2013): Because some research suggests that teaching word families may be confusing for learners, this list has the 3000 most frequent lemmas for academic contexts instead.
These lists prioritize the most frequent and useful vocab words. Please make use of these free vocab lists as you plan your vocab instruction!
Student Strategies
While it is important to devote classroom time to teaching vocab, the best way for students to quickly build their vocab knowledge is to take their vocab learning into their own hands. Below are some of my favorite strategies that students can use to learn vocab both inside and outside of the classroom:
Flashcards: As simple as it seems, flashcards are very effective. Encourage your students to write an English vocab word on one side of the card, and a one- or two-word equivalent in their L1 on the other side. To practice receptive word knowledge, the learner can look at the English side and recall their L1 equivalent. To practice productive word knowledge, the learner can look at the L1 side and recall the English word. Research shows that spaced recall helps move knowledge into the long-term memory, so tell your students to take a break with one stack of flashcards, and then come back to it in a few days or weeks.
Vocab Notebook: Have your students keep a notebook of new vocab. Each entry could have space for an English definition, an L1 equivalent, the part of speech, synonyms, antonyms… whatever may help your students. Be sure to tell your students that it’s ok to leave sections of the entry blank. They can come back and fill in more information about the word as they keep learning. Encourage your students to record new words during class, during intensive reading exercises, during an English movie, or even while taking the bus to class! Whenever they hear or read a new word, they can write it down and look up its meaning! This may sound tedious to you, but you’d be surprised how fun your students think it is.
Extensive Reading: This may not be the fastest and most effective way to rapidly build vocab as an L2 learner, but it can result in incidental vocab learning. Plus, reading is a great way to reenforce receptive vocab! Graded readers are a great option for extensive reading since they use simpler vocabulary.
Bilingual Dictionaries: Not everyone is a fan of bilingual dictionaries in the classroom, but research suggests that they are a great asset for vocab learning! One of my favorite online bilingual dictionaries is WordReference. It can define English words in dozens of languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Although bilingual dictionaries can be helpful, I would tell your students to avoid using a dictionary while extensive reading. If the student comes across an unfamiliar word while reading, tell them to skip it. They will probably be able to understand the gist of the passage without looking up the unknown word.
Learning Words from Context?
When students encounter an unfamiliar word in a passage, many novice teachers simply say, “Guess the meaning from the context.” Although well intentioned… this is not great advice. Yes, some contexts can help, but others can be too general or even downright misleading!
There may be some exceptions, but in general, when your students are unfamiliar with a word, direct them to a dictionary, not the context.
These are just a few suggestions you can provide your students. Be fun, be creative, and help provide your students with a flood of vocab! Nothing will help them more.
