What are the appropriate criteria for choosing and teaching vocabulary?

Image: Space Vocabulary book, by jimmie

Before teaching children new vocabulary, it is essential to carefully select the word or words within a particular word group that you want to teach. Here are some things to bear in mind when choosing new vocabulary:

• Remember that there are both active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is what the children both understand and use; passive vocabulary is what they understand but are not able, or are required, to use. Obviously most of the words you use in class will only be passive vocabulary for young children.
• Choose vocabulary that is relevant to your pupils' age, lives and interests. E.g., nationality or telling the time has no meaning for a four-year-old.
• Keep your expectations realistic. Have a basic group of words that you want to teach the whole class, the number of which will depend on their age group. You can teach some extra words to the quicker pupils and the slower ones may absorb them passively, but do not expect the slower ones to use them actively.
• See if there are any words that resemble L1 ('football' is an easy word for most children).
• Think of what they already know which might be easy to build on. E.g., if they know 'flower' and 'toy' it is easy to teach them 'flower shop' and 'toy shop' when they are learning names of shops.
• You can expect your pupils to find some word groups more difficult to learn than others, for a number of reasons: a) if a word group consists mainly of words of an origin that is unfamiliar to your pupils (e.g., English words of Anglo-Saxon origin are unfamiliar to speakers of Romance languages), then these will be hard to learn; b) words that are difficult to pronounce, or are long, can also be problematic; c) food is usually an easy topic (e.g., salad, hamburger, spaghetti) while clothes are quite difficult, with lots of words that sound similar (e.g. shirt, skirt, shorts).
• When playing a game with the whole class, take care to choose the right level of vocabulary for each pupil: challenge a quicker pupil with a difficult word and encourage a slower pupil with an easy one.

Once these tips have been explained, let us now analyse how to teach difficult words. Before teaching a number of new words, check to see which ones will present the most difficulty. Here are some ideas to help you teach them more easily:

• Get the children to clap on the stressed syllable(s) of a word as they say it.
• Put the word in a rhythmic or rhyming sentence. E.g., I eat meat; Rice is nice!; I fly through the sky!
• Separate the word into syllables as you say it, getting the children to follow the sound curve in the air with their fingers.
• Teach words that rhyme, together. E.g., nose and toes.
• Get your pupils to visualise a picture from rhyming words. E.g., a spoon in the moon.
• Get the children to repeat a word after you in different ways. E.g., in a deep voice or a little, squeaky voice, in a whisper or a shout, slowly or quickly, etc.

Now, some suggestions for how to teach vocabulary in ways that will make it easily understandable to young children, and that will be enjoyable at the same time: pictures, murals, crafts, sequences and stories.

In relation to pictures, they are an obious, simple and easy way to teach vocabulary. If they are attractive, children will love them. So look out for good pictures all the time, especially in magazines, and keep them for future use. Some recommendations to miximise the use of pictures are the following:

• Make sure the pictures are simple, clear and can be seen from the back of the class.
• Stick your pictures on coloured card and cover them with transparent adhesive plastic to protect them.
• Choose a different colour for each lexical set. This will help you identify them quickly and the children will also learn to identify lexical sets.
• Write the name of the object in a corner, on the back of the card, so you can show the picture to the class and know what you are showing.
• Enlarge a photocopy to make a poster and use it to teach vocabulary. You can divide a sheet of paper into four and have each part enlarged to A3 size. Tape the sheets together and you will have a good poster. Get active children or those who finish their work quickly to colour it for you.
• Later, give each pupil the same photocopy in its normal size. They can colour it, while you go around checking what they know. Use it as an end-of-unit task or for recording pupils' progress.
• It is a good idea to have two pictures or posters which show the same subject but which are slightly different. Use the first poster to teach the vocabulary and structures. Then use the second one to see if your pupils can use the new language without the visual prompts or reminders of the first poster. This is a good way to find out how much your pupils have assimilated, and is another useful exercise for testing.
• When your pupils are older, use pictures to gradually teach them how to build a paragraph. When they see a picture, children usually start by commenting on the first detail that catches their eye. E.g., about a picture of a park, they will say 'The flower is red'. Try and teach them to begin by saying what the picture is (It's a park), and then to talk about bigger things before going into detail. Get them to finish by saying something general about the picture (I like the park/the picture). This sequencing of ideas can be taught by asking questions, e.g., What's this?; What is the most important thing in the picture?; Do you like the...?

As far as murals are concerned, they are excellent teaching materials, especially if the children make them themselves. Making a mural with your pupils is a very complete lesson, though you will need more than one lesson to finish it. Once finished, a mural decorates the class and is good teaching material.

As regards crafts, these are generally very interesting for students, since authentic activities involve children active participation. Older childrenwho are learning to write can keep a simple diary of their activities, with two or three lines of description and a drawing of the activity.

A fun and easy craft is making a potato man (or animal). These are the materials needed: one potato per child, toothpicks for the arms and legs, wool for the hair (have two or three different colours), felt tip pens for drawing the face, scissors, and for older children, some card for making hands, shoes, etc. and some tape to fasten these to the toothpicks.

The basic procedure for this activity is the following: revise the names for parts of the body and teach the words you are going to need for the craft; demonstrate and explain in English how to make the potato man and keep the wool, extra toothpicks, tape and card on your table so the children have to come and ask you for them in English; give out the potatoes. Each child asks 'Can I have a potato, please?'. Give each child only two or three toothpicks so they have to come and ask for more. They stick the toothpicks into the potato, some for his arms and legs, and some on his head. They can wind the wool round the sticks to look like hair. They draw his face.

As an extension activity, students can draw a picture of their potato man and while they are drawing, you can go around the class and get them to describe their man to you. If any adaptation is required for older children, you may ask the children to write a line or two and/or invent a little dialogue in pairs, using their potato men (e.g., Hello!; How are you?; What's your name?; Do you like sweets?; etc.).

Learning vocabulary

Vocabulary cannot be really learned by looking at words, writing them down, and then writing the translations of words. Vocabulary learning is a large part of the work when studying a language.

There are different ways of learning vocabulary and the aspects which are important will vary with the word itself and the purpose for which you want to use it.

As teachers we have learned ways of teaching vocabulary and probably use a variety of presentation techniques, such as building a context or situation (at the doctor's); using flashcards or working from known language to unknown language - 'huge' is another word for very, very big. However, as we all experience, learners do not necessarily learn everything we teach them. The key is to look for successful learning techniques. Naturally, different techniques will suit different learners.

If students must react in some way to the vocabulary being learned, they will learn better. Vocabulary can be processed at various levels:

• Cognitive: students can process, make decisions about, categorise or rank words.
• Affective: they can associate words with something significant to them, they can express their feelings about words and through words.
• Physical: they can learn the sound and stress pattern of a word, and can give a physical reaction to it, a technique used in a method known as Total Physical Response.

Here, there are some activities for learning vocabulary taking into account the levels mentioned above:

• Students follow the teacher's instructions, acting them out: 'Walk to the wall', 'Raise your left hand' 'Touch the wall'...
• The teacher asks students to close their eyes and listen in silence for one minute. At the end of the minute they write down in English all the sounds they heard while their eyes were closed: 'a car', 'a door', 'the wind', 'a person walking'...
• Students work in pairs to complete a grid like the one below, using vocabulary they have recently studied, e.g., as revision at the end of term / before a test.

Word	Part of speech	Opposite	Similar word	Rhyming word	Example sentence
enormous	adjective	tiny	huge		My dad’s feet are enormous!
worse	comparative adjective	better		nurse	My grammar is bad, but my spelling is worse!
heard	verb, past of hear			bird	Say it again. I don’t think he heard you.

• Before doing a speaking activity describing a house, students brainstorm vocabulary to produce a mind-map. They consult each other, the dictionary or the teacher for the words they don't know.
• Students read a text and answer questions about difficult vocabulary which encourage them to work out the meaning from context.
• Students look at pictures of a variety of things: spiders, ice-cream, a beautiful landscape, a fun-fair, etc., and have to react to each one: 'She's beautiful!'; 'That's horrible!'; 'That's boring!'
• Each student chooses a word they like and says why they like it, or draws a picture.
• Students label classroom items in English.
• Students work in pairs or small groups to match words that rhyme.
• Students think of someone very important to them and choose five words or phrases to describe that person, e.g., 'kind', 'blond hair', 'funny', 'fat', 'pretty'.

Apart from working actively on learning vocabulary in class students have to take responsibility for studying outside class as well. In order to do this, they need to find systems of recording vocabulary.

Different techniques will appeal to different learners. Some techniques are particularly suited to certain aspects of vocabulary learning. Working on a grid may be a good way to deal with relationships between words, e.g., imagine-imagination-imaginative-imaginable-unimaginable. Drawing a picture may help students to understand and remember prepositions such as in, on, behind, next to, etc. Singing a song may help students to master the pronunciation of words.

In addition to these ideas, some other ways to record vocabulary can be used at word level:

• Word + translation.
• Word + picture.
• Word in an example sentence.
• Word + definition.
• Word + pronunciation (syllables and stress).
• Word + information (formal/informal, medical, legal, etc.)
• Word(s) in a text.
• Word + opposite/synonym.
• Word cards (English on front, L1 on back).
• Word + grammar (verb, noun, adverb, etc.)

At this point, some techniques will be analysed in order to record vocabulary:

• Vocabulary notes. Encourage students to keep vocabulary notebooks or files. These can be kept in a variety of ways -whatever the students prefer. Introduce them to different ways of doing this, in order to get them to try out new ideas. A useful technique is to ask them to experiment, at a week time, with different ways of recording new vocabulary (e.g., week one: note the translation; week two: write an example sentence; week three: group words on similar topics; week four: give the dictionary definition). After a few weeks they will probably realise that different words demand different treatment. A word like 'cod' is probably best dealt by a translation, a word like 'nice' is better delat by a series of examples. They will also realise which ways are most meaningful to them.
• Games. It is often useful for students to work together. They can quiz each other, to make learning new words more fun. The spelling game The Hangman is an old favourite that can help students learn and remember vocabulary. Another fun activity is back-spelling. One student 'writes' a word on a friend's back with a finger (you need to write quite large, and slowly). The friend has to guess the word. This is especially good for students who have difficulties with spelling.

In addition to these proposals, other techniques can be really useful when studying vocabulary, such as the following:

• Underlining or highlighting words in a text.
• Keeping word lists and reading through them regularly.
• Recording new words onto a CD or computer.
• Covering the word in your notebook and guessing if from the definition or translation.
• Asking a friend to test you.
• Carrying cards in your pocket with new vocabulary written on them.
• Using a dictionary to find vocabulary on a certain topic.
• Repeating words to yourself many times.
• Making up stories using new vocabulary.
• Collecting items such as tickets, advertisements, or packets with new words on them.