Teaching and explaining vocabulary

This chapter looks at teaching and learning activities. It looks at the jobs that teaching activities need to perform, how teachers can communicate the meanings of words to learners and a wide range of activities for vocabulary teaching and learning.

Learning from teaching and learning activities

This section looks at the psychological conditions that need to occur in order for vocabulary learning to take place. It is organised around four questions that teachers should ask about any teaching or learning activity.

1. What is the learning goal of the activity?

2. What conditions does the activity use to help reach the learning goal?

3. What should a teacher look for to see if the goal is likely to be reached?

4. What should a teacher do to make sure that the conditions occur?

The section ends with a detailed look at repetition and vocabulary learning.

Let us first look at a vocabulary teaching technique to see how these questions might be used.

The What is it? technique (Nation, 1978a) is a useful way of teaching new vocabulary, in particular becoming familiar with the spoken form of the word and linking it to its meaning.

The teacher gradually communicates the meaning of a word by using it in context. When the learners think they know what the word means, they raise their hands. After enough hands are raised, the teacher asks a learner for a translation or explanation of the meaning. The teacher's description might go like this. The word being taught is precise.

"Sometimes it is important to make a precise measurement. Sometimes it is not

important to be precise. Doctors need a lot of information to find the precise nature of a disease. If you tell me your precise age, you will tell me how old you are in years, months, and days! When you give someone precise instructions, the instructions must be accurate and complete ..."

When using this technique several things are important. First, not too much information is given about the word at the beginning, so that the learners have to listen attentively to the word in a range of contexts. Second, the teacher repeats the sentences wherever possible, by saying each sentence at least twice when it is first used, and by going back over the previously said sentences. The teacher does not ask the first learners who raise their hands for the meaning of the word (a translation, a synonym, or a definition), but keeps on describing until most of the class have raised their hands. If this technique is used properly, the learners will have made a very good start to knowing the word precise. It is however easily possible to use the technique badly, by giving the meaning too quickly, by not repeating the sentences, and by removing any

challenge for attention. This is another way of saying that there are features in the effective use of the technique that encourage learning. These design features are the repetition of the word and its contexts, the presence of a variety of rich contexts, and the need to give careful attention to the word and its contexts in order to be able to complete the activity by working out its meaning.

These design features set up conditions that research tells us are important for language acquisition. These conditions include having a positive attitude to the activity (helped by its puzzle-like nature), noticing the item several times, and thoughtfully processing its meaning.

These conditions help reach the vocabulary learning goal. It is therefore important that teachers are aware of the important features of techniques so that they know how to use techniques and what to look for when they are being used (see Loschky and Bley-Vroman, 1990: 165).

When the technique is being used the teacher should be looking for signs that it might be achieving its learning goal. These signs include seeing if the learners are interested and paying attention, seeing if they are trying to find an answer, and seeing if they do find the answer but not too soon.

We will now look at each of the four questions in detail.

1. What is the learning goal of the activity?

A learning goal may be a Language goal (vocabulary, grammar), Ideas (the content such as cultural knowledge, safety information ...), Skills (accuracy, fluency), and Text (discourse schemata, rhetorical devices, interaction routines)(The mnemonic LIST is a way of remembering these general goals). In this book we are interested in the vocabulary learning goal. When

looking at teaching and learning activities, we can answer this question about the learning goal in a very general way by saying a vocabulary learning goal. But we can also be more specific if we wish by considering all the aspects of what is involved in knowing a word (see Table 3.1) and deciding which of these is the learning goal of the activity. For example, is the learning goal to learn the spelling of some words, their pronunciation, or more commonly to recognise a word

form and link it to its meaning? In general when looking at learning goals and analysing how a goal will be reached, it is simplest to consider only one learning goal at a time. Most activities however can achieve several learning goals. Let us look at some vocabulary activities to see what their specific vocabulary learning goal might be.

TABLE 3.1. THE LEARNING GOALS OF SOME VOCABULARY ACTIVITIES

Activity Learning goals

Guessing from context Word meaning, collocates Learn a strategy

Keyword technique Link form to meaning, word meaning

Learn a strategy

Breaking words into parts Link form to meaning, word meaning Learn a strategy

Split information tasks with annotated pictures

Bring receptive vocabulary into productive use

AIt=s my word ...@ Learners present words they have met

Teach word form, meaning and use Develop an awareness of what is involved in knowing a word

In order to reach a goal, the knowledge or information that makes up that goal needs to be available. The sources of information about words, for example, the words' meaning, can come from textual input such as a reading or listening text, or the context provided on a worksheet, it can come from a reference source such as a teacher or a dictionary, or it can come from the learners in a group who already know something about the word. Newton's (forthcoming) study found that when learners discussed the meanings of words from the worksheet with each other, by far the majority of words discussed resulted in useful and accurate information being provided about the words. This is not surprising. Vocabulary tests of learners who have roughly the same proficiency level usually show a remarkable diversity of knowledge (Saragi, Nation and Meister, 1978). All learners usually know the higher frequency words, and one or two learners but not all know many of the other words appropriate to their level of proficiency.

Newton (1993), for example, found that in his pre-test to the tasks, 35% of the 111 tested words were known by all learners, 54% by one or more learners but not everyone, and 11% were not known by anyone. It was the 54% that were known by at least one person that could most usefully be discussed by the learners. In addition the learners could use the context clues to work out meanings of the words that nobody knew before the activity.

2. What conditions does the activity use to help reach the learning goal?

There are three important general processes that may lead to a word being remembered. These include noticing (through formal instruction, negotiation, the need to comprehend or produce, awareness of inefficiencies), retrieval, and creative (generative) use. These processes can be viewed as three steps with the later steps including the earlier steps.

NOTICING

The first process encouraging learning is noticing, that is giving attention to an item. This means that learners need to notice the word, and be aware of it as a useful language item (see Ellis, 1991; McLaughlin, 1990; Schmidt, 1990 for discussions of noticing). This noticing may be affected by several factors, including the salience of the word in the textual input or in the

discussion of the text, previous contact that the learners have had with the word, and learners' realization that the word fills a gap in their knowledge of the language (Schmidt and Frota, 1986;

Ellis, 1990). Noticing also occurs when learners look up a word in a dictionary, deliberately study a word, guess from context, or have a word explained to them.

Motivation and interest are important enabling conditions for noticing. The choice of content can be a major factor stimulating interest. In his study of learning from listening, Elley (1989:

185) found quite different results from the same learners listening to two different stories. This seemed to have been due to the lack of involvement of the learners in one of the stories because of its strangeness, lack of humour, low levels of action and conflict and so on. Without the engagement and aroused attention of the learners, there can be little opportunity for other conditions favouring learning to take effect. Although there is no generally accepted theory of why interest is important and the factors that arouse interest, teachers need to watch their learners carefully and seek their opinions about what stories and topics they find interesting. There is some evidence (Bawcom, 1995) that teachers' views of what will be interesting do not match with what learners find interesting.

Interest can also be looked at from the word level. Elley (1989) asked teachers to rate vocabulary in a story according to its importance to the plot of the story that was read to the class. This is a kind of measure of interest in relation to the story. There was a moderate correlation (.42) between the ratings of importance to the plot and vocabulary learning. This indicates that if teachers chose to write up or define words that figured centrally in the plot, the chances of them being learned would be higher than with words not so important for the plot.

Noticing involves decontextualisation. Decontextualization occurs when the learners give attention to a language item as a part of the language rather than as a part of a message. This can occur in a variety of ways. Here are some examples.

1. While listening or reading, the learner notices that a word is a new word, or thinks, "I have seen that word before," or thinks, "That word is used differently from the ways I have seen it used before."

2. The teacher highlights a word while writing it on the blackboard.

3. The learners negotiate the meaning of a word with each other or with the teacher.

4. The teacher explains a word for the learners by giving a definition, a synonym, or a first language translation.

Notice that decontextualized does not mean that the word does not occur in a sentence context.

All the examples given above can occur, for example, with words that are in a story that the teacher is reading aloud to the class. Decontextualization means that the word is removed from its message context to be focused on as a language item. The focus can be very brief or can be for a long time. It may be that all language learning necessarily involves some degree of contextualization. That is, in order to acquire the language, learners need to consciously see language items as parts of the language system rather than only as messages. The problem is in deciding how much of this kind of attention to give, what to direct it to, and when to give it.

However, even if decontextualization is not an essential element of language learning, there is evidence that it can certainly help learning. We will look at two kinds of decontextualization, negotiation and defining.

1 Negotiation There is a growing number of studies that show that vocabulary items that are negotiated are more likely to be learned than words that are not negotiated (Newton, 1995; Ellis, Tanaka and Yamazaki, 1994). This is not a surprising finding, but care needs to be taken in interpreting it. Ellis, Tanaka and Yamazaki (1994) found that although negotiation helped learning, the negotiated task took much more time than the non-negotiated elaborated input task.

In the Newton study, it was found that although negotiated items were more likely to be learned than non-negotiated items (75% to 57%), negotiation only accounted for about 20% of the vocabulary learning. This is probably because only a few items can be negotiated without interfering too much with the communication task. So, although negotiation really helps

vocabulary learning, it is not the means by which most vocabulary is learned. It is thus important for teachers to draw on other complementary ways of decontextualizing items to improve the

quality of learning.

The negotiation studies have revealed another feature of learning through negotiation that is of significance to learning from input, namely learners observing negotiation learn vocabulary just as well as the learners who do the actual negotiation (Stahl and Vancil, 1986; Stahl and Clark, 1987; Newton, forthcoming; Ellis, Tanaka and Yamazaki, 1994; Ellis and Heimbach, 1997). This indicates that it is not the negotiation itself which is important but the learning conditions of noticing and gaining information that negotiation sets up. If learners are engaged in a task, then observing others negotiating is just as effective as doing the negotiation. This is good news for large class, teacher-centred activities where there is not an opportunity for every learner to negotiate.

Newton (forthcoming) found that all the instances of negotiation of meaning in the four tasks he studied involved negotiating items in the textual input. No vocabulary items that were

introduced in the discussion and that were not in the textual input were negotiated. This indicates that teachers can have a major effect on determining what is noticed. We will look more closely at this in the vocabulary and speaking section in Chapter 4.

2 Definition Some studies (Elley, 1989; Brett, Rothlein and Hurley, 1996) show that vocabulary learning is increased if vocabulary items are briefly explained while learners are listening to a story. In Elley's (1989) study, such defining more than doubled the vocabulary gains. Some studies of reading similarly indicate that looking up words in a dictionary increases learning (Knight, 1994), although this finding is not consistently supported in other studies (Hulstijn, 1993).

This inconsistency may be at least partly explained by a finding by R. Ellis (1995) which indicated that simple definitions were the most effective. A simple definition is short and includes only a few defining characteristics of the word. This agrees with a study by Chaudron (1982) which found that more elaborate definitions tended to be confusing rather than helpful.

Several studies of learning from lists or word cards (Nation, 1982) have shown that for many learners learning is faster if the meaning of the word is conveyed by a first language translation.

First language translations are probably the simplest kind of definition in that they are short and draw directly on familiar experience.

Like negotiation, defining while telling a story is a form of decontextualization, that is, focusing attention on words as words rather than as parts of a message. In order to increase incidental vocabulary learning while listening to a story, teachers can put target words on the blackboard as they occur, point to them on the blackboard as they recur, translate them, define them simply, and encourage learners to negotiate their meaning with the teacher. Ellis and Heimbach (1997) working with young learners of English as a second language found that a group negotiating with the teacher was more effective for vocabulary learning than when there was individual

negotiation in one-to-one interaction with the teacher. A variant of story-telling may be for the teacher to read the story to a particular learner who is set up to negotiate with the teacher while the rest of class are like eavesdroppers on the story-telling and negotiation. Ellis and He (in press) found learner to learner negotiation more effective for older learners.

An argument against the decontextualization of vocabulary is the teachability hypothesis (Pienemann, 1985) which basically argues that explicit teaching of language items will not be effective if the learners are not at the right stage of language development. It is likely that much of vocabulary learning is not affected by developmental sequences and thus explicit teaching has the potential to directly contribute to implicit knowledge (Ellis, 1990). If this is true, then the temporary decontextualization of vocabulary items during a message focused task like listening to a story is of major benefit to second language proficiency.

Teachers can have a direct influence on noticing in speaking and writing tasks by giving thought to where wanted vocabulary items are placed in the written input, and by some form of

preteaching or "consciousness-raising" of wanted items before the activity. Teachers can use a range of attention drawing techniques in listening and reading tasks to encourage noticing.

RETRIEVAL

The second major process that may lead to a word being remembered is retrieval (Baddeley,

1990: 156). A word may be noticed and its meaning comprehended in the textual input to the task, or through teacher explanation or dictionary use. If that word is subsequently retrieved during the task then the memory of that word will be strengthened. Retrieval may be receptive or productive. Receptive retrieval involves perceiving the form and having to retrieve its meaning when the word is met in listening or reading. Productive retrieval involves wishing to communicate the meaning of the word and having to retrieve its spoken or written form as in speaking or writing. Retrieval does not occur if the form and its meaning are presented simultaneously to the learner.

Several studies (Elley, 1989; Stahl and Fairbanks, 1986) have shown the importance of repetition as a factor in incidental vocabulary learning. As Baddeley (1990: 156) suggests, it is not simply repetition which is important but the repeated opportunity to retrieve the item which is to be learned. When the learners hear or see the form of the word, they need to retrieve what they know of its meaning. This retrieval is likely to be retrieval of ideas stored from previous meetings and retrieval of content and information from the present meeting. Baddeley (1990) suggests that each retrieval of a word strengthens the path linking the form and meaning and makes subsequent retrieval easier.

It may be possible to calculate how much input, in terms of number of running words, a learner needs to get within a certain time in order for there to be an opportunity to meet a recently met word again before the memory of the previous meeting fades. If too much time has passed between the previous meeting and the present encounter with the word, then the present

encounter is effectively not a repetition but is like a first encounter with the word. If however a memory of the previous meeting with the word remains, then the present encounter can add to and strengthen that memory. There are two major factors involved in such a calculation - the

encounter is effectively not a repetition but is like a first encounter with the word. If however a memory of the previous meeting with the word remains, then the present encounter can add to and strengthen that memory. There are two major factors involved in such a calculation - the