Introduction

“Words, Words, Words”. Words are everywhere! Vocabulary provides the building blocks on which all communication rests – indeed without a wide-ranging vocabulary there can be no communication at all. And of course vocabulary teaching and learning cuts across every English lesson that is taught.

Traditionally, grammar has been king! In the past, teaching theory has rested on the fact that when students have a good understanding of grammar, they will be able to ‘slot in’ relevant vocabulary to produce perfect speech or writing.

More recent theory suggests that vocabulary is in fact the basis for students’ language acquisition – through learning ‘chunks’ of vocabulary, students slowly develop an awareness of grammatical forms. Vocabulary is becoming the new king. The king is dead! Long live the king!

With the increasing importance placed on vocabulary, teachers need to build up their repertoire of techniques and activities to cope with the demands of vocabulary teaching and to motivate their students to learn in the most efficient ways. This was the focus of the workshops that took place across Vietnam in February and March.

These workshops took place in 10 Vietnamese provinces, involved 16 co-ordinators, 34 VTTN trainers (many of whom visited a different province to train), 5 British Council trainers and 400 upper secondary school teachers. The planning began in December 2002 and what follows is a testament to the hard work and dedication of all those VTTN members involved.

Workshop participants and trainers spent three days together exploring vocabulary teaching and exchanging ideas, techniques and activities.

What follows in this magazine are some of the lesson ideas and activities that participants used in the VTTN workshops. We hope you will try some of these activities with your classes. Enjoy!

“Words, Words, Words”
Effective Vocabulary Teaching and Learning

Content

• What is vocabulary? – the importance of effective vocabulary teaching and learning
• Techniques and checklists for presenting vocabulary
• Building a ‘repertoire’ of teaching activities for practising and recycling vocabulary
• Sharing activities and testing them out
• Putting it all together
- adapting and supplementing existing textbook materials
• Peer-teaching – demonstrations and evaluations

Presenting Vocabulary

On day 1, the focus of the workshop was on presenting vocabulary. What follows are some of the questions asked and some of the checklists and methods that were discussed during this session.

What are the stages that you need to include when you are presenting vocabulary for the first time?

This was a question that many workshop participants discussed. The following checklist was put together by Yen Bai teachers:

• Elicit or show the meaning of the new vocabulary
• Clearly model pronunciation and ask students to repeat both as a class and individually
• Check that students clearly understand the meaning
• Draw students’ attention to aspects of vocabulary such as part of speech, collocation, frequency etc.
• Give students a written record (and check that they write well in their vocabulary notebooks!)

And then…..

• Follow up with activities to fix/activate/practise the new vocabulary
• Don’t forget what you have taught – help students to remember by doing recycling activities in following lessons

What different ways are there of showing the meaning of new vocabulary?

Khanh Hoa participants came up with this list:

• Using picture
• Miming
• Using real objects (realia)
• Giving definitions
• Translation
• Using synonyms and antonyms
• Giving an explanation
• Using a context to show the meaning
• Etc.
• More ideas here!!

Which techniques would you use to present the following words to your
students:

Jogging
Kangaroo
Fan
President
Air pollution
Independent

Having discussed these questions and seen
demonstrations of some of the techniques, workshop participants went on to practice these in small groups

Othello or Transaltion Reversi

The rules are quite difficult to explain in writing - it is much
easier to demonstrate this game!

You will need sets of square cards - on one side a word/phrase, on the other a translation.

The game is played by two teams (2 or 3 in each team) on an imaginary 8x8 board.

Divide the cards in half between each team. One team is ‘English’, the other team is ‘Vietnamese’. The teams should look at their cards and try to remember the translations. Each team places two cards in the middle four squares of the board e.g.

The ‘English’ team places one card down to trap their opponent and make their opponents’ card vulnerable, e.g.

The team should try to guess the ‘English’ translation of the Vietnamese card. If successful, they can turn it over and it becomes an ‘English’ card. Then it is the ‘Vietnamese’ team’s turn to lay a card.

The winning team is the one who has the most cards showing when all the cards are used.

Bi-linggual Presentation

Write up a list of new vocabulary down the left-hand side of the board. Read out the words several times using different
intonation/ expression each time, and every time you say a word, perform an action at the same time, e.g.

Ask students to repeat the words and
perform the actions. When they have done this, ask them for possible Vietnamese translations. Write the translations in a
column on the right-hand side of the board. Repeat the words in English with the actions once again. Ask students to copy down into their notebooks.

Rationale-By linking vocabulary to an action, it should be more memorable for the
students!

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