Vocabulary is clearly something language speakers need to know in order to have any sort of conversation. However, it used to be of secondary importance. It was believed students would just pick up on vocabulary and did not need to be directly taught. Although this is true to some extent, there are somethings that need to be taught and should not be considered secondary to anything else. All components to a language are necessary.
Chomsky made the argument that language learning should be very structural. Students should learn the grammar and simply place in vocabulary words. But vocabulary should be just as fluent and habitual as anything else in a language. It was Hymes who assumed vocabulary would be something that would just kind of take care of itself, or implicit learning.
Again, somethings that are a part of vocabulary are very difficult to simply "pick up." Such as idioms. An example of an idiom would be to say "That blew my mind" instead of saying "I was astonished." Phrases like that can vary from language to language. Like how Americans say "when pigs fly" for when something is impossible or not going to happen, the French say "When chickens have teeth." Even if a student learning French knew all the words in that sentence, they would probably be very confused by what the sentence actually means.
There are also word collocations, which is when words frequently appear together. Like how people say "sour milk" but not "sour butter." This is the kind of thing a teacher would need to directly teach to students, or explicit learning.
This also brings up the context issue. It is very good to learn vocabulary words through context, but it takes multiple times in various different contexts. Words can be used in many different contexts. Like "She is so spoiled" versus "These eggs are spoiled." So simply memorizing the word meaning isn't enough. Students need to be exposed to many environments in which the word can occur.
There are many ways in which to teach vocabulary, even though most of the words students learn will probably be through implicit learning. A good way to teach multiple words at a time is through word families. An example of a word family would be [act, actor, acting, active, actively] etc. Another good way (that works best for me, personally) is by using mnemonics or word relations in which a student creates associations to words to help remember their meaning. I remember that "porte" is door in French because doors are kind of like PORTals to other rooms. It doesn't matter how ridiculous it is, so long as it works. :)
I definitely think the best way to learn vocabulary is through many many exposures. But the methods in doing this should all be very different. Sometimes I can recognize a word when reading, but I won't be able to remember it completely to be able to speak it. Therefore, I think vocabulary should be taught and learned by students in every aspect of a language - speaking, reading etc. DeCarrico mainly used writing examples when describing activities in learning vocabulary, but I definitely think there should be more of a variety. I also don't think all of the strategies mentioned don't work effectively for everyone. DeCarrico brought up how reading is a very good way to learn vocabulary, but this is a strategy that has not really worked very well for me in the past. I usually just look up the word meaning, finish the sentence and move on... Forgetting whatever word I just looked up. Sometimes there just isn't enough reinforcement for certain words when doing implicit learning like this.
I also don't think I learned very many idioms in the classroom. I know about a million in English, and I couldn't tell you very many in French. I often learn them from French speakers or from my friends who also learned them from other French speakers.
So I am curious what works best for other people.
If you have taken a foreign language in a classroom before, how did you learn specifically learn vocabulary? Did your teachers use any other strategies DeCarrico didn't mention? What methods worked best for you?
Or if you have had to speak a second language in another country, how long did it take until you understood casual conversation, and what was that whole experience like? What difficulties did not knowing certain vocabulary pose?
I'd also like to hear vocabulary learning methods that are not so heavily focused on reading. Be specific in how the students will get enough exposure to the words or idioms.
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ReplyDeleteI once heard that students typically need 30 hits of a single vocabulary word until they are able to retain it. I’m not sure if the number is exact, but regardless, students need repetition when learning vocabulary and the more repetition one has with the vocabulary or idioms, the easier time they will have with remembering it.
ReplyDeleteIn the classroom, often times, my teachers would utilize visuals when learning vocabulary as a way to help us gain a stronger association with the words. My mother, who was previously a foreign language instructor, would cut out single pictures of the vocabulary (i.e. a picture of only pear, a house, a door, ect.) from magazines and would post them around the classroom. Then, when she would be introducing the vocabulary, she would have a visual on-hand and point it out to students. Another form of vocabulary learning I experienced in my language classes was describing the pictures at the beginning of the chapters/units by using the new vocabulary. The use of realia in the classroom is yet another way teachers can help students learn the vocabulary in a more meaningful way. When students have a tangible item that they are able to hold or see, then they are more likely to have an easier time associating the new vocabulary with the images. Overall, having visuals for students when they are learning new vocabulary is much more effective than having them use plain white notecards because it gives them a visual they recognize to associate with the L2 word.
As far as personal vocabulary learning goes, often times I would write and re-write the word until I recognized it both from English to my L2 and from the L2 back to English. Occasionally I would use a mnemonic device if I was feeling creative or could absolutely not learn the word correctly (as far as spelling or pronunciation-wise), but overall, I have always used constant repetition to learn new vocabulary.
As idiomatic expressions go, one thing I came across in my L2 studies was in the classroom, my teacher prepared a handout sheet of 30-40 expressions and would have use work in pairs to decipher them. Although the majority of them are not word for word translations, we were still able to connect the L2 phrase with an equivalent English phrase easily. Throughout the semester, every week my teacher would give us a new sheet with the idiomatic expressions to decipher, learn and use. At the end of the year, we had to perform an original skit for the class using least 10 of them as well as incorporating other grammar points we had learned throughout the year. Similarly, in my ESL placement this semester, the first day I went to class, they were learning idiomatic expressions that make references to body parts (i.e. shake a leg, head over heels, know by heart, ect.) Although my mentor teacher did not use the same technique as my own teacher used, he did have them create their own skit where they were to use all the phrases. Many of the students used them in an appropriate manner and were very creative and original with their skits.
All in all, the more students use the vocabulary, the easier time they will have associating the words with their L1 counterparts, and therefore be able to retain them easily. The challenge for teachers is to make vocabulary learning meaningful and interactive with students, so that they will have more fun with the words. Incorporating a number of ways to help them associate new words with objects and meanings will undoubtedly be more effective than having them use notecards.
When taking Spanish in high school, my teachers attempted to teach us Spanish in different ways to attend to everyone’s learning styles. Each chapter pertained to something different, such as weather, body parts/feelings etc. My teacher taught the vocabulary by playing games, having us do skits and using pictures. When learning the body parts, we played many games of simen says. We also were required to create skits using the vocabulary, while others took notes and tried to figure out what the words meant. When learning topics such as the weather, my teachers using pictures to aid our learning. We’d see a picture of the sun while simultaneously reading the word next to it. The teacher would hold the flashcards with pictures up to the class and use the method of repeating this many times until the whole class was able to repeat the words. Then, she would cover up the picture and make sure the whole class was able to repeat the word without using the picture. This occurred daily, so by the time the semester as over, the words were engrained in our minds. When the whole class understood a section of vocabulary, she would make sure it stuck with us before we left the classroom. We used conversational Spanish and made up humorous skits to perform for the class. These skits were remembered, and in turn, the vocabulary was remembered as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen studying for exams and quizzes, I would use notecards to aid my learning of the vocabulary. Once I thought I knew the word, I would write and rewrite the word many times until it became routine. I would leave my Spanish and move to a different subject or activity. About an hour later, I would come back to the vocabulary and see if it I knew it. I would write and rewrite the words that I didn’t know from the previous hour. This really helped me not only memorize, but learn the vocabulary as well. My teacher did use some techniques that DeCarrico mentioned, but the one that worked best for me was the gap-filling activity. My teacher would set up sentences and provide word banks of vocabulary. This helped us learn the vocabulary and prepare us for our exams. In my opinion, but was a great activity/learning strategy because there was room for error. We were able to make mistakes, learn form them and try not to make them in the future. I liked doing these in class because rather than lecture, we were able to figure things out on our own. My teachers also used lexical phrases as a strategy of teaching, but not as DeCarrico proposed to do it. My teachers just had perform skits and make up songs including these lexical phrases. We were not given specific instruction or controlled. Although we were able to perform and have room for error, more instruction and controlled variation would have been better. Lexical competence is a great way to learn language and have good discourse.
It was interesting reading this article, because it cleared up why I often had such a hard time forming sentences in Spanish. When I first started taking language in middle school, we learned vocabulary almost entirely by rote. There were a few occasions that I can remember maybe identifying objects in a picture, but beyond that we were given lists of words to write on notecards that we had to memorize for vocabulary tests.
ReplyDeleteIn high school, my classes were definitely more engaging. My teacher freshman year liked to introduce vocabulary through speech. Sometimes he would tell us a story, or he would use visuals to accompany what he was saying. I think this was a good strategy, because we were learning the vocabulary in the context that you generally will encounter a lot of vocabulary (if the goal is communication). It was almost like a guessing game, where we were using some of the context strategies to figure out the meaning of new words. I also remember a lot of word banks, which I never really thought did much because you can use process of elimination to get the right answer without necessarily learning the words. We also did skits, but again, the words were often just memorized for the performance, and the meaning wasn't really committed to long term memory. It was better when we generated our own dialogues, but I didn't do this until the upper level.
It was interesting to read about the different ways of order words, especially for presenting collocates. This is something that we never did until I got to the AP level, when we began to analyze the language more. This is I think what made learning vocabulary so hard for me. I felt like I was just learning these strings of random words with no structure behind them. To some extent, that was exactly what was going on. Even when word associations are made between a word and an image, I think that learning vocabulary is best when relationships are shown between different words. Not only does this teach vocabulary, but it also teaches skills for finding relationships between known and unknown words which students can then apply to new vocabulary.
I disagreed with DiCarrico when she said that some concepts shouldn't be introduced for beginners. I think that the more depth of meaning that can be taught, the better. If you were to wait until Spanish 4 to start teaching how to speak using idiomatic speech, the students are probably never going to really use idioms that well.
I have something to share about idioms. When I was studying German, I always liked to know what some of the idioms were. More than that, I liked to know where they came from, since most have some sort of story. By looking up the story, it made me remember the idiom because I knew where it came from.
ReplyDeleteIt works the same way in English. For example, when teaching the seasons, a teacher can explain the phrase "April showers bring May flowers." This saying makes a lot of sense, plus it can help students understand the order of the months and recognized different seasons. I find that providing a story or reason to learn the phrase or idiom makes it stick better.
I took Spanish in high school and using pictures to show vocabulary was used often. We would also have to use the vocabulary in assignments. For example I remember when we studied vocab about family we would have to make a family tree listing each individual and their family label. Or when we were learning food vocabulary we would have to make a menu and list a certain number of beverages or dinners in order to get us to write the words. With vocabulary on traveling we would have to make up a story about a vacation we took using the new vocabulary words. Often the sentences were really simple, but using the vocabulary helped me to remember it. For simple memorization I would always use flash cards because they worked best for me.
ReplyDeleteAs far as idioms go I never got far enough along in my L2 studies to have to learn them. However, my husband is from Sweden and often when he tries to translate them from Swedish to English or from English to Swedish they don't make any sense. Once he said he was going to try and "Kill two flies with one smack" and I started laughing. I'd never heard of it before, but it makes sense!
I have taken both high school and college level French courses, and the way that vocabulary was taught was differently betwen the two levels.
ReplyDeleteIn high school, we were taught the meanings of new words by studying word-picture associations in our textbooks. We also studied word definition lists and completed matching and cloze test exercises.
In college, the focus was more on learning vocabulary in context, such as reading through passages in French and figuring out what an unfamiliar word meant based on the topic of the passages and its sentences. We also used dictionaries more frequently, did cloze tests, and completed matching activities. When it came to idioms, we were just taught the phrase and given the definition of what it meant; usually we learned a couple of idioms with each unit.
None of my instructors used any activities outside of what DeCarrico mentioned.
For me, the strategies that worked for me the best were studying vocabulary lists and word-picture associations. I also used flashcards from time to time.
I learned vocabulary words in a variety of different ways. I took German in high school and college, having two different teachers in high school and three in college. Each teacher or professor had their own ideas, but the trick that worked best for me was my first german teacher. Each chapter, we were all responsible to bring in a two "flashcards". These flashcards were full size pieces of paper with an image or picture of the word on them. For example, if the word was "to run", there could be a picture of a marathon runner. If it was desk, there could be a desk on there. Every day at the beginning of class, my teacher would go through the stack of flashcards, and we would have to say what it was. At the end of the chapter, we had a quiz on the words. This way, we all learned the words through picture association. Other teachers would just give us a list of words and have us memorize them on our own time, in which I would make my own flashcards (picture free) and repeat them until I could go through the entire stack twice without missing the word. If I was having particular difficulty with a word, I would repeat it and its English translation over and over and over until it stuk simply because I had repeated it so many times. But this did not help with understand the word in different contexts, as I discovered in college. Trying to use one word in the wrong context could give you a very inappropriate sentence. I never had training or education in different idioms-- it was more or less just something that I picked up from a few native speakers I knew.
ReplyDeleteI studied German for four years during High School. In my class we learned a lot of vocabulary words however it was difficult for me to apply these words when I was reading or trying to have a conversation. My teacher for the most part used an Explicit approach to our vocab learning. Most of the time we were handed out vocabulary lists for the week with about 15-25 words on them. The teacher would go over what the words were in class and then told us to study them for a vocab. quiz we would have next week. To practice these words we had to make flashcards that we turned in, did crossword puzzles, had practice spelling tests, matching the word to the picture and so on and so fourth. While these techniques really helped me memorize the words and learn how to spell them for some reason a few weeks later if I was reading a passage and encountered some of the old words I would forget what they meant. If we had to write dialogues using specific words from a while back I would often times have to consult a dictionary or look them up on my previous worksheets. The problem with this I think was that we were only taught to memorize the words, not to apply them in a specific situation or context. Very sparingly when we would read a chapter out of our textbook or be asked to do a project where we really had to apply and know what the words were instead of just memorizing them was when I 100 percent learned these words and stored them in my long term memory, instead of just memorizing and forgetting them. In a classroom situation like Mallorie mentioned I also think that it is important to do a wide variety of activities with your students. One method or activity that works well for one student might not work so well for someone else. It is important to be sensitive and aware of all of your students needs, strengths and weaknesses in learning and language learning and plan types of activities that will appeal to the majority of your students if possible.
ReplyDeleteTaking Spanish in a classroom for the first time in 6th grade came as a bit of a struggle for me. Vocabulary was difficult for me at first, but when my teacher factored in pictures and visuals of objects, it began to get easier. It is easier to start out on this basis for middle school students, or they will get discouraged and not be motivated to learn if it is difficult for them. However, as I entered high school Spanish courses, my instructors focused more on the listening and communication aspect of vocabulary learning methods. I had the same professor 3 out of the 4 years that I took Spanish in high school. She always encouraged each student to participate at least 3 times every class period. The more we talked in Spanish, the easier it was to learn the correct use of the vocabulary in the language. It’s like the old saying goes, “Practice makes Perfect.” This method definitely worked well for me. Another method that worked well for me was pure memorization of the word meaning in Spanish and English. After every unit, my high school professor made us make a list of the Spanish words on one side of a piece of paper, fold it in half, and put the English definition on the other side. For 3 years, before every day of class, we had a quiz on these terms. It was a pain to study the 30-35 terms every night, but that’s how the vocabulary stuck with me. We also did numerous listening activities accompanied with questions about 3 times a week. Even though the people in the listening cd’s spoke very fast, we learned to grasp the general concept of what they were saying, picking up on key words. This came to be very helpful when I went to Mexico for Spring Break my senior year. It was a lot easier to communicate with the people there, because my Spanish classes have prepared me for verbal communication. As I approached college Spanish courses, vocabulary began to get more difficult because we read more passages, analyzed more definitions, and wrote more papers thus expanding our Spanish vocabulary use greatly.
ReplyDeleteVocabulary learning methods that are not so heavily focused on reading are such things as using flashcards, photographs, and of course direct instruction of vocabulary and vocabulary related skills. However, the most important vocabulary learning methods, in my opinion, involve learning from an actual context. If the child can effectively learn from context, and answer questions based on texts, then they will perform well. After awhile, students get bored with just listening to a teacher, and tend to dose off. This is where it is important to factor in group work, or even better individual task based questions, and call on them randomly to give their answers.
Regarding idioms, I never had a lot of practice with using them. It's something I picked up with time in my spanish classes.
I was exposed to multiple facets of the Hebrew language at the very beginning. I learned everything all at once; reading, writing, speaking, etc. I don’t particularly recall how I learned my basic vocabulary, however as the years went on I was taught vocabulary using many techniques. For instance while I was learning how to write the letters and such, I was to write the new vocabulary words three times over and over. Though this might have helped with the physical writing of the words, I felt it tedious and that it did not help me learn the meanings simply based on repetition. I also learned vocabulary in a/my foreign language just like I learned it in English. We were given the words and then had to look them up in the dictionary. I felt this method was good because we learned the alphabet well in order (as it differs from the English alphabet) and it also required us to use a more active rather than passive approach. We had to teach ourselves in a way and in general I find this is very effective in many different styles of learning. Furthermore, I learned by using rhymes or sounds. For instance, if a word sounded like a similar word in English, I would use that technique to remember it. Fork in Hebrew is “mazleg” so to remember this I would think of sticking a fork in my Ma’s leg. Graphic, yes, but effective too! I’m sure there were many more ways that I was taught and learned however it was a while ago so I have difficulty recalling these methods. But overall I must have been taught vocabulary effectively as this is my strong point in foreign language as opposed to grammar which is always a struggle.
ReplyDeleteMy first English teacher was horrible and I owe her so much. She was very old-fashioned, always insisted on the proper BE pronunciation and had us memorize vocabulary lists until our brains started smoking and she tested us on both every other day. I hated it and yet I have to admit that most of my English vocabulary I have learned from her. While I want to believe that her technique should not work, it actually worked in my case.
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