The Teaching of EFL Vocabulary
There are many strategies that can be used by EFL teachers to help their students acquire vocabularies in English. In this article I would like to explain two of them, those are:
Direct Vocabulary Teaching
teaching vocabulary
In this strategy, teachers give exercises or do activities that focus on giving vocabulary exposure on the students. For instance, teachers ask the students to guess meaning from context or give vocabulary games and stories. Teachers can use stories, news, jokes, and magazine articles. The teaching materials have to be on the students’ ability level and interest.
Teachers can introduce the difficult vocabulary first or let their students read quickly first to get the main idea. It is better for the teachers to always have many questions prepared before class (it is better to use both, simple comprehension questions and discussion questions). Most of the questions encourage students to use the vocabulary when speaking, but always try not to force the students to use any words unnaturally.
In direct vocabulary teaching technique, students experience conscious efforts to memorize new words. In order to give effective exposure and make the students indirectly acquire the new vocabularies taught, teachers can:
- help their EFL students to meet the words in a variety of contexts, anywhere at least 5-16 different times.
- assist the students to use the new words taught in different ways, so variety is essential for vocabulary teaching.
- ask the students to recycle and review those new vocabularies because commonly most new words are forgotten in the first twenty-four hours after class.
- limit the vocabulary exposure for not more than 10-12 new words at a time.
Memory Strategies
cross word for vocabulary teaching
Learning will be much more effective as it is conducted by connecting the materials taught with learners’ background of knowledge and experiences. Similar to that concept, new vocabularies also have to be related to EFL students’ existing knowledge (or schema), sounds, images, personal feelings/responses, etc. Some activities that can be employed to reinforce students understanding and memorization on the new words taught are:
1. Connecting words to a personal experience.
Teacher can help the students to link the new words given with students’ way to respond those new words by categorizing them into groups: the words they like/dislike (e.g., based on the way they are spelled or pronounced), or the words they think will be easy (or difficult) to remember, and why.
2. Sorting and ranking activities.
For instance, when students are assigned to memorize a list of food, teacher s can ask their students to rank the food items from those they like most to those they like least.
3. TPR (Total Physical Response)
Teachers help the students to associate a verb to an action (or an emotion or adjective to a gesture or cue) by physically acting out the word. Gestures and mimic play an important role when conveying new words.
4. Representations
Teachers visualize the words; they can use small drawings in context (a picture of a house labeled with window, door, roof, etc.) to help the students retention the new words. Besides, teachers can also ask the students to draw pictures or images of the new words given.
5. Grouping words by collocations.
Teachers can help the students to join the new words given according to the words they are often found with. (i.e., idea: original, brilliant, unusual, great). Besides, teachers can use synonym, a quick and efficient way of explaining unknown words. With simple English, we explain new words by antonym and words family including suffix and prefix.
6. Learn in context
This is the best way for the students to learn vocabularies. By learning the new words in their context, students will not only remember the words better, but they will also know how the words are used. To understand a new word fully, a student must know not only what it refers to but also where their boundaries are separate. In other words, the affective meaning of an item can vary according to the context and speaker. The meaning of a word can only be understood in terms of its relationship with other words in the language.
