Gain insights into helping your students learn vocabulary from what they read.

1. Ways of Teaching
Vocabulary Using
Reading Material
With
Andrew Weiler
http://strategiesinlanguagelearning.com
http://languagelearningunlocked.com

2. Learning Vocabulary
 There are many ways to teach and learn
vocabulary
 However, we need to make
sure that the way we do it is
going to help our learners
get to their destination

3. What is our aim?
 Teachers in fact have to do more than just
teach vocabulary

- Help students learn vocabulary
- Help them become better learners
- Inspire them to want to become
better

4. What holds learners
back?
 One of the biggest factors is doing
something the wrong way

Results of that are:

progress is slow

can end up believing that you
are not capable

can giving up - because
progress is so slow and you believe
you have no ability

5. Vocabulary with no
Dictionary
 Dictionaries have a place, but not in the
classroom. Why? By using them it
discourages students from:
-
asking questions in L2

- thinking about the overall meaning

- discussing the meaning in L2

- examining the grammar for clues

- examining the context for clues

- guessing

6. Minimal Teacher
Explanation
 Most teachers have a habit of explaining
what students don’t understand. Why is it
better to avoid this if possible?
 Students can become teacher dependent
 Students are not given the chance or
encouraged to work it our for themselves
 Much better to empower students with
strategies so they can work it out for
themselves
 Helps us as teachers to think more about
what we can do to empower students

7. At the lower levels
 What are some keys to helping learners with
vocabulary at the lower levels?

- make sure that the
vocabulary is mainly at the
level of their perception

- remember aim B from slide 2,
namely that we are there to
help them become better
learners not just to learn one
piece of vocabulary

8. At the higher levels
 Coming to the more practical side to
today’s tutorial. Key: We want learners to
learn more than just one word at a time –

- to ask questions in L2

- to think about the overall meaning

- to discuss the meaning in L2

- to examine the grammar for clues

- to examine the context for clues

- to guess the meaning of the word

- to apply what they learn, immediately

* develop effective language learning
strategies

9. Story excerpted from Cynthia Kersey's,
Unstoppable. www.unstoppable.net
 Some people bring out the best in you in a
way that you might never have fully realized
on your own. My mom, Ruby Lloyd Wilson,
was one of those people," says Kemmons
Wilson, founder of the Holiday Inn hotel
chain.

10. 1a Origins and the Use
 Realized –
 Similar to in meaning….
 Function of “ize”
 Bring this into their life with questions like

What have you realized / what do you know?

How did you realize it?
 Founder – where does this word come from?
 Who founded ……..? When? How?
 Who was the founder of …….?

11. 2

Most people called her Doll. My father died when I
was nine months old, making her a single mother and
a widow at the age of eighteen. While I was growing
up, there were times when we had so little money
that we had to live on a few pounds of dried butter
beans for a week at a time. While food was scarce,
my mother's love and devotion were abundant.
Each night, she sat me on her lap and spoke the
words that would change my life, 'Kemmons, you are
destined for greatness and you can do anything in
life if you're willing to work hard enough to get it.’

12. 2a Questions
 Scarce –


Was there a lot of food around? So….


Look at previous sentence.
What are things in your life that are scarce –
Widow – (what are you called if your husband dies?)

Why do you become a widow?

When do you become a widow?

What is a man called if he loses his wife?

13. 3

At fourteen, I was hit by a car and the doctors said I would
never walk again. My mother took a leave of absence
from her job at a meat-packing plant and moved into my
hospital room to care for me. Every day, she spoke to me in
her gentle, loving voice, reassuring me that no matter what
those doctors said, I could walk again if I wanted to badly
enough. She drove that message so deep into my heart
that I finally believed her. A year later, I returned to school - walking on my own.

14. 3a Similar meanings
 (Meat packing) Plant


Okay…any ideas of other examples of each


What is another word for this word?
So what is the difference?
She drove that message so deep into my heart that I
I finally believed her.

Why did he end up believing her?

How did she drive the message so deep?

What else can you drive deep…what is the result?

15. 4

When the Great Depression hit, my mom lost her job like
millions of others. I was seventeen, and against Doll's
wishes, I left school to support the both of us. At that
moment, it became my mission in life to succeed for my
mother's sake, and I vowed never to be poor again.

16. 4a Alternate Uses,
Personalise
 Hit
 What can be hit?
 Why use hit here?
 Vowed
 Another word?
 Why did she vow?
 What is the difference between 2 words?
 When else do we vow?

17. 5

Over the years, I experienced varying levels of business
success. But the real turning point occurred on a vacation I
took with my wife and five kids in 1951. I was frustrated at
the second-rate accommodations available for families
and was furious that they charged an extra $2 for each
child. That was too expensive for the average American
family, and I was determined to offer them an alternative.

18. 5a Levels and subtleties
 Frustrated – what’s a little frustration called
 Furious –
There are levels AND shades of meaning that can
be explored by making words personal with clear
examples – providing extended practice

19. 6

I told my wife that I was going to open a motel for
families with a brand name people could trust that
never charged extra for children. I figured about 400
nationwide motels would be the right number so that
each one would be within a day's drive of about 150
miles. There were plenty of doubters who predicted
failure because there wasn't anything remotely similar
to this concept at that time.

20. 6a Cause and effect
 There were plenty of doubters who
predicted failure because there wasn't
anything remotely similar to this concept at
that time

What caused what?

Why did they they predict failure?

Who did they doubt?

Why did they doubt him?

Cause
Process
Effect

21. 7

"Not surprisingly, Doll was one of my strongest supporters
and among the first to pitch in. She worked behind the
desk and even designed the room decor for the first
hundred hotels. As in any business, we experienced
enormous challenges. For years, we paid our employees
Christmas bonuses with promissory notes because cash
was so short. But with my mother's words deeply
embedded in my soul, I never doubted we would
prevail. Fifteen years later, we had the largest hotel
system in the world, with one of the most recognizable
names in the business.

22. 7a Exploring
 Pitch in

What did she do?

Another word for that?

When else would you pitch in?
 Embedded

What was embedded?

How was it embedded?

Is this a temporary result?

What word do you recognize within that word?

23. 8

You may not have started out life in the best of
circumstances. But if you can find a mission in life worth
working for and believe in yourself, nothing can stop you
from achieving success.

24. 9

Kemmons Wilson founded the first Holiday Inn in 1951 and
built it into the largest hotel chain in the world. When he
retired in 1979, the company had 1,759 inns in more than
fifty countries with annual revenues of $1 billion.

25. Summing up
 The end of the story is a great place to orally go
over the story, maybe in paragraphs or maybe
in events – giving them a chance to reuse the
vocabulary
 Recycling words, rephrasing meaning,
connecting together the ideas in different ways
are all natural outcomes in an ESL classroom.
 Questions like, “What did YOU learn?”, “What
was the most important idea for you take this
story into a more personal area, providing them
opportunities to further explore and use the new
vocabulary.

26. What did we achieve?

By choosing an inspiring story, students are engaged

Even if they can’t relate to all of it, everyone should
be able to relate to some of it

By not going to a dictionary, they have had to ask
questions, talk, think, guess, ponder about ideas,
grammar, word forms, etc

By relating words to their own lives they make the
learning personal –

Hence, learning vocabulary becomes an interesting,
engaging, memory filled event, one not to be
forgotten easily.

27. Homework! 

This of course would not be a real lesson unless I gave
homework!!

So I would like to choose 5 other words from this story
that you believe your students would have trouble
with.

I would like you to write down how you would teach
them.

Please put your answers in the comment thread
under this lesson for ONE of them. This way every one
can benefit from what you learned. I will comment
where needed, if I believe some input is needed.
What I am doing here is not dissimilar to what I do with
my students

28. Thank you for being here
and participating!
Good luck with your teaching! 
Andrew Weiler –
www.strategiesinlanguagelearning.com
http://languagelearningunlocked.com
andrew@strategiesinlanguagelearning.com