1. Teaching Vocabulary
Based on M. Lewis, S. Moras & P. Nation
Students: Ana Luna
Gary Torres
Teacher: Roxanna Correa

2. Vocabulary is one of the most vital features in a language, either spoken or
written, as it is what a language is composed of. When teaching English, it is important
to take into account that vocabulary is what compounds a language, consequently, if
students efficiently learn a considerable amount of words, the acquisition of the new
language will become effective. However, when teaching English vocabulary we can
notice that only a few words are the ones which learners remember and use correctly.
This limitation occurs when incidental learning happens, either from listening or
reading. It is easier to find large amounts of vocabulary learning on independent
listening and reading that it is to find these amounts on teaching. Nowadays students
learn English from many other sources apart from the teacher itself, from music and
movies for instance. This becomes a huge part of learning, leaving a small amount of
information about a word at a time for being taught. In this essay we will go deep on
how to teach English vocabulary, having on mind that the more complex the new
information is, the more likely the students are to misinterpret it. We will explain
information based on three important researchers, Michael Lewis, Solange Moras and
Paul Nation, which provide meaningful and real activities for implementing in class and
also suggestions for efficiently teach vocabulary.
Firstly, Michael Lewis is considered as an important contributor to English
teaching, not only because he highlighted the importance of vocabulary as an essential
element for communication, but also because of his controversial and thought-
provoking ideas presented in his work. For instance, his Lexical Approach is one of his
most important contributions to language teaching and learning. Here, Lewis (1994)
gives importance to the term meaning in vocabulary, which is important because if
students do not know the meaning of words they are learning, they are not going to be
able to participate in real conversations, or even in class. In order to make this
participation improve, fluency becomes significant. On one hand he suggests that
vocabulary is not precisely stored only as individual words, but also as phrases and
larger chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing in this way the
difficulties at the moment of processing. On the other hand, he states that learners who
tend to learn individual words are going to need more effort and time to memorize the
word, understand its usage and finally using it to express themselves. That is why
identifying chunks and master their collocational range is very important and teacher
should encourage students to organize and record these, and at least in the beginning,

3. help them with a lot of guidance. Moreover, in this approach, grammar joins vocabulary
in terms of importance at the moment of teaching. Grammar should be totally present
when teaching vocabulary, either inductively or deductively. Otherwise the new words
turn useless with time, which happens to most of EFL students nowadays. Moras (2001)
mentions that learners can communicate well and make themselves clear, they recognize
items and their meaning, they learn the basic structure of the new language and they
might have a wide range of vocabulary, nevertheless, their productive use of that wide
range of vocabulary is commonly limited. The material used for these kinds of lessons
should be real since the beginning of the lesson. Learners need to be engaged to what
they are going to learn as they also expect attractive, meaningful, authentic and didactic
material to get involved in the class.
Secondly, the way students acquire a language, word by word has a lot to do
with how our memory and storage system works. According to Moras (2001) it seems
that everything we learn goes through our short-term memory first and when we start
using what we learn we transfer it to our long-term memory. In this case, vocabulary
should be taught by creating mental linkages (assimilation and accommodation),
applying images and sounds (imagery, semantic mapping, using keywords, representing
sounds in memory), reviewing in a structured way, using physical response or sensation
(mechanical techniques). Noticing that students forget the words they have learnt seems
to be an inevitable process, unless teachers regularly encourage students to use these
items they have learnt. Consequently, recycling is essential, and it should constantly
happen one or two days after the initial input. We can use this information to facilitate
the learning process in students, by grouping items of vocabulary in semantic fields,
such as topics.
Thirdly and as mentioned before, meaning is one of the most important features
of vocabulary, even though, it I not the only one. On one hand, Lewis (1994) and Moras
(2001) mention the use of dictionaries as a way to discover meaning and foster learner
independence. In addition to this, he suggests activities such as guided discovery, which
implies the teacher asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess
meanings correctly; and the contextual guesswork, which means that students guess the
word by providing them the context in which the it appears. On the other hand, Nation
(1974) provides activities such as word and meaning matching, labeling, sentence
completion or crossword puzzles. Besides, teachers might focus on form and use in their

4. lessons. For focusing on form Nation states that following spelling rules, recognizing
word parts or building word family tables are good options. For focusing on use,
although, he suggests sentence completion, collocation matching or collocation tables.
Whatever the activity is, it must be focused on useful words which learners are going to
use in the future, and avoid interference by not relating unknown or partly known words
together.
Fourthly, According to Paul Nation (2007) there are 10 best ideas to teach
vocabulary and they are not exactly a list of simple vocabulary teaching techniques.
Nation believes there are much better ways of using valuable learning time.
The first idea to teach vocabulary is to apply principles learning of teaching and
learning. Nation believes that principled planning of vocabulary learning is more
important than particular techniques. He suggest that a principle such as provide
opportunities for cooperative interaction should be more valuable at the moment to
teach than making vocabulary learning exercises (hidden words, match the word and
meaning). The principles can be applied in different ways according to the
circumstances in which the language courses is taught.
Second idea, approach high and low frequency words differently. Teachers should deal
with high and low frequency words in quite different ways. Nation suggests that high
frequency words deserve a lot of attention from teachers because at the moment they are
all know , teachers should train learners to use strategies for learning and dealing with
low frequency words.
Third idea, use the four strands. According to Paul Nation a well-balanced vocabulary
course should have equal proportions of opportunities for learning in each of the four
strands of meaning focused input where students learn vocabulary through
communicative listening and reading activities such as listening to stories, watching TV
or films and shared reading, but learners do not produce anything. The second strand is
meaning focused output where students learn vocabulary through communicative
speaking and writing activities such as talking in conversations, writing a note keeping a
diary. The third strand is language focused learning; learners give deliberate attention to
language features such as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and discourse.
The last strand is fluency in the development in the four skills of listening, speaking,
and reading and writing, here learners are helped to make the best use of what they

5. already know through typical activities such as speed reading, repeated reading,
repeated retelling, ten minute writing and listening to easy stories.
The fourth idea is to implement an extensive reading program. Learners should read a
least one book every two weeks and a major aim should be that students gain pleasure
from the reading without interference from the teacher; moreover, an extensive listening
program would be a very useful idea.
The fifth idea is to carefully design speaking and writing activities. The teacher should
design speaking and writing activities. This involves written or spoken input in the
activities that each piece of input contains about L2 words that may be new to the
learners.
The sixth idea, use a variety of activities aimed at fluency development. Nation prefers
that learners do not meet or use any new vocabulary; instead, they become more fluent
at using what they already know.
The seventh idea to teach vocabulary is to provide extended training and practice in
guessing unknown vocabulary from context. The eventual goal is to become fluent at
guessing. This is a strategy very useful for dealing with both high and low frequency
words. It can be approached in many ways, but it is best to use a bottom–up guessing
strategy that relies on language instead of background knowledge.
The eighth idea is to train students to use words cards. According to Nation an excellent
way to increase vocabulary in Students is train them in the strategy of learning words
using small cards with a foreign word or phrase in one side and the L1 translation on the
other.
The ninth idea is to teach the high frequency affixes of English. A good useful tool to
help student to remember the meaning of the many Latinate words of English is get
students to learn the most useful 15-20 English prefixes and suffixes.
Finally, the last best idea to teach vocabulary is to encourage learner autonomy. Is
important to encourage students to take responsibility for their own vocabulary learning,
it means, if students know what vocabulary to learn and how to learn it they learning
can be much effective.

6. To summarize it is remarkable to say that vocabulary should be at the centre of
language teaching, mainly because language consists of grammaticalized lexis and not
lexicalized grammar. In another words, vocabulary relies a lot on grammar, making
these two elements essential to be taught together. We as future teachers must be
concerned about how students learn, how their minds work in order to acquire the new
language. As learners’ productive use of a wide range of vocabulary is limited,
strategies for vocabulary teaching agree on the fact that teachers should turn student’s
receptive vocabulary items into productive ones, which means, encourage students to
learn and to use lexical items eventually. To reinforce this, teachers need to use
authentic material to expose the students to rich, contextualized, naturally-occurring
language. Learning vocabulary is fundamental for any student learning English as a
foreign language. If learners want to do normal activities such as writing a story,
talking in a conversation or comprehending written pieces of text, they need to know
vocabulary for each situation they face. There are many strategies to teach vocabulary
that we have to keep on mind to make our students learn more effectively. In this essay
we provided just some choices from a wide variety of strategies for teaching
vocabulary. As Paul Nation suggests, learners should read at least one book every two
weeks to improve their vocabulary and to comprehend more. Besides, students not only
have to learn new words, but also they have to repeat them a lot because when students
see a word repeatedly they can acquire an idea of what it means faster that if they just
see a word once. We notice the importance of vocabulary at the moment of learning
another language because acquiring vocabulary implies the developing of speaking,
writing, listening and writing skills. We cannot write or tell a story without knowing
words and their meaning, we cannot even comprehend a text. We acquire vocabulary
through meaningful activities and as explained before, learners have to notice
collocations and deal with meaning. Teachers need choose suitable tasks including
group work as a way of exchanging knowledge in class and making students use the
language in realistic context. It is important to remark that students’ production will
depend highly on motivation, and this is what teachers should constantly promote.

7. References
Lewis, M. (1994). The Lexical Approach. Hove, England: Language Teaching
Publications, Volume 1, Number 2.
Moras, S. (2001). Teaching Vocabulary to advanced students: A Lexical Approach. Sao
carlos, Brazil.
Nation, I.S.P. (2007) The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching
1, 1: 1-12.
Nation, I.S.P. (1974) Techniques for teaching vocabulary. English Teaching Forum 12,
3: 18-21.