This document discusses techniques for teaching vocabulary to advanced students. It emphasizes that vocabulary is an important part of the curriculum and should not be overlooked, as students can have strong grammar skills but lack vocabulary. It outlines several effective techniques, such as teaching vocabulary through listening and reading, grouping words into categories, considering students' interests to motivate learning, and using authentic materials and group work with dictionaries when planning lessons. The document also introduces concepts like polysemy and homonymy and stresses the importance of teaching vocabulary chunks like idioms and collocations to help students sound more natural.

1. I read the text titled “Teaching Vocabulary to Advanced Students: A Lexical
Approach”. And I would like to highlight that this text is not only about how to teach
vocabulary to advanced students but also it tells about different techniques that I, as a
future teacher of English, can use in order to improve the vocabulary acquisition in my
future students. Besides, I can use all of these techniques at home in order to learn new
lexical items.
This text suggests that vocabulary can be learnt incidentally through the
practice of the receptive skills such as listening and reading; however, this incidental
learning is not enough to expand vocabulary in students. For that reason this text
emphasizes the teaching of vocabulary. Moreover, it proposes that vocabulary should be
considered an important part of the syllabus. Because, a student can have a perfect
grammar; nevertheless, he/she maybe does not have enough vocabulary to express
his/her ideas clearly and appropriately. Personally, I agree with the text, because I
believe that vocabulary is as important as grammar or phonetics and that it requires a
great attention in the classroom. I have observed in different schools and also at the
University that some students have an excellent pronunciation and an almost perfect
grammar; nonetheless, I could notice that their vocabulary is not in the same level. I
completely sure if the teaching of lexis was part of the program at both schools and at
the University’s student would improve their vocabulary considerably.
Also with this text I learnt some new concepts such as polysemy, homonymy,
homophyny, etc. which are quite relevant in order to teach vocabulary better and which
were unknown for me before reading the text.
In addition, this text clarify that vocabulary not only means single words but
also chunks such as collocations, idioms; multi-words verbs, etc. which are within this
enormous group that is known as “vocabulary”. Moreover, I have learnt the importance
of teaching these chunks because these make students sounds more natural. Thus, in
order to teach chunks teachers have to know that our memory plays an important role in
the vocabulary acquisition. First, a good technique to teach chunks is to be conscious
that, in general, our memory cannot retain more than seven items at a time hence a
teacher should not teach more than seven different items in a class. Second, another
good technique is grouping the items in lexical categories such as sports, fruits, colors,
and so on. Third, is to be aware of the interest of our students, because if they feel a
personal need to know a lexical item it would be easier to be learnt for them. Thus,
motivation plays another relevant role in the acquisition of vocabulary and it has to be
considered in the teaching vocabulary process.
Finally, I learnt how to plan a good lesson to teach vocabulary. To do that is
important to consider some key factors such as the selection of the material. In this step
is a very good idea to select authentic material. Also, teacher has to help students to
identify collocations. Another factor is to make students working in group to foster their
independence from the teacher and the use of dictionaries. The last factor is the

2. selection of the task, is a very good option to choose a realistic context to teach
vocabulary.
To conclude, as a future teacher of English I learnt, with this text, that I have to
focus my attention not only on the teaching of grammatical structures or on the
pronunciation but also on the teaching of vocabulary.