This presentation is about teaching and learning vocabulary in SLA course in EMU

1. Raba and
Tazhan
Learning and Teaching
Vocabulary

2.  “While without grammar little can be
conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be
conveyed”
David Wilkins, British linguist

3. The vast majority of students and teachers
report that vocabulary acquisition is an essential
part for language learning…

4. Word Frequency
It measured by counting how often a word or word form
occurs in a large sample of speaking or written language.
The most frequent words in the target language should be
taught first which is the most teaching has been based on
this idea.
Most frequent words are introduced in the beginner level.

5. According to BNC the most frequent
words are

6.  Most frequent words are structure words.
 According to BNC for three types of content words are

7.  It is more likely to remember a word that you
meet everyday than you only meet once.
 But, sometimes students learn a word which
they meet only once like swear words or when
a teacher drops something and say a rude
word students learn it even if it is never
repeated in a class.

8. Knowledge of Words
 Learning vocabulary means acquiring long
lists of words with their meanings, whether
through some direct link or via translation in to
the first language.

9. Knowledge of
words
Forms of the
word
pronunciation
spelling
Grammatical
properties
Grammatical
category
Possible and
impossible
structures
Idiosyncratic
grammatical
information
Word building
Lexical
properties
collocations
appropriateness
meaning
General
meaning
Specific meaning

10. One word-store or two in the L2
user’s mind?
 The L1 and the L2 sets of vocabulary in the
L2 user's mind maybe related in various ways,
ranging from completely separate to
completely integrated.

11. Types of meaning
 Components of meaning: general aspect of
meaning which are shared by many words:
boy has the components “ male”, “human”,
“young”, etc.

12.  Lexical relations: words do not exist by
themselves, but are always in relationship to
other words… the meaning of hot relates to
cold, etc.!!!!!!!!!!!
 In lexical semantics, cruse (1986) explained
that words can be synonyms or hyponyms for
example dogs, cats, horse are kind of
animals, or antonyms, etc.

13.  Prototypes: words have whole meanings
divided into basic level “car”, subordinate level
“ford” and superordinate level “vehicle”.

14. Are meanings universal?
While some aspects of meaning are universal, there
are differences between languages in how they
express concepts of color, etc., which may affect the
thinking of L2 users.

15. Strategies for understanding and
learning vocabulary
 To understand an unfamiliar L2 word, people
make use of variety of strategies, such as
guessing, using dictionary, deducing meaning
from the word’s form and relating to cognates.
 To acquire new L2 words, people use
strategies such as repetition, organizing them
in the mind, and linking them to existing
knowledge

16.  Guess from the situation or context:
this is the natural process of getting meaning for unknown
words that we use all the time in our first language.

17.  Use a Dictionary:
The most popular way of getting the meaning of a
new word like “calligraphy” is to look it up in a
dictionary.
-monolingual versus to translation dictionary:
written in one language, used by native speakers
and competent speakers.
-reception versus production dictionary:
production dictionaries permit one to hunt for the
precise word to express something one wants to
say.

18. - corpus-based dictionaries: depend on
collecting a large sample of words from many
sources, but recent dictionaries have been
based on large-scale collections of real spoken
and written language processed by computer.

19.  Make deductions from the word form: try to
deduce it from its actual form, I have
encountered other words with the morpheme
“lith” before, such as(megalith) which I
understand to be a big stone, and (neolithic)
which I understand stone age, hence I guess
that (lith) is something to do with stone.

21. Strategies for acquiring words
 Repetition and rote learning:
repeat the word again and again until you know
it well, typically this is done by memorizing lists
of words or by testing yourself repeatedly.

22. Organizing words in the mind:

23. Linking to existing knowledge
The commonest way to remembering new
vocabulary is to exploit the different memory
system in our minds for linking new information
to old.

24. Vocabulary and Teaching
Demonstrating The complexity Fitting in student’s strategies
meaning
of words
Audio visual traditional TBL not transfer L1,L2 show pic, miming, definition
Picture Translation no technique

25. Vocabulary and teaching
 Teach the complexity of words
 Fit in with the students' strategies
 Teach basic-level words first
 Teach lexical relationships
 Think about the first presentation of the word
 Teach some words through components of meaning
 Remember that it is how the word is practiced, not how often,
that is important
 Remember that students transfer L1 meanings as well as the
words themselves
 Put word in their structural context