The process of acquiring vocabulary

Contents

 

 

Introduction……………………………………………………………………

 

 

I. Theoretical part

1.1 What is vocabulary?

2. How important is vocabulary?
3. How is vocabulary learned?
4. How words are remembered?
5. What makes a word difficult?
6. Revising vocabulary
7. How important is the student’s motivation?

 

 

II. Techniques of teaching

2.1 Techniques of teaching………………………………………………………14

2.2 Categorization………………………………………………………………..14

2.3 Semantic Feature Analysis…………………………………………………..15

2.4 Making Analogies……………………………………………………………16

2.5 Structural Analysis…………………………………………………………...16

2.6 Use of the Dictionary…………………………………………………………18

2.7 Special Types of Vocabulary Terms…………………………………………21

 

 

 

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………….26

 

 

List of literature…………………………………………………………………..27

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

                This coursework presents the process of acquiring vocabulary. The reason I’ve chosen this theme is the wish to know more about developing vocabulary and how to make the lesson more interesting and useful at the same time. Also I’m interested in finding more successful methods of learning and memorizing words. There are the following questions which in my opinion should be considered: 

• What is vocabulary?
• How important is vocabulary?
• How words are remembered?
• Why do we forget words?
• What kind of mistakes do learners make?
• What techniques are used in learning and teaching vocabulary?
• What methods are used and how they work?

    Not all of these methods presented here is any brand new discovery for the language teacher. The vast majority of teachers used to practice most of them in his/her work, there’s only a try to add something new to well known and allegedly usual techniques (like note-taking), to study them deeper and show more interesting and useful side of them. Perhaps some teachers can discover something new in my coursework and I would be very grateful to them if they would be inspired to apply them!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How is Vocabulary learned?

 

 

1. What is vocabulary?

 

          What is vocabulary? The word vocabulary means all the words of a language and what they mean. A person’s vocabulary consists of all words he/she can use and understand. Vocabulary can be split into two types: receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary consists of the words which a person understands when he/she hears or reads them. Expressive vocabulary consists of the words the person uses when she/he speaks.

          Why teach vocabulary?

• Vocabulary building is important in developing literacy.
• Vocabulary has a direct affect on comprehension.
• Knowing vocabulary words is a key to reading comprehension.

         The reasons why these individuals have weak vocabularies are often complex and overlapping, but here are a few of the common reasons for weak vocabularies. The person 1) lives in an environment where higher level vocabularies are not used, 2) has a lower education level because the person either did not complete school or the education was of poor quality, 3) attended special education classes in which lower level vocabulary was used in class and in textbooks, 4) does not read much or has a reading problem, 5) does not pay attention to words, 6) has an auditory perception problem which makes it difficult to hear the subtle differences in words, 7) does not have a good understanding of the structure of language including parts of speech and word parts, prefixes, suffixes and word roots.

There are four different types of vocabularies: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In this section of this work I will try to show how and when students develop their vocabulary during the learning English language.

The listening vocabulary is composed of those words a person understands when he or she hears them spoken. It is possible for a word to be in a person’s listening vocabulary and not in his or her speaking, reading, or writing vocabulary. For many students, the listening vocabulary exceeds each of the other vocabularies by a large margin. Listening develops in a student before speaking, reading and writing and may serve as a readiness agent for the other areas. When a child at his or her first lessons of foreign language begins to recognize that the word “pen” means the same like in Russian language “ручка”, the child will respond without mistake when the teacher shows him/her the pen and asks “What is it?”. Later the child will feel confident enough of the word to use it to communicate with others orally. Still later, reading and writing of the word are likely to develop.

The speaking vocabulary is composed of those words a person can use orally to communicate information to others. Since speaking vocabularies are generally based on listening vocabularies, they are generally smaller than the listening vocabularies. Most students, even people in their own language understand many words that they never use in their speech.

The reading vocabulary is composed of the words that a student recognizes and understands when they are seen in print. A word may be in a student’s listening and speaking vocabularies and still not be in his or her reading vocabulary for at least two reasons. First, this occur because the child has not yet learned the sound/symbol relations that are needed to read that word, even though there is a regular sound/symbol association involved. For example, a child at the first stages of studying English language may understand the word “clock” when he or she hears it and may be able to use the word when speaking, but, because the child has not learned the ck blend or some other part of the word, he or she may not be able to read the word “clock” yet. Another reason a word may not be in a person’s reading vocabulary is that the word doesn’t fit a regular sound/symbol association pattern. For example, a child may have used word “daughter” before, may understand the word when it is spoken, and may be able to use the word orally, and still not be able to recognize it in print because the sound/symbol associations are not regular in English.

The writing vocabulary is composed of words that a student can use accurately in written form, in his or her written communications. Most students have fewer words in their writing vocabularies than in their listening, speaking and reading vocabularies. Using a word in writing requires more than just understanding it when it is heard (listening vocabulary) or read (reading vocabulary). Just as speaking the word does, writing the work requires the ability to recall the word and its meaning and to place it in meaningful relationships to other words, but writing requires one additional step – encoding the word into printed symbols. Writing vocabulary therefore takes somewhat longer to acquire. In addition, the permanence of the written word, as opposed to the spoken word, and its openness to close scrutiny make students unwilling to use in writing any words that they are not sure they have under complete control. Students writing themes, for example, often have excellent descriptive words in mind to use, but opt for easier words because they are more sure of either their spellings or meanings.

 

1.2 How important is vocabulary

 

 

Teaching English vocabulary is an important area worthy of effort and investigation. Recently methodologists and linguists emphasize and recommend teaching vocabulary because of its importance in language teaching. Vocabulary is needed for expressing meaning and in using the receptive (listening and reading) and the productive (speaking and writing) skills. "If language structures make up the skeleton of language, then it is vocabulary that provides the vital organs and the flesh".

Vocabulary is not a syllabus, i.e., a list of words that teachers prepare for their learners to memorize and learn by heart. Memorizing may be good and useful as a temporary technique for tests, but not for learning a foreign language. Language students need to learn vocabulary of the target language in another way. If we are really to teach students what words mean and how they are used, we need to show them being used together in context. Words do not just exist on their own; they live together and they depend upon each other. Therefore, teaching vocabulary correctly is a very important element in language learning. Correct vocabulary instruction involves vocabulary selection, word knowledge and techniques.

 

 

 

1.5 How words are remembered?

 

 

          The learner needs not only to learn a lot of words, but to remember them. In fact, learning is remembering. Unlike the learning of grammar, which is essentially a rule-based system, vocabulary knowledge is largely a question of accumulating individual items. There are few short cuts in the form of generative rules: it is essentially a question of memory. How, then, does memory work? And what are the implications for teaching vocabulary?

         Researchers into the workings of memory customarily distinguish between the following systems: the short-term store, working memory, and long-term memory.

          The short-term store (STS) is the brain’s capacity to hold a limited number of items of information for periods of time up to a few seconds. It is the kind of memory that is involved in holding in your head a telephone number for as long as it takes to be able to dial it. Or to repeat a word that you’ve just heard the teacher modelling. But successful vocabulary learning clearly involves more than simply holding words in your mind for a few seconds. For words to be integrated long-term memory they need to be subjected to different kinds of operations.

          Focussing on words long enough to perform operations on them is the function of working memory. Many cognitive tasks such as reasoning, learning and understanding depend on working memory. It can be thought of as a kind of work bench, where information is first placed, studied and moved about before being filed away for later retrieval. The information that is being manipulated can come from external sources via the senses, or it can be “downloaded” from the long-term memory. Or both. For example, a learner can hear a word (like tangi), download a similar word from long-term memory (like tango), and compare the two in working memory, before deciding if they are the same or different. Material remains in working memory for about twenty seconds.

        This capacity is made possible by the existence of the articulatory loop, a process of subvocal repetition, a bit like a loop of audio tape going round and round. It enables the short-term store to be kept refreshed. Having just heard a new word, for example, we can run it by as many times as we need in order to examine it (tangi.. tang.. tangi.. tangi..)-assuming that not to many other new words are competing for space on the loop. The holding capacity of the articulatory loop seems to be a determining factor in the ability to learn languages: the longerthe loop, the better the learner. Or, to put it another way, the ability to hold a phonological representation of a word in working memory is a good predictor of language learning aptitude. Likewise, any interference in the processes of subvocal repetition –e.g. distracting background talk-is likely to disrupt the functioning of the loop and impair learning. Another significant feature of the articulatory loop is that it can hold fewer L2 words than L1 words. This has a bearing on the length of chunk a learner can process at any one time.

          Also linked to working memory is a kind of mental sketch pad. Here images-such as visual mnemonics (or memory prompts) – can be placed and scanned in order to elicit words from long term memory into working memory.

          Long-term memory can be thought of as a kind of filing system. Unlike working memory, which has a limited capacity and no permanent content, long-term memory has an enormous capacity, and its contents are durable over time. However, the fact that learners can retain new vocabulary items the length of a lesson (i.e. beyond the few seconds’ duration of the short-term store) but have forgotten them by the next lesson suggests that long-term memory is not always as long-term as we would wish. Rather, it occupies a continuum from “the quickly  forgotten” to “the never forgotten”. The great challenge for language learners is to transform material from the quickly forgotten to the never forgotten. Research into memory suggests that, in order to ensure that material moves into permanent long-term memory, a number of principles need to be observed. Here is a brief summary of some of the research findings that are relevant to the subject of word learning:

• Repetition: The time - honoured way of “memorising” new material is through repeated rehearsal of the material while it is still in working memory –i.e. letting the articulatory loop just run and run. However, simply repeating an item (the basis of rote learning) seems to have little long-term effect unless some attempt is made to organise the material at the same time. But one kind of repetition that is important is repetition of encounters with a word. It has been estimated that, when reading, words stand a good chance of being remembered if they have been met at least seven times over spaced intervals. (Are you still in any doubt, for instance, as to the meaning of tangi?)   
• Retrieval: Another kind of repetition that is crucial is what is called the retrieval practice effect. This means, simply, that the act of retrieving a word from memory makes it more likely that the learner will be able to recall it again later. Activities which require retrieval, such as using the new word in written sentences, “oil the path” for future recall.
• Spacing: It is better to distribute memory work across a period of time than to mass it together in a single block. This is known as the principle of distributed practice. This applies in both the short term and the long term. When teaching students a new set o words, for example, it is best to present some more, then backtrack again, and so on. As each word becomes better learned, the testing interval can gradually be extended. The aim is to test each item at the longest interval at which it can reliably be recalled. Similarly, over a sequence of lessons, newly presented vocabulary should be reviewed in the next lesson, but the interval between successive tests should gradually be increased.
• Pacing: learners have different learning styles, and process data at different rates, so ideally they should be given the opportunity to pace their own rehearsal activities. This may mean the teacher allowing time during vocabulary learning for learners to do “memory work”-such as organising or reviewing their vocabulary-silently and individually. 
• Use: Putting words to use, preferably in some interesting way, is the  best way of ensuring they are added to long-term memory. It is the principle popularly known as Use it or lose it. Meanwhile, the following points all relate to ways of manipulating words in working memory.
• Cognitive depth: The more decisions the learner makes about a word, and the more cognitively demanding these decisions, the better the word  is remembered. For example, a relatively superficial judgement might be simply to match it with a word that rhymes with it: e. g. tango/mango. A deeper level decision might be to decide on its part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc). Deeper still might be to use it to complete a sentence.
• Personal organising: The judgements that learners make about a word are most effective if they are personalised. In one study, subjects who had read  a sentence aloud containing  new words  showed better recall than subjects who had simply silently rehearsed the words. But subjects who hade made up their own sentences containing the words and read them aloud did better still.
• Imaging: Best of all were subjects who were given the task of silently visualizing a mental picture to go with a new word. Other tests have shown that easily visualized words are more memorable than words that don’t immediately evoke a picture. This suggests that-even for abstract words-it might help if learners associate them with some mental image. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter if the image is highly imaginative or even very vivid, so long as it is self-generated, rather than acquired “second hand”.
• Mnemonics: These are “tricks” to help retrieve items or rules that are stored in memory and that are not yet automatically retrievable. Even native speakers rely on mnemonics to help with some spelling rules: e.g. i before e except after c. as the previous point suggests, the best kinds of mnemonics are often visual. The most well-attested memory technique is the key word technique.
• Motivation: Simply wanting to learn new words is no guarantee that words will be remembered. The only difference a strong motivation  makes is that the learner is likely to spend more time rehearsal and practice, which in the end will pay off in terms of memory. But even unmotivated learners remember words if they have been set tasks that require them to make decisions about them.
• Attention/arousal: Contrary to popular belief, you can’t improve your vocabulary in your sleep, simply by listening to a tape. Some degree of conscious attention is required. Avery high degree of attention (called arousal) seems to correlate with improved recall. Words that trigger a strong emotional response, for example, are more easily recalled than ones that don’t. this may account for the fact that many learners seem to have a knack of remembering swear words, even if they’ve heard them only a couple of times.
• Affective depth: Related to the preceding point, affective (i.e. emotional) information is stored along with cognitive (i.e. intellectual) data, and may play an equally important role on how words are stored and recalled. Just as it is important for learners to make cognitive judgements about words, it may also be important to make affective judgements, such as do I like the sound and look of the word? Do I like the thing that the word represents? Does the word evoke any pleasant or unpleasant associations?

 

1. 6 Revising vocabulary

 

 

Probably the commonest fault among students is failure to realize that learning is essentially an active process. Too many students sit for hours passively reading and rereading notes and textbooks, without ever attempting actively to recall what they have read. The fallacy of this method has been amply shown by experiments.

The same principles apply to more advanced forms of learning: for effective memory, some form of active expression is essential. The student, therefore, should read through the material he wants to master with close attention and should then reproduce the main points aloud or produce a written summary. An hour’s concentrated work of this kind is more effective than three hours’ passive reading.

Making the new words active

One of great advantages of revising vocabulary is that it should help you to make the step from having something in your passive vocabulary to having it in your active vocabulary.

Encourage this process by:

• Writing the words and expressions you are trying to learn in a sentence relating to your life and interests at the moment.
• Making a point of using the new words and expressions in your next class or homework.
• Keeping a learning diary in which you note down things that particularly interest you about the words you have learnt.
• Watching out for the words and expressions you are trying to learn in your general reading of English. If you come across any of them in use, write them down in their context in your diary or notebook.
• Writing a paragraph or story linking the words and expressions you want to learn.

 

7. How important is the students’ motivation?

 

 

          The desire to learn can come from many causes. Perhaps the students love the subject or are simply interested to see what it is like. On the other hand, they may have a practical reason for their study: they want to learn an instrument so they can play in an orchestra, learn English so they can watch American TV or work with English people.

         Famous research carried out in the second half of the twentieth century by Gardner and Lambert suggested that students who felt most warmly about a language and who wanted to integrate into culture of its speakers were more highly motivated (and learnt more successfully) than those who were only learning language as a means to an end (e.g. getting a better job). In other words Integrative motivation was more powerful than Instrumental motivation. But whatever kind of motivation students have, it is clear that highly motivated students do better than ones without motivation at all. 

            If good learners are those that have a positive attitude towards their subject, what can we do if we get students who aren’t like that? Will students whose motivation is only skin-deep be bad learners? Will people who are not extremely keen to learn automatically fail?

One of the main tasks for teachers is to provoke interest and involvement in the subject even when students are not initially interested in it. It is by their choice of topic, activity and linguistic content that they may be able to turn a class around. It is by their attitude to class participation, their conscientiousness, their humour and their seriousness that they may influence their students. It is by their own behaviour and enthusiasm that they may inspire.

         Teachers are not, however, ultimately responsible for their students’ motivation. They can only encourage by word and deed. Real motivation comes from within each individual.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.1 Techniques for Teaching

 

 

Vocabulary development techniques should actively involve the learner as much as possible. Students understand and retain better those things that they have experienced most directly and have been involved in analyzing and discussing. Encouraging use in spoken and written language of the vocabulary terms that are receiving attention is therefore a good idea.