I'm a very new ESL tutor with only a minimal amount of training, so I apologize for such a basic question. I have a adult Korean student with good grammar, pretty good pronunciation and intonation, and good reading and listening skills. She sounds like someone with a good command of the English language -- as long as she stays in a very small range of topics.
I don't think the methods I've had in my foriegn language classes have been very helpful, so I'm lost when it comes to teaching vocabulary. The textbook we have isn't giving me much help. What is the best way to help a student with a very small vocabulary?
How best to approach building vocabulary?
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
Here's one suggestion:
Don't rely on your textbook to provide all the answers. Perhaps, ask your student what topics she's interested in, then search of the Net for an article on this subject. You may need to adapt the text to simply the language, and reduce the amount of new vocabulary. This should keep you busy for a few months.
Buena Suerte.
Iain
Don't rely on your textbook to provide all the answers. Perhaps, ask your student what topics she's interested in, then search of the Net for an article on this subject. You may need to adapt the text to simply the language, and reduce the amount of new vocabulary. This should keep you busy for a few months.
Buena Suerte.
Iain
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LarryLatham
- Posts: 1195
- Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2003 6:33 pm
- Location: Aguanga, California (near San Diego)
Helping students expand their vocabulary.
Hi nckd,
Iain's suggestion is excellent. An important key is that he recommends working with a text rather than with lists of words, and a text that lies within the interest scope of your student. In addition, depending on how interested you are in developing your knowledge of this subject, may I suggest a couple of good readings on vocabulary development:
1. Vocabulary, by Michael Murphy, Oxford University Press, 1990. This is an excellent introduction to how words and idioms are organized, and how they are learned, stored, and retrieved by the mind. Some great work on the interaction between teachers and learners, too.
2. The Lexical Approach, by Michael Lewis, Language Teaching Publications, 1993. This is a seminal work, highly influential to me, although coming into controversy in recent months. The controversy is unwarranted in my view--brought by people who haven't read it carefully enough to understand what Lewis is proposing. Presents a theoretical (and to some extent practical) background for you to evaluate various ideas about how your students can learn vocabulary efficiently and effectively.
By the way, I share your suspicion that the methods employed in language classrooms are often not very helpful. Teachers really owe it to students to develop systems better than what we typically use.
Wish you the best in your ESL adventures. It is a wonderful, rewarding career, which will, if you throw yourself into it fully, gratify you in the most amazing ways. You may wind up with friends and people who respect you all over the world. You will be doing something that really matters in life-changing ways to at least some of your students.
Larry Latham
Iain's suggestion is excellent. An important key is that he recommends working with a text rather than with lists of words, and a text that lies within the interest scope of your student. In addition, depending on how interested you are in developing your knowledge of this subject, may I suggest a couple of good readings on vocabulary development:
1. Vocabulary, by Michael Murphy, Oxford University Press, 1990. This is an excellent introduction to how words and idioms are organized, and how they are learned, stored, and retrieved by the mind. Some great work on the interaction between teachers and learners, too.
2. The Lexical Approach, by Michael Lewis, Language Teaching Publications, 1993. This is a seminal work, highly influential to me, although coming into controversy in recent months. The controversy is unwarranted in my view--brought by people who haven't read it carefully enough to understand what Lewis is proposing. Presents a theoretical (and to some extent practical) background for you to evaluate various ideas about how your students can learn vocabulary efficiently and effectively.
By the way, I share your suspicion that the methods employed in language classrooms are often not very helpful. Teachers really owe it to students to develop systems better than what we typically use.
Wish you the best in your ESL adventures. It is a wonderful, rewarding career, which will, if you throw yourself into it fully, gratify you in the most amazing ways. You may wind up with friends and people who respect you all over the world. You will be doing something that really matters in life-changing ways to at least some of your students.
Larry Latham
In my view, East Asian students must learn how to learn, and that means they have to accept a certain measure of responsability for what they need to be able to do.
This is evident in acquiring vocabulary. It should NOT be a teacher's job to set quotas or goals for the student as to what words he or she has to learn.
I often ask my students to come equipped with a monolingual (if possible) dictionary. If I give them a composition assignment, I want them to know which words they do not know; they can find appropriate lexical units by themselves with the help of their own reference works.
This seems to be new to most CHinese (and, I suppose, to Korean) students.
Let's say we cover the topic of TIME: Your student will easily memorise English equivalents for his or her Korean/CHinese/Japanese concepts of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, season. These are all nouns; how do they learn adjectives? Year = annual (synonym: yearly), month = monthly, week = weekly, etc. Now, what about adverbials of time and adverbs of frequency? Many have no exact equivalents in the first tongue of our students, so it is necessary for them to get to understand how they function in an English sentence: COme late, lately, of late, etc.
I also believe in the virtue of writing whole sentences so the student has a graphic representation of the sounds he or she must pronounce. Some time ago, I noticed that students failed to hear the difference between "It is rainY" and "it is rainING". The textbook introduced the adjectives 'snowy', 'rainy', 'cloudy', but it failed to list the nouns rain, cloud and snow, which lead to some considerable confusion!
This is evident in acquiring vocabulary. It should NOT be a teacher's job to set quotas or goals for the student as to what words he or she has to learn.
I often ask my students to come equipped with a monolingual (if possible) dictionary. If I give them a composition assignment, I want them to know which words they do not know; they can find appropriate lexical units by themselves with the help of their own reference works.
This seems to be new to most CHinese (and, I suppose, to Korean) students.
Let's say we cover the topic of TIME: Your student will easily memorise English equivalents for his or her Korean/CHinese/Japanese concepts of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, season. These are all nouns; how do they learn adjectives? Year = annual (synonym: yearly), month = monthly, week = weekly, etc. Now, what about adverbials of time and adverbs of frequency? Many have no exact equivalents in the first tongue of our students, so it is necessary for them to get to understand how they function in an English sentence: COme late, lately, of late, etc.
I also believe in the virtue of writing whole sentences so the student has a graphic representation of the sounds he or she must pronounce. Some time ago, I noticed that students failed to hear the difference between "It is rainY" and "it is rainING". The textbook introduced the adjectives 'snowy', 'rainy', 'cloudy', but it failed to list the nouns rain, cloud and snow, which lead to some considerable confusion!
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italianstallion39
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:00 pm
Once the student has the basics like yours has, the best way to learn vocabulary is to read. I challenge my excellent students not to use a L1 dictionary at all, and an English-English dictionary only in the rarest instances. This forces vocabulary learning from context. It also improves motivation because they are able to read faster, skipping words that are unimportant for the meaning and general gist. This sort of "true" learning also makes the vocabulary more memorable and improves retention because the students will be remembering ideas and vocabulary to go with the ideas at the same time.