Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi Everyone,

I am most interested in teaching vocabulary to upper-level students; ie, those who are entering college or who are already there. Such students are unique, in that you can't sit them down in front of a chalkboard or force them to use flash-cards (I'm not so sure that learning to use vocabulary in such a way is good for anybody). Does anybody have any experience or good advice about how best to teach English vocabulary to such students? I'd appreciate it if anybody could give advice on non-traditional activities or if somebody could provide a list of resources where such activities or ideas can be found.

Here's what I have found so far:

1. http://www.vocabulary.com/
2. http://www.vocabularycoach.com
3. http://www.myvocabularywords.com/
4. http://a4esl.org/a/v5.html
5. http://www.vocabulary.co.il/

The above-mentioned websites have their strengths and weaknesses; does anybody have any comments?

There are several questions (or comments) that I have:

1. Do word lists work? My intuition is that they do not. Word lists are passive activities, and I doubt that anything but a few percent of the seen words are actually retained.

2. Which activities that are successful for young children are also applicable to adults? If there are cartoons involved, chances are that such an activity is not for adults.

3. Aside from going to the United States or to Great Britain, is there truly a good way for non-native English speakers to learn new vocabulary words?

4. Books. Does anboyd have a list of books which are vocabulary "heavy"?

Thanks everyone!

I wonder if you aren't asking the wrong people. If your students are at such a high level, they will have discovered great ways to learn vocabulary themselves. Why don't you ask them what they do? There are as many ways to learn as there are people and it depends on your own abilities, strengths, preferences and mood as to what works for you. It is useful to know what other people do though in case your mood changes or you want to have a change.

What is wrong with going to Canada, India, South Africa, Kenya, New Zealand, Australia, Gibralter or any of the other of the 75 countries who list themselves as speaking English to learn English? Thousands of people do. But I have also met hundreds of people who never left home in a non-English speaking country and they speak English perfectly well. They seem to have a special ability for learning languages though and so seek out opportunities to use it with other people who speak English, watch English TV, movies, listen to music and play video games in English. The people I met also taught English which helps you learn a lot as your students keep you up-to-date.

A book that is vocabulary heavy might be a dictionary.

There's a lot of activities that can help to revise vocabulary, but the tried and trusted technique of making your own vocabulary book often helps students to learn and remember vocabulary. In fact I've been asked this question so often that I made a resource on my Website called: Making a Vocabulary book. (62KB PDF)

For lower levels, I've been trying to collect resources together to assist students and teachers and so far I've made three vocab packs. Each pack has word search, crossword, vocab definitions and some interactive games.

Anyway, I hope this helps and gives you some ideas.

James

P.S. I think the best way to encourage students to remember more vocabulary is to give them a big variety of tasks...

To understand the complexities of learning vocabulary you might want to read this paper. You can find it under Google Scholar.
Learning vocabulary in another language
ISP Nation - 2001 - assets.cambridge.org

Thanks for the info and for me the page count was enough to persuade me that it's a complicated business... But if you want the actual document, then you'll have to pay for it:
http://www3.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/ ... 0521804981
(Google Scholar only provides a sampler)



James