Best practice in vocabulary teaching and learning

Best practice in vocabulary teaching and learning Paul Nation
A well-balanced course should contain four major strands: meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, fluency development and language-docused instruction.
The aim is to show how the vocabulary component of a language course fits into these strands.

Vocabulary and meaning-focused input
Reading has been a long major source of vocabularu growth. For sevaral reasons, there is a fragility to this kind of learning.
1. Research with native speakers shows the amount of vocabulary learning that occurs during the reading text is rather small.
It is likely to cumulative if there are repeated opportunities to meet the partially learned vocabulary again. There will be a close relationship between vocabulary growth and the amount and variety of meaning-focused input.
2. It depends heavily on the qualiy of the learners’ control to the reading skill.
There is little vocabulary growth through reading while learners gain control of reading skill. One of the major barriers is vocabulary size. It allows second language learners to draw on the reading skill developed in theor first language to expand their vicabulary in second language by providing series of graded readers with careful vocabulary control.
3. The type reading that is done will strongly influence vocabulary learning.
Deliberately drawing attention to language items as a part of the language system makes learning more certain. Relying too much on mraning-focused input is leaving too much to chance.
Best practice in vocabulary teaching and learning is provideing large quantities of suitably graded input through a range of genrals and topics, and providing language-focused activities to support it.

Vocabulary and meaning-focused output
The spoken production of vocabulary items helps learning. The fondings of spoken communicative activities are as follows:
1. The written input to a communicative task has a major effect on what vocabulary is used and negociated during the task.
2. Vocabulary was learned through being used productively and receptively.
3. The more the vocabulary is observed or used in contexts which differ from its occurrence in the written input, the better it is learned.
4. Learners are able to provide useful information to each other on most of the vocabulary in a typical communocative task.
5. Learners who actively negociate the meaning of unknown words do not seem to learn more than learners who observe the negociation.
6. Only a small amount of negociation in a communicative task is negociation of word meaning.
By carefully designing and monotoring the use of the handout sheets for spoken tasks, teachers can have a major influence on determing what vocabuary could be learned from such tasks.

Devaloping fluency with vocabulary
Fluency development tasks have the characteristics of involving no new language items , dealing with largely faniliar content and discourse types. (meaning-focused tasks) the learners’ focus is on the message and are envourage to reach a higher than usual level of performance, through the use of repetetion, time pressure, preparation and planing.

Vocabulary and language-focused instruction
Language-focused instruction occurs when learners direct attention to language items not for producing or comprehending a particular message, but for gaining knowledge about the item as a part of the language system. Language-focuse inatrustion includes focusing on the pronounciation and spelling, learning the meaning of words, memorizinf collocations, phrases and sentences containing a word and being corrected for incorrect use of a word. First, it can affect implicit knowledge of a language and second, it can raise learners’ consciousness or awareness of particular itemsso that they are then more readily noticed when occur in meaning-docused input.
The third dffect of language-focused is indirect: implicit knowled.each suggestion as follows is matched with its likely effect on implicit knowledge.
˙Guessiong unknown words from context: To guess the meaning from the context rather than the underlying meaning.
˙Learning the meanings of unknown words: explicit, decontexualize study of vocabulary
˙Study the word parts and mnemonic devoces: Knowledge of these word parts such as prefixes and suffixes can be used to improve the learning of many words through relating unknow word forms and meanings to known word parts.

Reference

Nation P. Current Research and Practice in Teaching Vocabulary. In Richards, J. C. and Renandya, W. A. (Eds)Methodology in Language Teaching(pp. 267-272) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.