Learning Words

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Learning Words

By: Bishara Adam

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Vocabulary Development InChildren’s Language

When teachers and speech-language pathologists talk about vocabulary, they are referring to the set of words that a child knows.

Vocabulary can be split into two types: receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary.

A child’s receptive vocabulary consists of the words the child understands when he/she hears or reads them.

A child’s expressive vocabulary consists of the words the child uses when he/she speaks.

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Learning Vocabulary During the first few years of life, as babies begin to say words, it is easy to keep track of their growing vocabularies.

Children typically understand or recognize more words than they actually use when speaking.

For example, a toddler might only say five different words (e.g., dada, mama, doggie, bottle, more) but be able to understand many others—like pointing to the light when Mommy asks, “Where is the light?” or beginning to cry when Daddy says, “Bye-bye” as he leaves for work.

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Learning Vocabulary

Vocabulary development does not stop once a child can talk.

In fact, children learn many new words once they start reading and going to school.

The chart (on next slide) shows typical vocabulary development across several ages. Notice how quickly vocabulary grows over the first six years of life.

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Typical Vocabulary Development Across Several Ages

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Why Is Vocabulary Important? Vocabulary is the basis for learning language. Educational research shows that vocabulary strongly relates to reading comprehension, intelligence, and general ability.

As children learn to read, they must learn to decode (sound-out) print, but they also must have a vocabulary base (word knowledge) in order to make sense of what they decode.

By third grade, however, children are reading to learn.

For example, a child who is reading to learn about the Revolutionary War needs to know words like war, army, and horses (a basic vocabulary) to understand the history lesson. At the same time, however, the child will likely learn new words like weapons and revolution—continuing to build his/her vocabulary.

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How To Encourage Vocabulary Development?

Read to your students, read with them, expose them to plenty of reading materials.

Talk to your students about the environment around you.

Encourage students to tell about their surroundings.

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Learning & Teaching Vocabulary Learners need to acquire vocabulary learning strategies, in order to discover the meaning of new words. The strategies are useful in in-class and also in out-of-class situations where they encounter new and unfamiliar words. These strategies also help them acquire new vocabulary items they see or hear.

The students can benefit from how to use contextual clues and guessing the meaning from the content to deal with unfamiliar items.

Vocabulary development should include both Direct instruction (teaching the words and their meanings such as pre-teaching vocabulary items).

Indirect instruction (teaching the strategies to help learners figure out the meaning themselves).

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Learning & Teaching Vocabulary Young Learners should be exposed to vocabulary items repeatedly in rich contexts. We can’t expect them to learn the items we teach and to remember all in the lesson two days later. Thus, a newly taught word should reappear many times and in different situations for the following weeks of instruction. The vocabulary items should be revisited/recycled in different activities, with different skills and for multiple times.

Another important component of vocabulary teaching in Young Learners classes is deep processing, which means working with the information at a high cognitive and personal level. Deep processing makes it more likely to remember the information, as the students build connections between new words and prior knowledge. Instead of memorizing list of words and their meanings, personalizing vocabulary lessons greatly helps students’ deep processing.

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Benefits Of Learning Vocabulary

When vocabulary items are taught before an activity, the students may benefit from it in two ways:

1. It helps them comprehend the activity better.

2. It is more likely that they acquire the target vocabulary words.

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Useful Classroom Activities For Young Learners

a. Connecting vocabulary to young learners’ lives through personalizing

b. Word for the day

c. Categories

d. Scavenger hunt

e. What’s missing?

f. Mystery words

g. Concentration

h. Vocabulary basket

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Knowing A Word Includes: A. Receptive knowledge: recognizing & understanding its meaning when heard/read

B. Memory: recall it when needed

C. Conceptual knowledge: use it with correct meaning

D. Using it correctly in spoken form (in isolation and in discourse)

E. Grammatical knowledge: accurate use

F. Collocation knowledge

G. Orthographic knowledge: spelling

H. Pragmatic knowledge: style and register

I. Connotation knowledge: positive and negative associations

J. Metalinguistic knowledge: grammatical properties

K. Cultural content: what is the significance of use in the culture

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Techniques In Presenting The Meaning Of New Items To Young Learners

I. Demonstration

a. Visuals: Magazine Pictures/ Flash Cards/ Filmstrips/ Photographs/ Images from TV or video

b. Real Objects

c. Black/white board drawings

d. Mime, gestures, acting

II. Verbal Explanation

a. Definition Lexical Meaning (requires pre-existing knowledge)

b. Putting the word in a defining context (requires pre-existing knowledge)

c. Translation: (This doesn’t require learner to do some mental work in constructing a meaning for the new foreign language word.)

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Extending Children’s VocabularyDifficulties in learning vocabulary may result from that vocabulary not being sufficiently connected to pupil’s real lives.

In order to extend children’s vocabulary beyond textbook:

(1) Working outwards from the text book

(2) Learner(s) choice

(3) Incidental learning through stories

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Children’s Vocabulary Learning StrategiesStrategy use changes with age, and successful and less successful learners vary in what strategies they use and in how they use them.

Teachers have to encourage young learners to adapt vocabulary learning strategies:

Guessing meaning

Noticing grammatical information about words

Noticing links to similar words in first language (cognates)

Remembering where a word has been encountered before

World knowledge

Teachers can model strategy use, teach sub-skills needed to make use of strategies, include classroom tasks for strategy use, rehearse independent strategy use and help young learners reflect on their learning process through evaluating their achievement.