How can a teacher help students enlarge theirvocabulary? ppsx
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How can a teacher help students enlarge their
vocabulary?
Ways to help students enlarge their vocabulary
It is a self-evident truth that a good command of a
language requires a knowledge of both its grammar and
vocabulary as structural patterns serve as building blocks
that hold lexical items together. Therefore, in addition to
teaching grammatical rules, English teachers must help
their students enlarge their vocabulary. This will not come
as a daunting task to language teachers if they know that
they can offer assistance to their students in their
vocabulary learning and vocabulary expansion in the
following ways.
Teachers can first help by raising students’ awareness of
the importance of vocabulary learning and expansion. As
can be seen, not all students are fully conscious of the
necessity of having a wide vocabulary of English. Some
students may emphasize the acquisition of linguistic
structures over that of vocabulary because the former, in
their opinion, can help them operate effectively inn
English. However, it is not difficult to find cases in which it
is words, not grammatical structures that help one get his
message across. For example, a speaker can still make
himself understood even though he produces a
grammatically incorrect sentence like ‘Yesterday I meet
mine old friend’. Therefore, language teachers should give
priority to making students aware of the important role that
vocabulary plays in language learning. Only when
students realize the significance of knowing the lexis of a
language will they make effort to learn words and increase
their vocabulary.
Second, teachers can help students enrich their
vocabulary by teaching words in context. The reasons for
this technique are not difficult to understand. For one
thing, the environment in which a word occurs with other
words that will decide which meaning of the word is
intended. Lexical items should thus not be presented to
student in isolation; they should be presented in clear and
meaningful contexts so that students can work out which
sense of the word concerned in used. For another thing,
students will get into the habit of guessing the meaning of
new or unknown words form context, a badly needed skill
for their vocabulary expansion. It is because when they
first encounter new vocabulary items students will rely on
the context as a clue to their intended meaning. In this
way the meaning or use of the word will be retained longer
in their mind.
Moreover, teachers can promote students’ vocabulary
learning and expansion by teaching words in relation to
other words. It is highly recommended that specific words
such as red, blue, yellow should be related to the generic
term color, that words like happy should compared with
happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and unhappiness,
that words like book should be extended to notebook,
textbook and handbook and that acceptable combinations
like headache, earache, stomachache should be identified
as opposed to illegitimate ones like eye ache or throat
ache. In other words, teachers do not simply teach certain
words as discrete lexical items; teachers have to present
words in a network established by such language
phenomena as sense relations word formation and
collocation. An additional teaching tip is that teachers can
present vocabulary in categories of words depending on
topics. Teachers can ask students to keep a notebook to
record words in different sections for different themes or
topics so that they can develop their vocabulary
systematically. In this sense, students not only learn, for
example, a single word happy but several connected
forms like happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and
unhappiness and other words referring to human
emotional states like glad, pleased, sad, and depressed.
This will certainly lead to a massive increase in the
number of words students learn and acquire.
One more thing that teachers can do to help their students
to widen their vocabulary is to train them in dictionary
using skills. Naturally, teachers cannot provide students
with all the words they need. So dictionaries will serve as
their best source of reference outside class time. And that
is the reason why students should be given practice in
using dictionaries. Teachers can start by recommending a
good bilingual dictionary such as an Oxford or Cambridge
or Longman learners’ dictionary. Certainly, a monolingual
dictionary has a role to play but an English – English
dictionary would expose learners more to the language.
As learners’ dictionaries often define more complex words
by means of simpler words, students can get at the
meaning without switching back to their mother tongue.
What is more, as easy and familiar words are used to
explain new words, the former are recycled, thus
facilitating students’ comprehension and acquisition of the
latter. Then teachers can spend some of their class time
showing students how to use the dictionary they have
recommended. For example, they can set exercises in
which students have to look up some new words from their
reading or listening texts. This will force them to get to
know the symbols and abbreviations used in the dictionary
and to choose the most appropriate meaning of the words
from a range of meanings listed in the dictionary.
In conclusion, there are just a few ways in which teachers
can help their students enlarge their vocabulary. It is
hoped that with the help and guidance from the teacher,
students can first discover the value of vocabulary learning
and expansion in language learning and then develop
strategies to increase their vocabulary.
