TEACHING VOCABULARY | How to Teach Vocabulary

   Vocabulary learning has always been challenging for most of the students. They are given a long list full of irrelevant words and they are expected to memorize all the words with their meanings in L1. If this is the way how we teach vocabulary, of course it will be a torture for our students. Why do we make this process so difficult? It is very simple to teach vocabulary by using some techniques. Today, I'll share those techniques, Dos and Don'ts with you. Let's dive into the subject!   First thing to be careful about teaching vocabulary is to provide a written or audio context. We should get students to spot unknown words in the text and tell them to guess the meanings from the context. While teaching action verbs like 'walk', 'run' and some adjectives, we can make use of facial expressions, actions and mimics.
   It is the best to use real life objects, if possible, to point out the object but if it is
not, we should draw on the board or bring some pictures to create a visual of the word
in student's mind.
   We have talked about what to do so far. Now it is time to learn what not to do in vocabulary teaching.
   We should never and ever teach our students irrelevant words. We should teach them lexical sets instead (you can CLICK HERE to learn about lexical sets). We should also avoid translation unless it is necessary. What do we mean by necessary? We mean the time you have to teach abstract words like 'awareness' or suppose you put so much effort to explain a word but your students cannot understand it, then you may of course translate. There is no need to spend your whole time on one word. Lastly, we shouldn't use complex sentences, paragraphs for our context, we ought to choose very simple sentences instead.
   Our list ends up here. I wanted to explain Dos and Don'ts briefly. I'd be glad to have your comments. You can tell me which parts you agree and which parts you don't. Have a nice week!
Zey.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ELT Z Website | Final Product of our Training Program

Image
     Hello dears! How have you been? I have great news for you. We had the last presentation meeting with all the groups and our instructors. As you know, I have been working at my dear instructor Melda YILMAZ's PhD research project, 21st century Skills Training and Project Based Learning , for 11 weeks. After our intensive 6-week theory-based training program, we had a 5-week practice and product creation section. In the first section, we worked on various skills and topics such as global language, critical thinking skills, digital literacy skills, information literacy skills and in the second section, we designed a website as a product. You can learn about the whole process by reading my previous blog posts. Today, I will briefly explain our website, also mention about my friends' products and I'd like to talk about my overall opinions about the program.     We created our website on ' English As a Global Language and Its Pedagogical Implications ' topic by using
Read more

Career Planning | Creating the perfect CV

Image
 Who plans your career? Is it you? Your family? Your teacher?  When do you start planning your career? Is it when you are a high school student or a college student? When does it end? When you are retired? We found answers for those questions in the second week of Yetkin Gençler . Let's look at those answers together! Career planning is an ongoing and never-ending process which is developing and changing over time. It starts at a very young age, when you start to think about your future in your childhood. So, you start planning your career when you are a school-age child. Yes, it's YOU planning it. Nobody else can plan it for you but they can only guide or assist you during the process. You keep planning it until you keep contributing to the society. The keys to career planning are: - your assets (competencies, knowledge, experience, network) - your aspirations (vision, goals) - market realities (what will the companies pay you for) You should be aware of your strengths and we
Read more

Collaboration Skills | 21st century Skills Training and Project Based Learning

Image
      Hi there! Hope you enjoy your week. Today, I'll be sharing my reflections of the second week. It was a really enjoyable one as we had lots of group work included. So, let's get started!     Before we had the session, we had some pre-tasks to do. Firstly, we had to read a chapter from Galloway & Rose (2015) and answer the reflection questions. It was basically about English Language Teaching in a global scale and nativeness of English teachers. After I read thechapter, I realized both native and non-native speakers have their own advantages and being native does not make a person more proficient in the language education. As the writers mentioned, professional qualities are more important than nationality. Secondly, we had to  check the website called 'IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive' ' which includes a world map of all countries with speakers of different dialects. It helps us obtain the scope of World Englishes and recognize  the varieties
Read more