The Language Teacher
July 2000

Travelling the Road to an Active Vocabulary

Norma Shapiro


I remember my first night as a neophyte ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in a program for adults. I was armed. I brought with me a huge calendar, a collection of plain, colored paper, flashcards of numbers, and a series of pictures of weather scenes (painstakingly cut out the night before). This was my lesson plan for the evening. I would say the word, show the picture and they would repeat it. These were simple words. That should be enough.

The next evening I was ready with more pictures but my students could barely remember anything from the evening before. After talking to my colleagues, I learned I had completed two weeks worth of lessons in one night! But just how long can one spend teaching numbers, colors, or any topic for that matter? I asked. Students already know the concepts in their language. Isn't it a matter of supplying them with the new words -- much like teaching new vocabulary in a history class or a science class?

I didn't know it, but this was the beginning of a personal professional quest -- what does it mean to know a word? Just to be able to repeat it when looking at a picture? Obviously not. To be able to choose it from a list for a cloze exercise? Or to write it when translating a passage? Perhaps we can say that students know the word if they can understand it when listening to a radio or television broadcast or use it correctly in a discussion with a native speaker.

As often happens in any professional journey, one question leads to another. Why are my students learning English? Do they want to be fluent speakers or to be able to read an English newspaper? In my classroom, of course, they needed English to be able to survive. But they didn't just want to conduct their daily business in their new country, they wanted to be able to express opinions, negotiate, and persuade in their new language. In other words, they wanted to use language to communicate higher-level thinking skills.

Slowly, I amended what I thought it meant to "know" a word and corrected the error of my ways. I listened more to my colleagues, went to conferences, read, and paid more attention to my students. Each of the four skills, (listening, speaking, reading and writing) needed to be practiced. From Patricia A. Richard-Amato (1996), in discussing Krashen and Terrell's natural approach, I learned how to ask more questions before asking them to talk. From Tricia Hedge (1988), I learned how to encourage my students to practice the words in writing. From Jayme Adelson Goldstein, my future writing partner and author of Listen First (1991) I learned to incorporate focused listening activities. And even that wasn't enough. To use vocabulary to express higher-level thinking skills, students had to practice negotiating meaning, persuading others, and offering opinions (Richard-Amato, 1996).

I became a full-fledged proponent of a plethora of new weapons: the communicative approach, competency-based learning, the natural approach, TPR (Total Physical Response) and other methods as well. I had learned how to create activities in the classroom so that students felt a need to speak, (Allen, 1983, pp. 9-10), how to provide natural language listening situations so that students can understand what they hear (Celcia-Murcia, 1979), and how to give group assignments so students had to negotiate with each other (Larsen-Freeman, 1986).

When Jayme Adelson-Goldstein and I sat down to write activities that would support learning the vocabulary in the Oxford Picture Dictionary Program we defined what we saw as the various stages students go through when learning vocabulary:

Stage 1 - classroom comprehension
Stage 2 - retention
Stage 3 - recognition out of the original context (listening and reading)
Stage 4 - production (speaking and writing)
Stage 5 - higher-level thinking skills

After we decided on the topics, the words for each topic, and the pictures that would provide the meaning, we set about providing activities for each stage of vocabulary acquisition. As I looked back, I saw how far I had come from that first night eighteen years ago. But as experienced as I might think I am, I am always impressed with what my fellow educators are doing. Every time I think I know all there is know about conducting a role play or an interview, I hear about another strategy. "After we do interviews, I have my students chart the results," one high school teacher recently told me. "I never do a role play unless at least five of my twenty students tell me this would be very useful for them," a teacher at a community college said. Many times after a workshop in a new city I find myself writing down all of the suggestions I have heard that day.

I am really looking forward to coming to JALT and exchanging ideas with fellow teachers of English. I have never met a teacher who didn't have something to teach me.

References

Adelson-Goldstein, J. (1991). Listen first: Focused listening tasks for beginners. New York: Oxford University Press.

Allen, V.F. (1983). Techniques in teaching vocabulary. In R.N. Campbell and W.E. Rutherford, (eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. Celce-Murcia, A (1979). Teaching English as a second or foreign language. Massachusetts: Newbury House.

Hedge, T. (1988). Writing (Alan Maley, Ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (1986) Techniques and principles in language teaching. (R. N. Campbell and W.E. Rutherford, Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.


All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website