Re: How To Teach Vocabulary

Titithi — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:07:36 GMT

I think before teaching vocabulary, we need to choose active and passive vocabulary. For passive words, we only realize and don't spend a lot of time to explain them. Students will research themselves by looking up in the dictionary or guessing from the context. Thus, we have to define which word as a passive or active vocabulary to teach.
For active words, we should save time by choosing the real active words which are needed to teach. By eliciting or brainstorming, we will find out which words are really new words and which words are needed to review. Sometimes ,we have to ask directly our students which words they don't know.The best way to teach active words is setting up the context (as Mr Joe has mentioned) by realia, real object, real story, pictures, visual aids, mapped- dialogue etc...Translation is obviously one way round the problem of difficult concept ,however it's not good for grasping the meaning. A suitable mother tongue equivalent is not always available.
Besides,we can use synonym, a quick and efficient way of explaining unknown words. With simple English, we explain new words by antonym and words family including suffixe and prefixe.Gestures and mimic play an important role when conveying new words. To understand a new word fully, a student must know not only what it refers to but also where their boundaries are separate.In other words, the affective meaning of an item can vary according to the context and speaker.The meaning of a word can only be understood in terms of its relationship with other words in the language.This is why translation is the brief way of explanation and necessary in some situation but it's not suitable to target the language.

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Re: How To Teach Vocabulary