Chapter I. What’s in a Word?
Vocabulary sits at the very heart of language acquisition, and yet it is often the dimension of learning that teachers and curriculum designers have addressed most inconsistently. All languages have words. All words have different meanings, different functions, and they belong to different groups and classes as well; some carry grammatical function while other words carry more semantic information. Even today, we learn new meanings of existing words or encounter new words in our first language. Understanding the meaning of new words in a second language is much more difficult, as there are many words used in novel ways that confuse second language learners. In this context, it is crucial for second language learners (SLL) to understand both the meaning and use of a specific word and to develop their own strategies for learning new words. It is very important for learners to know and make distinctions between different forms of the same word; this helps them identify the word class and produce and use the proper meaning. From my personal experience, a useful example is the word “like” used both as a verb and as a preposition: “What is London like?” (preposition) versus “What do you like?” (verb).
To understand differences in meaning and in the concept of a target word, students have to take into consideration the word class. It is not only an issue of grammatical difference but also of new vocabulary with new meaning and form. Word families are another very important issue. Different languages already have the same structure that gathers words, forms new words, or adds new meanings to existing words. Both suffixes and prefixes appear in English and Albanian. Being a native learner of Albanian makes it easy to identify and use words in different forms and meanings, but for EFL learners, it is quite difficult even when they are familiar with the models of inflectional or derivative words. What I have noticed most is the difficulty of ESL learners in mastering the process of word formation in English, which differs significantly and is far more complex than in Albanian. Compounding, conversion, blending, and clipping all express the complexity of this process. Multi-word units, including phrasal verbs with either literal or non-literal meaning, sentence frames, and multi-part verbs are another important point worth mentioning in vocabulary teaching. Their meaning is usually subject to change depending upon the parts the unit contains.
It is very important to be able to notice the difference in meaning of words that share the same form. Homonyms, homophones, and homographs can really confuse learners, and polysemy is a real challenge for dictionary compilers as it is a real headache for learners. For example, the word “fair” carries different meanings in: “long fair hair,” “Skipton fair,” and “fair cook.” To sum up, language first emerges as words, and going further into structures and forms we use them to produce language that we have learned.
Chapter II. How Words Are Learned
“Without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (David Wilkins). The importance of vocabulary is very high; you can master the grammar well but without proper knowledge of vocabulary, spoken language will remain at the lowest levels. There were many problems with vocabulary teaching because it was not at the forefront in the Direct Method or the Audio-Lingual Method, which gave greater priority to grammar learning and structures. The number of words taught on those courses was very low, and the words learnt were chosen because they were easy to demonstrate. Nowadays, teaching vocabulary has been given special importance, and courses and coursebooks give much more space to teaching new words and communication. In order to have better communication, L2 learners need to have a critical mass of vocabulary to cross the threshold of a second language. In this context, they should develop their own unique styles for remembering words, styles that can be developed with a teacher’s help through guidance toward appropriate learning strategies.
Looking back at the early period of the Direct Method and ALM, students had to learn and repeat the words they were taught; these models are now considered old-fashioned. From my experience as a primary school student, teachers translated key words for us, but without much effort to make us understand them more deeply. These words were placed in short-term memory and, after a while, could not be recalled and used properly when needed. In comparison, as an ELT teacher, I use different models to explain the meaning of new words, avoiding translation to L1 as much as possible and avoiding old-fashioned methods like “learn words by heart.” Eliciting meaning of new words, using flashcards, pictures, and word games all make students feel more relaxed and engaged. Another fact to consider is the first language: having good command of the first language can be helpful but sometimes acts as a potential block to the development of second language vocabulary, because the patterns of every language are different, and when learners try to make links, they may or may not succeed. In second language learning, vocabulary matters alongside spelling, pronunciation, and word length, all of which can cause errors because words with difficult pronunciation, spelling mismatches, or complex length appear more difficult to learn and remember.
Chapter III. How to Teach Vocabulary
The main issue in this chapter is vocabulary teaching: the sources and methods and techniques that best fit these sources. At least five possible sources provide vocabulary input for learners: lists, coursebooks, vocabulary books, the teacher, and other students.
Based on class discussions and readings about lists: one of the main tasks should be to ensure that lists consist of words selected for active study. Criteria of usefulness, frequency, or lexicality do not seem to be consistently applied, but in order to be successful with lists, learning activities need to be integrated into lesson plan activities in the classroom. Coursebooks usually apply some criteria of choosing vocabulary: usefulness, meaning that words can be put to immediate use; frequency, meaning words that appear most frequently and express the most frequent meanings; and learnability, which includes careful choice of words in the syllabus, especially for beginners. Teachability is very important because teachers make words easy to understand through different activities by demonstrating or illustrating them.
Vocabulary books are targeted at specific purposes, such as business or technology, and aim to test vocabulary knowledge as much as to teach it. Activities such as brainstorming of ideas or meanings to new words and eliciting students with new word meanings appear to be very useful. Teachers are also considered a useful source of acquiring new words, phrases, or expressions commonly used in the classroom. Student-to-student lexicon sharing, whether through brainstorming activities, pair working, or spoken activities in the classroom, is also very useful and leads to the ability to recall and express new vocabulary when necessary.
Chapter IV. Texts, Dictionaries and Corpora
Texts are more explicit than lists for vocabulary teaching, and vocabulary teaching has increasingly been incorporated into textbooks. Comparing to lists, short texts have great advantages in vocabulary teaching and building, since words in context increase the chances of learners appreciating not only meaning but structural and word order in sentences. Authentic texts are usually rich in vocabulary, especially literary texts. Extensive reading provides the opportunity for students to meet words in their context of use and also supplies repeated encounters with many of these words; words that are repeated up to six times are more easily acquired or learnable from context.
Dictionaries are regarded as tools and vocabulary resources because they contain rich information about words. The benefit for teachers and learners of corpus data is that it provides easily accessible information about real language use, frequency, and collocation. Before the advent of corpora, teachers had to rely largely on intuitions about the way words are actually used; frequency information was also largely guesswork. Corpus information is typically presented in the form of concordances, which display the results of a word search as individual lines of text with the targeted word aligned to the centre. Corpora are the latest addition to resources available for vocabulary input, and concordancing and keyword programs are two of the tools that make corpus data available for classroom use.
For the end, I would like to say that “vocabulary teaching and learning is like exploring the universe.”
As Nation (2001) argues in his comprehensive account of vocabulary learning and teaching, the most effective vocabulary instruction is that which combines explicit teaching with opportunities for incidental learning through reading and listening, ensures repeated encounters with new words across different contexts, and helps learners develop strategies for inferring meaning from context. For students studying applied linguistics and language pedagogy, reflection on vocabulary learning draws attention to the degree to which word knowledge is not binary but exists on a continuum: from recognising a word in a text, to understanding its multiple meanings, to using it accurately and idiomatically in speech and writing.
References
Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511733000
Wilkins, D. A. (1972). Linguistics in Language Teaching. Edward Arnold.
Schmitt, N. (2019). Vocabulary in Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569057
Nation, I. S. P., & Waring, R. (2020). Teaching Vocabulary: Context and Techniques. Cambridge University Press.