Adding more items to the word basket

The previous article published on this blog was also about means of improving vocabulary. I believe starting a new series of posts on the same topic is a good working direction. This next article was recently published in a different educational publication: Maria Bob (2023) Adding more items to the word basket in Revista VividEdu, Nr. 3/2023, București, pp. 25-27. You can read it in the next lines. Some of the up-coming blog posts will also provide visual examples of the items explained in this article.

Words are an integral part of our lives. Whether they are written or spoken, they transmit a message, they carry feelings, they encapsulate memories. These also represent the core of a language class. In EFL classes, students and teachers, likewise, deal with words: listening to and reading texts, having conversations, holding presentations, playing games, etc. To be able to solve these tasks, people rely on their vocabulary, on their personal word basket. How big is a word basket? Can we keep adding vocabulary items to it? How exactly can we do that? are just three questions frequently asked about the very broad topic of vocabulary. This paper is meant to provide some suggestions to fellow teachers who would like to help their students improve their word basket during the English lessons.

A simple Google search provides the answer to the number of English words included in a dictionary. For instance, the Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords, while the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary includes 470,000 entries (List of dictionaries by number of words, 2023). The Economist carried an online independent survey on two million people over the course of two years and they made public the results to this survey in 2013, stating that the vocabulary of “most adult native test-takers ranges from 20,000–35,000 words” while “the most common vocabulary size for foreign test-takers is 4,500 words” (R.L.G., 2013).

A word is more complex than its form – it has a meaning, it has a synonym or an antonym, it can be used in idioms and phrasal verbs, it can collocate with other words, and it can be associated to an image. A person most likely employs strategies that include several, if not all, these categories to add a new item to his/her word basket.

We remember words because of our memory, and the researchers into the way in which our memory works have divided it into the following systems: the short-term store, working memory, and the long-term store (Thornbury, 2007, pp. 23-28). During a regular lesson, a teacher needs to activate the cognitive processes of a student in connection to words and the many factors that are associated to a word, such as: pronunciation, spelling, length and complexity, grammar, range, connotation and idiomaticity, etc. All these factors contribute to the workings through which a student acquires new vocabulary.

Scott Thornbury rightfully claims that “learners need tasks and strategies to help them organise their mental lexicon” and that “learners need multiple exposure to words and they need to retrieve words from memory repeatedly” (Thornbury, 2007, p. 30). Having his ideas as a starting point, I have tried to compile some of the activities I use most frequently to teach new items of vocabulary to my primary school students and my lower secondary school students. Nevertheless, these activities can be very easily modified to be used with high school students, as well.

A while ago, I came across a suggestion for building vocabulary in one of the textbooks I used at school: vocabulary picture cards (Ines Avello, 2020, p. 18). To make these, students need minimum resources and they can be assembled in class or at home as part of their homework. I favour this activity as part of the revision of each unit. The textbook I use has a speaking activity for each unit, in which students use various picture cards provided for them at the end of the book. After cutting them out of the book and using them for that activity, these cards ended up in the bin of the classroom or in that from the child’s room. To make these cards more valuable, I asked the students to turn them into picture cards. Each picture card includes the following sections:

·      the word – usually written in capitals and in a different colour than the rest of the text,

·      its pronunciation – literal, not phonemic, for the YLE and phonemic for the older groups of students,

·      its translation into Romanian,

·      the picture card,

·      an example of how this word can be used in a sentence – usually in connection to the grammar of the lesson. For instance, the second graders had to write sentences such as “The cat has got a long tail.” for the unit about pets while the third graders formulated sentences such as “My cousin has got short red hair.” for the unit about family members.

I suggested that my students should store these cards in a shoe box since such an item is easy to procure in all households and it does not take too much space to deposit. One of them came up with the idea of dividing the vocabulary cards using coloured cardstock paper for each unit. Another student said that, by stapling together the cards from a unit, these would be turned into a booklet. Both ideas caught on quite fast amongst their classmates. Following this process during all units of study, at the end of a school year, they have between six to eight booklets or coloured dividers. Thus, this became the Student’s Dictionary Box.

With my older students who are better at formulating sentences and including in them more abstract ideas, I used a different suggestion found in the same series of textbooks. Accordingly, students were asked to store their new lexis on Vocabulary Wheels (Ines Avello, 2020, p. 44). For example, a Vocabulary Wheel on the topic of Jobs will include the name of the job written in the middle of the wheel and surrounded by five incomplete sentences. A job such as male/female nurse will be surrounded by sentences like: works in a hospital, helps a doctor, helps patients, gives medicine, and always smiles. This type of activity can be done in the students’ notebooks or on separate cards, either in class or as homework. You might end up with quite a hefty collection of Vocabulary Wheels for each topic if you assign separate lexical items for each student.

Another students’ favourite in terms of word practice is the Vocabulary Board. If you have some white space in the classroom, whether on a wall or even on the door, you can embellish it with some purposeful sheets of paper. You can print the following categories on individual pieces of paper: Word of the week, Meaning, Example, Drawing. You can use coloured fonts or coloured paper. I suggest laminating the paper because this gives students the opportunity to use the same paper week after week. If you choose to laminate the papers, whiteboard markers are the perfect choice for this activity. You could ask the pupils who are on duty to fill in each of the categories about their favourite word, an important word from the unit you are studying or a word someone in class has asked you about.

The previous suggestions are all paper based, they require minimum supplies and almost no other additional efforts from an already very busy teacher. Should you want to turn up the interactive button of improving the students’ word basket, I suggest using an app such as Quizlet (Quizlet, n.d.). It allows you to create online vocabulary cards for your students. At the same time, without any additional work from you, the app provides you and the students the opportunity of choosing between various ready-made game with the same vocabulary items that you have added. The downside is that you must pay a small fee for an annual subscription for this feature. However, you can still create cards in the free version of the app. LearningApps is a free alternative to this website, but you must create individually each of the games you want to use (LearningApp, n.d.).

The times we live in allow for a multitude of means of acquiring and developing new vocabulary. There are endless possibilities for teachers to help their students add more items to their word basket. I have mentioned but a few alternatives that are available to use with little resources. I believe that one never stops learning, especially when it comes to lexical items. What are you favourite activities to help your students improve their vocabulary?

References

Ines Avello, M. M. (2020). Team Together. Level 3. Workbook. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

LearningApp. (n.d.). Retrieved March 22, 2023, from LearningApps.org: https://learningapps.org/

List of dictionaries by number of words. (2023, March 11). Retrieved March 18, 2023, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words#Notes

Quizlet. (n.d.). Retrieved March 22, 2023, from Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/latest

R.L.G. (2013, May 29). Lexical facts. Retrieved March 2023, 2023, from The Economist: https://www.economist.com/johnson/2013/05/29/lexical-facts

Thornbury, S. (2007). How to Teach Vocabulary. Harlow, Essex, England: Pearson Education Limited.