(SKKN 2022) experience in teaching vocabulary for students of grade 3 at thieu hoa primary school

I have to admit that at the beginning I doubted about anyacquisition for young learners and many arguments seemed cogent to me.During the time I began to realize the chances and occasion

INDEX

1 THE BEGINNING.

1.1 THE REASONS OF CHOOSING THE TOPIC

The thesis teaching vocabulary to young learners deals with the need of ateacher to know his or her learners and to understand their needs and problems.Another issue mentioned in the thesis is the question of motivation andincluding fun and games into the teaching process The last issue the thesis dealswith is the usage of different methods and approaches for teaching younglearners

“Why? What is it good for? Is it good for them at all? Do they really need it? Is

it not only a useless worry? Why do we have to make them learn somethingmore than what they really need and have to? How much hope shall we place init?”

These are the most frequent questions I have been thinking about I havediscussed them with many pupils, teachers and parents Reactions and opinionswere, of course, different I have been teaching English for many years at aprimary school I have to admit that at the beginning I doubted about anyacquisition for young learners and many arguments seemed cogent to me.During the time I began to realize the chances and occasions that Englishlanguage can offer to children and I started to be a big fan of teaching English toyoung learners

I ran against a lot of troubles that I would like to share in my final thesisand also I would like to share some ideas for teaching vocabulary to younglearners At the beginning during the discussions with my colleagues we foundout that some kind of conception was needed, next we pointed out that therewere missing good textbooks or materials, also didactic aids and methodologybooks Frequent complain of many teachers is that it is extremely difficult toteach children that seem to lack the basic talent for learning languages.Therefore I would like to refer to the possibilities which teaching a foreignlanguage to young learners brings

The aim of this work is to show several ways that can be used for teachingvocabulary to young learners I would like to show why and how teachingvocabulary to young learners can be more efficient

I divided my thesis into the theoretical and the practical part – thepractical part follows the theoretical part In the theoretical part I will introducethe aim of this thesis, then I will try to describe who is a young learner In thenext chapter I will focus on what is vocabulary and how it is learned and also theways how vocabulary can be presented

In the second part of my thesis, I would like to present my system of workand also different methods I use while teaching I will enclose some materials

and games that I have used in my lessons In conclusion, I will brieflysummarize my thesis After that follows the list of sources - books (usedliterature) which I used for my thesis and the appendices where I included somematerials and exercises with the keys.

After exploring and accumulating the experiences from colleagues, I havesome experiences in teaching reading comprehension and achieved quiteeffective results The students are more interested in learning English and moreconfident in doing their reading exercises This improves that my methods areright With the passion and the love for teaching English, I have studied and

developed the research: "Experience in teaching vocabulary for students of grade 3 at Thieu Hoa Primary school"

1.2 THE PURPOSE OF THE RESEARCH

- The research applies the methods of teaching vocabulary to involvestudents in learning English well

- Creating the language circumstance to communicate in English andpromote students to actively participate in communicative activities; offeringsome solutions and methods for teaching vocabulary

- Exchanging and sharing some experiences in teaching vocabulary forprimary students

1.3 RESEARCH TASKS

- Systematizing some theoretical issues about the procedures andactivities in teaching vocabulary in English Primary program according to thecommunicative approach

- Exploring the present situation of teaching vocabulary at Primary Schooland suggesting some techniques in teaching vocabulary to develop skills forprimary students, helping them be more confident to communicate in English

1.4 RESEARCH TIME AND LOCATION

Research Time : School Year 2021- 2022

Research Location: Thieu Hoa Primary School

Research Object: "Experience in teaching vocabulary for students of grade 3 "

The respondents of the research: With this research I focused on theprimary students, especially the students of grade 3

1.5 NEW POINTS OF THE RESEARCH:

I have developed this research from my own old one And there are some newpoints being introduced in this research.These are presented in part 2.4 TheImplemented measures

2 CONTENT 2.1 RATIONALE

2.1.1 Young learner - who is a young learner?

A young learner – who is he or she? This term covers a wide age range,this can be anybody from the age of three to the age of eighteen There is a bigdifference between what a three-year-old child can do and what a child of fifteencan do We should consider their development too Some children developfaster, others need more time Teaching young learners requires knowledge ofknowing all the development differences Understanding these differences canhelp me as a teacher to develop methods and a system of work that I will use inthe process of teaching Of course, it is not possible to say that every child of sixwill know this and that But it is possible to pick out some characteristics which

I as a teacher should know and should be aware of

I have decided to focus on young learners – age group 7-11 I have chosenthis age group because I like working with young learners From my ownpersonal experience, I have to admit that learners at this age are grateful whensomeone invests time in them The results are seen quite easily and of course,teachers demand this kind of satisfaction These children still want to learnsomething new When they know it, they are happy to present it and they feelmore important I remember a girl - in grade 5 - who was able to

“communicate” with a native speaker Her joy was the best reward for me

From my personal experience, I achieved quite good results withkindergarten children so I do not see any problems for older learners I think ifvery young learners are able to achieve good results, I think the older ones can

do it too

I would like to point out some characteristics of this age group:

- They are happy when they can play

- They love to share their experiences; they love when people payattention to them and their talking

- They are able to talk about what they are doing

- They use imagination a lot

- They can think, argue, discuss and they are able to interact with bothchildren and adults They are able to concentrate for a certain time

- They understand situations and through situations – they use severalsenses

- They are able to use language skills not even realizing them

- They do not realize what fact is and what fiction is sometimes

- They want to learn and are happy when they learn something, then theyhave to share it with somebody and they are proud that they learnt something,they can show off a little bit

- Often, they “teach” each other

- They love to be praised for what they have done and learnt; this is a veryimportant fact to keep their motivation

- Very often they pretend they understand everything and they knoweverything

These examples of characteristics I have mentioned above are great hints onhow to teach young learners and what kind of methods we should use It is veryimportant to choose the right way of teaching for these little children Theteacher definitely has to be very sensitive to the children’s needs and has toprepare the lessons well We should avoid a stereotype; the 12 lessons have to

be creative and lively Otherwise, this could have really bad consequences forthe learners´ further improvement in the language

2.2 Vocabulary

2.2.1 What is vocabulary?

“Vocabulary can be defined, roughly, as the words we teach in a foreignlanguage However, a new item of vocabulary may be more than just a singleword: for example, post office, and mother-in-law, which are made up of two orthree words but express a single idea All languages consist of words Languagesemerge first as words, both historically, and in terms of the way each of uslearned our first and any subsequent languages Moreover, vocabulary is stillwidening Even in our native language, we are continually learning new wordsand meanings of old words For example, Czech word pošta This used to meanjust the post office or simple letters but nowadays it also means emails Somewords can be entirely new to us We come across completely new words that aremade up according to new technologies and according to the needs of real life.For example, a verb to Google is used frequently a lot Learners of a secondlanguage experience something similar Thornbury states that they can beconfronted by words that are totally unfamiliar, or being used in ways that forthem are novel and possibly obscure To find the right word to fit the meaningcan be very frustrating, especially if the store of words is limited

To summarize this, the learner while learning the vocabulary of a secondlanguage can come across several challenges:

- “making the correct connections, when understanding the secondlanguage, between the form and meaning of words

- When producing language, using the correct form of a word for themeaning intended (i.e nose not noise)

To meet these challenges the learner needs to:

- Acquire a critical mass of words for use in both understanding andproducing the language

- Remember words over time, be able to recall them readily 14

- Develop strategies for coping with gaps in word knowledge, includingcoping with unknown words, or unfamiliar uses of known words

- Have to take responsibility themselves for vocabulary expansion

2.2.2 How are words learned?

To know a word is one thing but we have to pause on the fact how thisknowledge is acquired Thinking about little children who learn to speak, thenthey always start with words used for labeling, so that the concept, for example,

of a cat has a name cat But of course, not every animal is a cat The child needs

to learn how far to extend the concept of a cat In other words, acquiring avocabulary requires not only labeling but also categorizing skills The child has

to realize that these common words like cat can be replaced by super ordinateterms like animals And to this category also belongs other animals, not just cats.There are many different methods and approaches how to teach a foreignlanguage, including vocabulary I will mention just some of them that can beused for teaching young learners

- To help the learners understand it is important to visualize the item andget the pupils to repeat or use the item actively One good way of doing this is tolet them see or perhaps touch the vocabulary item, for instance a house We need

to let them repeat it in different ways and they should be given a chance to listen

to the teacher talking about it

- A little bit of shocking method is the direct method or the directapproach The mother tongue is never used, there are no translations Only targetlanguage is used in the classrooms and only complete sentences are used.Culture is considered an important aspect

- What really works especially for young learners is the Total PhysicalResponse method - TPR Very many children are nowadays very hyper andphysically active and to concentrate for a long time can be very difficult forthem Using this method, games, changing topics and using a variety ofactivities is very appreciated by them This method is used a lot by teachers

- Communicative Language Approach (Teaching) – CLT – stresses themeaning of a language in context Communicative competence is highlydeveloped here and learners are encouraged to communicate

2.2.3 Which words and what should be taught?

The significant point in teaching vocabulary is the selection of words we

as teachers want to teach It is quite easy to teach concrete words at lower leveland then become more abstract Thus, we need to consider the frequency too

There is a choice for us; we can decide which words to teach on the basis offrequency, how often the words are used by the speaker of the language.Especially with young learners words that they are familiar with and they canstick to them should be taught Very often words are taught according to themesand topics Nowadays all the course books are organized into themes and theyprovide vocabulary according to it If there is a theme “Animals”, then we canexpect words like naming animals, also where they live, what they eat etc.Words that have quite specific meaning should be avoided with young learners

the learners need to be taught the form of the word, then grammar,collocations, meaning and word formation

In the form pronunciation and spelling should be mentioned The learnerhas to know what a word sounds like (its pronunciation) and what it looks like(its spelling) The grammar of a new item also needs to be taught Again,depending what level the learners are they should be taught to follow somegrammatical rules For example, when teaching nouns, we would like to presenttheir plural forms, also regular and irregular (girl-girls, mouse-mice) Whenteaching verbs, maybe we would like to present their past forms, especially ifthe verb is irregular (forget-forgot)

Word formation – using prefixes and suffixes, using hyphenated wordsetc is too difficult for young learners

To summarize this, firstly I think that knowing the word andunderstanding its meaning go hand in hand Secondly, it is easier to rememberconcrete words like a chair or a dog than abstract words Young learners oftenput words together with what they can see, hear or with what they can touch.But as said above they also need to know other aspects of the words they learn

In my opinion, it is important to teach them all these aspects Of course, we willnot teach them, for example the irregular plural form right away, but they need

to know it I think that if we keep repeating the plural form “mice”, after sometime most of them will not say “mouses”

2.2 THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE PROBLEM

For many years, teaching vocabulary was viewed as a mastery of theseskills Vocabulary followed what the study called mentioning, practicing, andassessing procedure where teachers mentioned a specific skill that students were

to apply, had students practice the skill by completing workbook pages, thenassessed them to find out if they could use the skill correctly Instruction didlittle to help students learn how or when to use the skills, nor was is everestablished that this particular set of skills enabled comprehension

A significant base of research, developed over many years, is available toinform educators about effective approaches to teaching children to read.However, research on applying the methods of teaching vocabulary for primary

students is in its infancy This reflects the fact that many teachers in Vietnam arefaced with the challenge of teaching children to listen and speak in Englishwhen the students have a heritage language that is not English and they are notyet proficient in English Making this a more critical issue, several researchessuggest that teachers are not receiving adequate professional development ineffective strategies to teach vocabulary for students In order to make best use ofthe information presented in this research, many teachers might want to considerthe following set of questions together in preparation for making decisions aboutteaching vocabulary for primary students

Analysis of my school’s performance in teaching and learning vocabulary

in recent years showed that students normally forget vocabulary after learningthem It was a situation that was of concern and motivated a thoroughexamination of the school’s approach to the teaching of vocabulary

Our school is a public primary school in Thieu Hoa province It is aschool with around 400 students, ranging from 6 to 10 years old There are two

to three classes in most year levels, meaning that collaboration among teachers

is extremely important to ensure consistency in learning programs After severalyears of teaching the book Tieng Anh 3,4,5, I found that most of the students donot like learning vocabulary They can not remember vocabulary after thelesson

* The quality survey and students’ classification:

Based on the present situation of students in grade 3 the level of allstudents is acquired after a few weeks of the school year with the methods ofteaching vocabulary I had 15 minutes to test students in grade 3 to survey andclassify the students The following chart will show the result:

Class3A:(Unit10) [1] :Reorderthe letters

1. folotabl

2. nbadtmnio

3. sehcs

4. tblaskebal

Class3B:(Unit10) [1] “Bingo”

Table1:Survey Results of the Classes3A and 3B

Class The numbers

of students

Excellent(A)

Good(B)

Fair(C)

Poor(D)

Fail(F)

2.3 THE SOLUTION

According to the present situation in English classes at my school.Learning vocabulary is so difficult for all grades from 3 to 5( especial withstudents of grade 3 who begin learning English as a compulsory subjects) Toimprove this situation, I would like to present some techniques for teaching

vocabulary and elicit the strategies of teaching vocabulary for primary students

which I have researched and applied quite successfully at my school

2.3.1 Vocabulary presentation

Firstly, we should consider how many words should be presented duringthe lesson This is closely connected with several factors:

- The level of the pupils – beginners, intermediate etc

- Their familiarity with the words – have they come across these words orare they completely new?

- words difficulty – are the words abstract, are they easily pronounced,can we find similar words in the learner’s native language etc.?

- can the words be easily demonstrated?

- shall we use realia or anything that the pupils can become familiar with?

- can pictures be used to elicit vocabulary?

After the teacher chooses what items to teach, he or she should followcertain guidelines In my opinion, this includes teaching the vocabulary "inspoken form first" to prevent students from pronouncing the words in the formthey are written, placing the new items in context, and revising them

A number of techniques can be adopted to present new vocabulary items.Some techniques are more popular and more often used than others Also, it is

up to the teacher which techniques he or she decides to use but always theeffectiveness of teaching should be considered I think every teacher tends to useand prefers some technique that he or she finds interesting And of course, thereare techniques that we as teachers try to avoid There are techniques that areparticularly appropriate for certain types of words – for example actions can beexplained through pantomime Another factor that is worth considering is theage of the learners Younger ones react quite well when we show them concreteillustrations, the older ones can manage pretty well abstract explanations or evendefinitions

The presentation of new vocabulary can be classified for exampleaccording to verbal and visual techniques Among visual techniques we can findpictures - flashcards, photographs and magazine pictures, wall charts, posters,blackboard drawings, word pictures, several realia 20 that teachers can hold up

or point to Mime, action and gestures can be used especially for explainingactions and times Learners can label pictures or objects or perform an action.Verbal techniques consist of using illustrative situations, descriptions, synonymsand antonyms, collocations, scales, and using various forms of definition: forexample, definition by demonstration (visual definition), definition byabstraction, contextual definitions, and definition by translation Explanation canbecome extremely difficult especially with beginner levels

2.3.2 Be realistic

Nowadays, teachers can come across many language teaching ideas andtechniques Many teachers are exploiting “sach mem” as a very useful tool inteaching lessons There are lots of resourses in “sach mem” which teachers canapply into lessons flexibly and effectively We draw pictures, cut paper intosmall pieces, draw flashcards, make crosswords etc and we do it even atmidnight We want to be flexible, creative, sensible; we want to praise thechildren as much as possible but on the other hand we want to be realistic and,very honestly, our expectations are sometimes very high And we hope it will beworthwhile But sometimes something goes wrong Language classrooms are

noisy; there are at least twenty five pupils – usually even more The classes withhigh number of students put exceptional demands on teacher’s preparation forthe lesson and there is obviously a requirement of larger classrooms too Quiteoften the children are not “angels” We encourage them to interact, be active,creative, independent This of course leads to the fact the children will becomesilly and they will really enjoy it There are teachers who would never do suchactivities again And their lessons then turn to be boring “We need to berealistic in our expectations of ourselves and the learners It does not mean,for example, we should reject the idea of pair work because our classes are big,

or not very able, or poorly motivated After every lesson we should askourselves whether the lesson was productive or unproductive and we should goback to our objectives and aims We should evaluate the lesson ourselves Or if

we have an observer in the lesson, we should discuss it with him/her

2.3.3 Choosing activities

It is up to the teachers mostly to choose the right activity This is not easyand teachers should spend really quality time to think about this It needs to beconsidered well Some language activities can stir a class Thinking about thepositive way of the word “stir”, it means these activities will wake up the class,warm them up Of course, there are activities that have the opposite effect Theymay seem to settle the pupils Before the lesson is planned, there should beconsidered what kind of activities should be chosen knowing the effect of them.Activities that can stir the class are, for example, oral work, games, andcompetitions Another aspect we should think about is activities which engagechildren’s minds and which keep them physically occupied

We should not forget context developing activities “If we are to help thelearners acquire independent second language lexicons, we need to highlight theimportance of the context in which the language naturally occurs Once the idea

of context playing a decisive role in the choice of language is firmly established,

we can begin to introduce varieties of the language used in different contexts.Many course books provide learners with plenty of opportunities to developtheir own context for the language presented, for example activities like “oddone out, filling-in exercises, dialogues” etc”

Another factor that teachers should bear in their minds is to keep thelessons simple We often try to make our lessons varied This is good but canlead to misunderstanding The lesson can be varied by doing lots of activities ondifferent topics But this can mean we may produce a lesson which is a disaster,too many activities and changing the activities all the time can destroy the lessonwell The children’s minds have to jump from one topic to another with notmuch time to let things sink in effectively We should realize some importantthings

Variation does not only mean changing the topics and materials but alsothe change of work we do Variation comes in the forms of activity Usingdifferent methods and ways of teaching should become a regular part of ourlessons We can reuse materials all the time, we can come up with new thingsbut always the activities should be simple in principle Then they can transfer todifferent topics and situations

2.3.4 The role of fun and games in the lessons

It is the fact that young learners learn through play much easier and theyenjoy it more This is quite a natural way for them to learn They play and love

to play In playing together we can see elements of interaction and duringinteracting the learners develop language skills Learning can be absorbed reallywell Quite often the learners do not realize they are learning Fun and gamesshould have an important role in the children’s education The language learnt

by heart can often be a part of the activities For example, commands for thegames can be remembered quite easily Many games can be looked at as drillexercises but they have an added fun and competition element For example, agame that works like this is well-known game “Simon says”

It is obvious that the games need to be motivating Games may focus onoral or written part of the language; they offer a vast selection of activities

Language can also be picked as a result of an enjoyable activity.Teachers can tell stories the learners are familiar with in their own language.Then the learners are able to

follow it better Again, the stories need to be picked carefully, the level of thelearners needs to be considered and the teacher has to investigate time intopreparation

Several activities can allow and involve more creative use of thelanguage New sentences and activities can be produced by the childrenthemselves Songs are most grateful way for this The learners can make up newverses, and then they can be extended Example - a song “This is the way, I ”

or “If you are happy and you know it ”

As said above, games and fun time activities are important parts of the lesson Aplay is in the essential nature of the child There are many possibilities foradapting games we can find The teachers should not forget the values of gamesand fun activities in the lessons All this can be applied to teaching vocabularytoo Teachers can “play” with vocabulary while teaching it It is veryappreciated by the learners

Therefore, in the teaching process I thought about how students acquirevocabulary best to help them create the atmosphere of language learning lively,help them remember the lessons from the right in , from which they can use thewords in the communication process more easily