How can a teacher help students enlarge theirvocabulary? ppsx

How can a teacher help students enlarge their vocabulary?. Ways to help students enlarge their vocabulary It is a self-evident truth that a good command of a language requires a knowled

How can a teacher help students enlarge their

vocabulary?

Ways to help students enlarge their vocabulary

It is a self-evident truth that a good command of a

language requires a knowledge of both its grammar and

vocabulary as structural patterns serve as building blocks

that hold lexical items together Therefore, in addition to

teaching grammatical rules, English teachers must help

their students enlarge their vocabulary This will not come

as a daunting task to language teachers if they know that

they can offer assistance to their students in their

vocabulary learning and vocabulary expansion in the

following ways

Teachers can first help by raising students’ awareness of

the importance of vocabulary learning and expansion As

can be seen, not all students are fully conscious of the

necessity of having a wide vocabulary of English Some

students may emphasize the acquisition of linguistic

structures over that of vocabulary because the former, in

their opinion, can help them operate effectively inn

English However, it is not difficult to find cases in which it

is words, not grammatical structures that help one get his

message across For example, a speaker can still make

himself understood even though he produces a

grammatically incorrect sentence like ‘Yesterday I meet

mine old friend’ Therefore, language teachers should give

priority to making students aware of the important role that

vocabulary plays in language learning Only when

students realize the significance of knowing the lexis of a

language will they make effort to learn words and increase

their vocabulary

Second, teachers can help students enrich their

vocabulary by teaching words in context The reasons for

this technique are not difficult to understand For one

thing, the environment in which a word occurs with other

words that will decide which meaning of the word is

intended Lexical items should thus not be presented to

student in isolation; they should be presented in clear and

meaningful contexts so that students can work out which

sense of the word concerned in used For another thing,

students will get into the habit of guessing the meaning of

new or unknown words form context, a badly needed skill

for their vocabulary expansion It is because when they

first encounter new vocabulary items students will rely on

the context as a clue to their intended meaning In this

way the meaning or use of the word will be retained longer

in their mind

Moreover, teachers can promote students’ vocabulary

learning and expansion by teaching words in relation to

other words It is highly recommended that specific words

such as red, blue, yellow should be related to the generic

term color, that words like happy should compared with

happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and unhappiness,

that words like book should be extended to notebook,

textbook and handbook and that acceptable combinations

like headache, earache, stomachache should be identified

as opposed to illegitimate ones like eye ache or throat

ache In other words, teachers do not simply teach certain

words as discrete lexical items; teachers have to present

words in a network established by such language

phenomena as sense relations word formation and

collocation An additional teaching tip is that teachers can

present vocabulary in categories of words depending on

topics Teachers can ask students to keep a notebook to

record words in different sections for different themes or

topics so that they can develop their vocabulary

systematically In this sense, students not only learn, for

example, a single word happy but several connected

forms like happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily and

unhappiness and other words referring to human

emotional states like glad, pleased, sad, and depressed

This will certainly lead to a massive increase in the

number of words students learn and acquire

One more thing that teachers can do to help their students

to widen their vocabulary is to train them in dictionary

using skills Naturally, teachers cannot provide students

with all the words they need So dictionaries will serve as

their best source of reference outside class time And that

is the reason why students should be given practice in

using dictionaries Teachers can start by recommending a

good bilingual dictionary such as an Oxford or Cambridge

or Longman learners’ dictionary Certainly, a monolingual

dictionary has a role to play but an English – English

dictionary would expose learners more to the language

As learners’ dictionaries often define more complex words

by means of simpler words, students can get at the

meaning without switching back to their mother tongue

What is more, as easy and familiar words are used to

explain new words, the former are recycled, thus

facilitating students’ comprehension and acquisition of the

latter Then teachers can spend some of their class time

showing students how to use the dictionary they have

recommended For example, they can set exercises in

which students have to look up some new words from their

reading or listening texts This will force them to get to

know the symbols and abbreviations used in the dictionary

and to choose the most appropriate meaning of the words

from a range of meanings listed in the dictionary

In conclusion, there are just a few ways in which teachers

can help their students enlarge their vocabulary It is

hoped that with the help and guidance from the teacher,

students can first discover the value of vocabulary learning

and expansion in language learning and then develop

strategies to increase their vocabulary