(AW) Book Summary

Name    : Safitri Dyah Utam

NIM       : 2201411058

Class      : 101-102

Book:  Teaching Vocabulary

Lessons from the Corpus Lessons for the Classroom

By Jeanne McCarten

How can we help learners learn vocabulary

There is a lot of advantages in learning vocabulary. Materials can help students in two broad areas:

1.       They need to present and practice in natural contexts the vocabulary that is frequent, current, and appropriate to learners’ needs.  Materials should help students become better learners of vocabulary by teaching different techniques and strategies they can use to continue learning outside the classroom.

These are the key principles that we can follow to help students learn vocabulary more effectively:

A.      Teaching vocabulary in class:

1.       Focus on vocabulary

One of the first vocabulary learning strategies for any classroom is how to ask for words you don’t know in English, and how to ask the meaning of English words you don’t understand, so phrases like “What’s the word for in English?,” “How do you say ?,” and “What does mean?” are useful to teach at the basic levels. As students progress, another useful strategy

they can use is to paraphrase: “It’s a kind of ,” “It’s like a ,” and “It’s for -ing X” etc. Focusing on these strategies puts vocabulary learning firmly on the classroom agenda.

materials can help teachers in this in the following ways:

·         Providing clearly marked vocabulary lessons

·         Making the target vocabulary set stand out, including focused practice and regular review

·         Giving lists of vocabulary to be learned for the lesson

2.       Offer variety

Teachers can use different ways to present vocabu­lary including pictures, sounds, and different text types with which students can identify: stories, conversations, web pages, questionnaires, news reports, etc.

3.       Repeat and recycle

Learning vocabulary is largely about remembering, and students generally need to see, say, and write newly learned words many times before they can be said to have learned them. Repeating words aloud helps students remember words better than repeating them silently.

4.       Provide opportunities to organize vocabulary

Types for organizing vocabularies:

·         Real-world groups: occur in the real world, such as the countries within each continent, parts of the body, the foods in each food type, activities that take place for a celebration, etc.

·         Language-based groups draw on linguistic criteria as ways of grouping, for example, the different parts of speech of a word family; words that have the same prefix or suffix, or the same sound; verbs and dependent prepositions; collocations of different kinds (verb + noun; adjective + noun, etc.).

·         Personalized groups use students’ own preferences and experiences as the basis for the groups. It might include grouping vocabulary according to likes and dislikes, personal habits or personal history, for example, foods that you like and don’t like, or eat often, sometimes, rarely, or that you ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday.

5.       Make vocabulary learning personal

materials should provide opportunities for students to use the vocabulary meaningfully, to say and write true things about themselves and their lives.

6.       Don’t overdo it!

Another important point is not to overload students – there are limits to how much vocabulary anyone can absorb for productive use in one lesson.

7.       Use strategic vocabulary in class

Since the classroom may be the main or only place that students hear or use English, it’s important to include in lessons the strategic vocabulary. In doing this, it’s possible to use a range of basic discourse markers for starting, concluding, and changing topics, such as All right/Okay, So, Let’s start, Let’s move on.

B.      Helping students become independent learners in and out of class

1.       Vocabulary notebooks

Usually students’ own vocabulary note-taking consists of writing translations of single words in lists, but it can be much more varied than this, including labeling pictures and diagrams, completing charts and word webs, writing true sentences, creating short dialogues, etc.

2.       Research tools

Students now have access to vast resources such as the Internet and the wealth of information in learners’ and online dictionaries. they can exploit any resources more effectively and become more independent in their learning.

3.       Everyday usage

Materials can also provide students with ideas to activate and practice vocabulary in their everyday life, which is especially useful for students who live in non-English-speaking environments.