Interchange author Jack Richards is currently exploring the 5 biggest challenges faced by students moving from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate. In today’s post, he continues to explore what we as teachers can do when learners have a limited vocabulary range. (You can read part the first part of this post When learners have a limited vocabulary range here.)
One of the key problems in helping learners improve their vocabulary is finding effective ways to help them remember words they have encountered. How can we help learners move words from short-term to long-term memory? One clue is from research on memory. Gairns and Redman (1986) point out that our mental lexicon is highly organized and efficient, and that items that are related semantically are stored together. This is why it is much easier to recall a list of words that are grouped or organized in a meaningful way, as compared with trying to recall a set of words that are simply organized alphabetically. Word frequency also plays a role, since the more frequently a word is encountered, the easier it is to remember.
Guided discovery
Helping learners develop their own approaches to vocabulary learning is also an important goal at the advanced level, so that learners can deal with new words they encounter in independent learning. Moras (2007) recommends the use of guided discovery, contextual guesswork, and mastering dictionary use as effective teaching and learning strategies.
Guided discovery involves asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess meanings correctly. In this way learners get involved in a process of semantic processing that helps learning and retention.
Collocation competence
Another dimension of vocabulary development, which is essential if students are to make a successful transition to the advanced level, is to expand what has been called their collocational competence. Collocation refers to restrictions on how words can be used together, such as which prepositions are used with particular verbs, or which verbs and nouns are used together. Corpus analysis has allowed common collocational patterns in English to be easily identified (O’Keeffe et al., 2007).
Knowledge of collocations is vital for effective language use, and a sentence that is grammatically correct will look or sound awkward if collocational preferences are not used. For example we can say “blond hair,” but not “blond car”; “lean meat,” but not “slim meat”; “perform a play,” but not “perform a meeting.” Vocabulary development does not only involve acquiring new words. It also involves expanding knowledge of the collocational patterns that known words can enter into.
O’Keeffe et al. (2007) comment:
One may conclude that collocations, along with semantically transparent and opaque, idiomatic chunks, form the main component of the multi-word lexicon and that the multi-word lexicon is at the heart of advanced level lexical knowledge, given that the challengeat this level is as much to do with grappling with observing recurrent collocations and chunks (which will most often consist of words already known individually) as it is with simply pushing for a (never-ending) linear increase in the vocabulary size based on single words never seen before (p. 53).
Jack continues this series with a look at what happens when learners’ language production is adequate but often lacks the characteristics of natural speech.