A few issues with traditional vocabulary teaching

A few issues with traditional vocabulary teaching

Having been engaged in language study for over four decades, made attempts on four foreign languages and witnessed the growth of my first language, English, I can assure you that I have invested a great deal of time into learning vocabulary. Much of it was wasted. Much of it was spent learning useless words in ways that did not teach me how the words work in the target language. Vocabulary learning strategies were not taught. It was simply assumed that students would memorise context-free bilingual lists as if the L2 words worked in the same way as in L1. If I was lucky, my attempts to use the words in sentences and texts were returned bespattered with red ink highlighting collocation and colligation errors in particular. ​

In my experience  as a language learner, teacher, trainer and author, I consider the following activities useful but limited:

• memorizing bilingual lists 
• using bilingual flash cards
• filling in gaps in sentences 
• matching pairs of synonyms/antonyms
• translating sentences
• sticking labels on things in your kitchen
• matching words and their definitions
• learning lists of prefixes and suffixes
• doing crosswords
• doing sample exam papers 

The reasons I consider these procedures limited:

• They treat every word as an island rather than showing how systematic vocabulary is. 
• Surface meaning only. 
• There is no consideration given to what vocabulary is. No depth of vocabulary knowledge is required. 
• There is no joined-up thinking. Students learn vocabulary as discrete tidbits.
• No learner training: strategies such as using dictionaries and corpora, noticing how words are used in texts, instructive ways of depicting lexical relationships.
• The procedures are not interactive. They are not much fun. They have no aesthetic appeal.
• The vocabulary is usually imposed top down.
• None of these activities respect the students’ intelligence
• The students only experience a limited sense of achievement

You can probably think of some counter examples. And so can I. But what I see in contemporary course books does not negate most of the above. ​

Alternatively, we could respect our students' intelligence and creativity.

We can task our students with identifying relationships between words and within words, and depict them meaningfully. 

These examples come from my Versatile Blank Book, which you can read about on this site.

Versatile Blank Book