Vocabulary Teaching today: A Comedy in Three Acts

Act I: The Tragedy of the Gap-Fill

​Imagine this. You’re an upper-intermediate student. You chat online in English, binge entire Netflix series without subtitles, and follow influencers from three countries. You turn up at your advanced English course expecting something stimulating.
And what do you get? 
“Fill in the gaps in these ten unrelated sentences.”

Yes. That’s your advanced vocabulary task. But wait — there’s more.

“Find the word which is misspelt in these ten unrelated sentences.”

You begin to wonder if you’ve stumbled into Year 3 spelling club. But no, this is your internationally published advanced vocabulary book. And finally:

“Replace the underlined word with a single word that has a similar meaning.”
So big becomes large. Bravo. Curtain down.

Meanwhile, in history you’ve analysed facsimiles of primary documents. In physics and chemistry you’ve run experiments, collected data, reported results. In literature you’ve explored metaphor, alliteration, cultural references. In every subject you’ve been expected to observe, question, and discover. Except in vocabulary study. Here your intelligence is politely ignored.

​Act II: Enter tomboy

Tomboy in SKELL

​One such book introduces tomboy. A definition is solemnly provided: “A girl who enjoys activities and behaviours usually associated with boys.” Very helpful — except every student already knew what it meant. So… why teach it?

The book had no interest in how the word is actually used. But the teacher did. And SKELL made that possible. With 40 student-friendly examples, each from a different text, students could ask:

• Which determiners appear before tomboy?
• What adjectives modify it?
• What nouns follow it (tomboy stage, tomboy persona)?
• Which verbs collocate with it?
• Are tomboys usually children, teenagers, or adults?
• Are they described positively or negatively?
• What cultural references appear?

Now students aren’t parroting a definition they already knew. They’re making discoveries about usage. They’re noticing patterns, testing assumptions, reaching conclusions. And all of this is mediated through their existing knowledge of English.

They have to read, notice, compare, infer, decide — in other words, they are using their English to grow their English. That’s not a trivial task. That’s an opportunity to use higher-order thinking skills and socially construct knowledge with classmates, mediated by the teacher and the language itself.

Act III: Learning How to Learn

​And here’s the deeper point. By working with tomboy in this way, students aren’t just learning one word. They’re learning how to learn vocabulary. They learn what features of words are worth knowing:

• collocations
• compounds
• colligations
• semantic features.

They learn why those features matter: because they make words usable, not just knowable. And they learn how to investigate: how to search, observe, interpret, and record.

This is metacognition in practice. It is procedural knowledge. It is training learners to keep learning. And it is done through English itself: students are using their English to analyse English.
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Isn’t that exactly what upper-intermediate and advanced students should be doing? Not hunting misspellings in ten random sentences, but engaging in real inquiry — the kind that deepens knowledge and develops independence.

Curtain Call

​SKELL provides a dataset of English at large, allowing students to observe the consensus patterns of thousands of speakers. If teachers want to focus on the language of a specific text — which has its own rewards — they can paste it into VersaText. Between them, these tools enable learners to treat language as evidence, not opinion; as data, not trivia.
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And once you’ve seen students interrogate a word like tomboy with curiosity and intelligence, it’s very hard to go back to filling in the blanks of ten unrelated sentences.