Transcript Effective Approaches to Vocabulary Teaching for College

Effective Approaches to
Vocabulary Teaching for
College Students
Tang Chongwen
Hebei University
I. Introduction
• Learning a foreign language is based on
the master of its vocabulary. Vocabulary is
one of the “bottlenecks” in learning of
English.
• Both teachers and students need to pay
much attention to the learning of English
vocabulary.
The importance of learning
vocabulary in language learning
• Vocabulary is a key element in language
learning because a widely productive vocabulary
is essential in enhancing the five language skills.
• Without a large English vocabulary, no one can
claim a good command of the language.
• In China, how to help students develop skills to
enlarge their vocabulary is always a great issue
that English teachers are faced with.
II. Strategies for the improvement
of teaching and learning vocabulary
• 1) Extensive reading and contextual guesswork:
Students need to acquire new words and
learn new meaning of many of the words they
have already known.
There are many skills for guessing words in
context that can be taught to learners.
Student should be encourages to make use
of their previous knowledge to guess the
meaning of new words.
2) Word unit analysis:
• The essence of the model is to help students to
enlarge their existing basic vocabulary. This
model is established on the assumption that
students are already familiar with basic words.
On the basic of basic words, teachers can help
students to realize other word forms and
increase the number of meanings.
• As students are quite familiar with “over”, “work”
and “sleep”, they can easily understand and
remember the peripheral word forms.
3) Communicative activities and
small-group work
When students are asked to manipulate
words, relate them to other words according to
their own experience, and then to justify their
choices, these word associations are reinforced.
Many students think group-work is helpful for
studying and practicing vocabulary, which is a
widespread impression that vocabulary study is
an activity best achieves individually. By doing
so, students can learn from each other and will
learn many useful English words.
4) The use dictionary
• Students naturally turn first to dictionaries which
define English words in their mother tongue.
• Some students like to use small English-Chinese
dictionaries and electronic dictionaries , which
do little more than give one word equivalents,
thus is very inadequate and misleading in their
advanced English study.
• The best dictionaries for college students are
learner’s dictionaries, such as the Oxford
Students’ dictionary of American English and the
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
5) Developing independent learning
ability
• Teachers can never give students a command of
all the words they will need. Each student must
be responsible for much of his own learning.
• When students have been taught how to deal
intelligently with words they need, they can
continue to learn vocabulary for the rest of their
lives.
• Helping students develop a personal plan of
vocabulary acquisition is a ideal way since most
vocabulary learning will take place outside of the
classroom
6) Applying CAI and internet to
expand vocabulary
• With the development of modern science
and technology, CAI and internet are
popular in foreign language teaching and
learning
III. Cautions to be taken in teaching
and learning vocabulary
• Tell the students to pay attention to the
connotations of some English words.
• Direct students not to overlook the
collocation of some English words .
• Connotation and collocation are two
important aspects in vocabulary for
Chinese students.
Thanks