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Issues in Teaching Vocabulary

© Brenda Townsend Hall

As far as trends in ELT are concerned, the nineties were the decade of the lexical approach. There were three issues that led to this concentration on the lexical element in language. One was a recognition coming out of the communicative approach, that to be understood speakers of a second language did not need to produce grammatically perfect sentences. This is connected also to the study of pragmatics, which shows us that the implications of a particular structure often have little or nothing to do with its overtly ascribed function. A second awareness was that the lexical phrase, or chunk, was seen from computational studies as 'an ideal unit which can be exploited for language teaching' (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992) and from this came the realisation that syllabuses could be devised around lexical material with organisational principles that would be just as valid as those used for structural syllabuses.

While these developments have by no means persuaded language trainers to abandon more traditional approaches to grammar teaching, they have thrown an emphasis on the importance of taking a systematic approach to the lexical content of the course. In this article I want to discuss some of the issues you might consider when planning your approach to teaching vocabulary.

1. External and internal worlds.

Words can refer to phenomena in the world we perceive: ice cream ship sun elephant

or to the concepts by which we organise our world:

Wednesday night hundred

but also to the relationships between words within the syntactical structures we use:

the if under unless.

Lexical chunks bridge the gap between these external and internal worlds by offering us 'prefabricated' lexical items for specific functions:

for the most part (qualifier) once and for all (summariser) as I was saying (topic shifter).

2. Selection criteria

Published courses invariably apply selection criteria based on such principles as frequency, coverage or distribution. Unfortunately this can throw up anomalies. For example, the word vehicle appears to be more useful on the basis of coverage than the word train. But native speakers always select the appropriate word over the more general one. One of the problems with artificial selection criteria is that they ignore the influence of collocation by which words co-exist in specific patterns. Take the sentence below:

my sister is always trying to ..... her cast-off clothes on me.

The word for the gap is 'foist' but it would hardly feature in any lists of frequency or coverage. It is specific to the context, but native speakers have no difficulty with such unusual collocations.

3. Rituals

Lexical chunks can be associated with certain rituals, telephoning for example. They help us to predict certain set expressions that recur in this activity:

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