Building Vocabulary
They’ll Need Lots
The English lexicon tips the scales at more than 600,000 words. Of course, no single speaker of English knows all of them, but an extremely intelligent, well-educated native speaker might know as many as 250,000. Even a typical native speaker in middle school should know more than 25,000. If you are a college-educated native speaker of English, chances are that there are few words in a dictionary of 100,000 entries that you do not understand. As if the sheer numbers are not intimidating enough, students must learn to hear, say, read, and write each word. And then there are those pesky nuances, homonyms, multiple meanings, idioms, and so forth.
The good news is that a language learner with a much smaller vocabulary can still communicate effectively. Speakers will use high-frequency words hundreds of times per day but will use some low-frequency words only a few times in a lifetime. Knowledge of 1,000 words plus a basic grasp of structure allows a learner to function in English. A student at this level may be said to speak survival-level English. At this point one can get around and get by without the aid of an interpreter. Between 1,000 and 2,000 words actually make up a full 80% of everything that most people say. In the case of younger people like your students, the low figure is the more accurate. Of course, many of those thousand are function words, and a missing 20% makes a big hole on a page.
A 5,000-word vocabulary along with a fair grasp of structure is sufficient to communicate intelligently on nontechnical subjects. Call this level oral BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) if you like. High school students at this level who have reasonably good academic skills in their native language should be able to function in the mainstream at least part of the day if they are willing to use bilingual dictionaries frequently. A mere 15 words per day will allow students of English to reach this functional level in one year. If they spend eight hours per day with English, that works out to less than one new word per half hour. Bear in mind, however, that many school-aged native English speakers add an average of 15 new words to their vocabularies daily, so English learners who hope to catch up with their native-English-speaking classmates should aspire to learn considerably more.
If you teach an ESL block that consumes at least half the school day, it is reasonable to present and test students on approximately 100 words per week. Also, English learners should be encouraged to attempt to learn another 100 per week on their own. At that pace, even with a mere 60% mastery, students will acquire sufficient vocabulary for survival-level English in about two months, BICS in a year, and the means to successfully compete with native speakers in three years. Very few students are not capable of learning to at least understand 100 words per week if they are given adequate exposure and practice, although some students might require some prodding before they do so.
ENJOYING THE PATH TO A LARGE VOCABULARY
Vocabulary learning need not be painful. Much can be painlessly absorbed through the natural techniques described in Chapter 6. More can be absorbed watching television, listening to songs, or talking with friends. This does not mean that endless hours spent watching MTV can take the place of studying, but all contact with English has value. Once students hit the 2,000-word threshold, they will be able to deduce much meaning from context. A student with such a vocabulary who hears “The lion was chasing an impala across the veldt” should be able to deduce that an impala is an African animal and the veldt is a sort of land found in Africa.
All of us assimilate vocabulary in this way in our native language, although as adults we do not encounter much new vocabulary in our everyday language use. Those who are immersed in second languages encounter hundreds of new words each day, and the meaning of a great many of them can be deduced through context.
Those who have learned foreign languages understand this process well. Monolingual readers can get a sense of this process by reading Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Clockwork Orange. Alex, the narrator and antihero, is a futuristic juvenile delinquent who speaks Nadsat, an odd slang, much of which is borrowed from Russian. The slang is presented in such a way that the reader can usually deduce the meaning from context. Where the context is not clear, Burgess has his narrator use appositives. Alex and his droogs, Pete, Georgie, and Dim, other malchicks about his age, drink moloko at the Korova Milkbar. The four droogs meet at the milkbar to peet moloko and viddy other malchicks and pretty devotchkas and spend their deng. They viddy people who come out of the nearby biblio with books that they had checked out or watch them read the news in the gazetta. When a droog makes a comment that Alex does not like, Alex tells him to shut his bloody rot.
It becomes clear that malchick means boy, droog means friend, peet means drink, biblio means library, deng means money, gazetta means newspaper, rot means mouth, and so on. After reading A Clockwork Orange, an attentive reader will understand scores of Russian words. Try it yourself. After only a few hours of reading, you will find that Russian-like words have invaded your thoughts. Bear in mind that these words have been presented in the Roman alphabet and that the reader understands them only when they are pronounced using English sounds. Also, verb inflections and other grammatical features are 100% English. Nevertheless, the experience of carefully reading A Clockwork Orange should give you an idea of how quickly vocabulary can be absorbed in context.
LEARNING FROM THE MOVIES
For students who are competent readers of either English or their native language, subtitled movies offer a fun and relatively painless way to build vocabulary. Viewers can either read the subtitles in English as they listen in their native language, or vice versa. In this manner, they might pick up 20 or 30 new words from a single movie without even being aware of having done so. Be warned, however, that this technique does not always work perfectly. Text is not always translated accurately, for a number of reasons. A student once entered my classroom and announced, "This room sucks." Because he was not a troublesome sort, I assumed that his comment was the result of a misunderstanding. When I asked him what he meant, he told me in Spanish, Esta sala apesta, which means “This room stinks.” The room had recently been cleaned with a foul-smelling detergent and did indeed stink. The previous night he had watched a subtitled movie in which a partygoer declared, “This party sucks!” while the subtitle read, Esta fiesta apesta (This party stinks).
Many DVDs have subtitles in several languages and multiple sound tracks. If your students are Spanish or French speakers, it will be easy to find DVDs that they can play in both English and their native language. Such DVDs are available in other languages as well, but they will be more difficult to find. Learners can watch the film in their native language while they read subtitles in English and then listen in English while they read in their native language. Or they can watch mostly in English, replaying scenes with subtitles only when they find them necessary. Bear in mind that this technique works with motivated learners only. Less interested students might spend hours mindlessly caught up in car chases, shootouts, and special effects without benefiting much linguistically.
TEACHING VOCABULARY WITH PICTURE DICTIONARIES
Picture dictionaries with themed pages are great tools for presenting concrete vocabulary. These dictionaries may be used to look up words or they may be used to present vocabulary thematically. Students may study a page about a kitchen the same week that they read a story or a textbook chapter with a lot of kitchen vocabulary. Or you may present a Total Physical Response (TPR) lesson in a real kitchen. The picture dictionary allows students to review TPR vocabulary or vocabulary taken from a written lesson at home without having to translate.
My personal favorite is the American English version of the Oxford Picture Dictionary. This dictionary covers a vocabulary of nearly 4,000 words grouped into 140 categories. It is available in a generic version that gives the words in English only, or in bilingual versions that offer translations into different languages. This dictionary also has accompanying tapes so that learners who are not yet competent English readers can hear the words as they look at the pictures. It also includes an interactive CD ROM.
USING VOCABULARY FROM THE NATIVE LANGUAGE
Most of your students will come to your class knowing a great many words that resemble English words. This is especially true of those who speak Indo-European languages, but as the world has shrunk Anglicisms have found their ways into all of the world’s major languages. Chances are your students will not understand the English cognates (words in different languages that resemble one another in both sound and meaning) for words in their native tongues at first, but as they master the English phonological system the cognates will become easier to hear and identify. When this happens, they will find that they have stumbled upon a bonus of hundreds or even thousands of free words. Using these cognates can greatly facilitate that first difficult step into English.
A few words of warning, however: Some cognates are a far stretch. The oke in the Japanese karaoke, rendered kareoke in English, is actually the Japanese cognate for the English word orchestra, and suto is a cognate for strike, abbreviated from sutoraiko. And some cognates are false. The Spanish word embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed, and condesendente means sycophantic, or boot-licking, not condescending. More often that not, however, the cognates will have a more-or-less equivalent meaning in the two languages. Early in the process of language learning, it is best for your students to assume that the cognates are equivalent until proven otherwise.
BUILDING VOCABULARY WITH WORD BLOCKS
Although students will need to learn tens of thousands of words before they attain native-like fluency, many of those words are variations of a single root word. If students know the affixes un, ness, and ly, upon learning happy they will also automatically understand the words happiness, happily, unhappy, unhappily, and unhappiness. Key prefixes and suffixes can be found in good dictionaries, grammar books, or ESL textbooks.
IDIOMS AND OTHER CONFUSING EXPRESSIONS
There is a great Tex Avery cartoon that features a speaker who uses idioms and slang expressions, while a listener tries to interpret what he hears. When the speaker says, “I was short handed,” the listener imagines the speaker with tiny arms. Upon hearing, “We painted the town red and really put on the dog,” he imagines a man painting a storefront while his girlfriend wears a collie like a stole. When he hears about caring for little ones, he imagines someone tending small numerals.
Idioms can be confusing for language learners. One must learn hundreds in the process of learning a language. Pick a good dictionary and look up the word “get.” You will find between a quarter and a half page of idioms: get up, get out, get over, get away with, get after, and so on. These expressions cannot be translated literally, and one who tries to do so will end up like the listener in the cartoon. When teaching idioms, it is best to teach students to think of an idiom as a single concept, not the sum of the words that comprise it. Most textbooks include idioms along with their vocabulary words. Good dictionaries include idioms along with word definitions.
LOOK IT UP! LEARNING ENGLISH WITH DICTIONARIES
Movies, pictures, and songs are useful and fun, but do not write off dictionary use. Context does not always make new vocabulary clear. While Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in a manner that makes Alex’s Russian-like slang easily intelligible, works of literature do not always provide context clues that clarify new vocabulary. Concrete vocabulary is best taught with objects, pictures, and actions, at least to beginners, but not all vocabulary is concrete. It is easy to demonstrate opening a window or zipping up a jacket, but it is not so easy to demonstrate the social, political, and economic upheavals that led to the French Revolution. More sophisticated vocabulary is not so easily represented with drawings and pictures. It is easy to draw a tree that all of your students recognize as a tree, but how about an oak or an ash?
When your students get past vocabulary that can be easily demonstrated, it will be time to hand out dictionaries. For beginning and intermediate students who are literate in their native languages, a bilingual dictionary is a must after the first semester. For English learners who lack a strong native language dominance or those who never learned to read well in their native language, a regular English dictionary may prove more useful than a bilingual one. Children’s dictionaries are good for beginning English learners, even the older ones, because the definitions are written in simple language.
You will find that your students most easily learn vocabulary related to subjects that interest them. A sports fan may learn words like goaltender, fullback, and stadium with little effort, and an amateur photographer might learn words like lens, shutter, aperture, and f-stop even before learning survival vocabulary. If you are tutoring one on one, you have the luxury of tailoring your lessons to your student’s interest. Most of us are not so lucky. Students in larger classes can, however, direct their own vocabulary learning using their own dictionaries.
Encourage students to look up words related to their favorite subjects and write them down. When you have a spare moment, engage your students in conversations that employ those words, or encourage them to use those words when they speak English with friends, classmates, and volunteer tutors. Encourage your students to mentally compose three or four sentences with each of the words they look up. When students look up words in text they are reading, have them write the words down or lightly mark them in the book with pencil and then compose the mental sentences later.
Many bilingual dictionaries use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to show how words are pronounced, although a few use the long/short vowel system, and a few make up their own system. Because the IPA is the most commonly used system in bilingual dictionaries, it will prove to be the most useful. There will be further discussion of the IPA in Chapter 10.
A number of excellent bilingual dictionaries are on the market. In selecting one, keep in mind the native-language reading level of your students. Many brands of dictionaries are available in one language only, although some publishers produce dictionaries in different languages. Larousse publishes excellent bilingual dictionaries in several languages, but their level may be too high for elementary or middle school students or for high school students or adults who are poor readers in their native language. If you teach older students, you might ask them which dictionaries work best for them, or keep several kinds of dictionaries in your classroom and see which ones your students gravitate to. If you can read your students’ native language, you can help decide which dictionary is best for them. If not, you could ask bilingual people on your school staff or in your community for recommendations.
ELECTRONIC DICTIONARIES
If you have computers in your classroom, dictionary software will prove to be quite useful. Several good bilingual dictionaries exist for personal computers and PDAs on the market. Good, reasonably priced hand-held electronic bilingual dictionaries are available as well. The advantage of the electronic dictionaries is that they are fast. For a student who needs to consult a dictionary 20 times per page, that extra speed makes a big difference. Talking dictionaries, which pronounce the word, are especially useful for beginning students or students who are poor readers.
Some of these programs, like the software version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary or the American Heritage Talking Dictionary, can be linked directly to a word processor, and some bilingual word processors have bilingual dictionaries built into them. Students can copy and paste text into the word-processor program and have automatic access to the dictionary as they read. If you have a dictionary program that does not link automatically, you or a reasonably knowledgeable computer user can create a macro that will create a link. You can also find programs that offer text with hotwords that link to definitions. Some reference programs like Microsoft Encarta or Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia have their entire text linked to a dictionary, so readers can click any word and get a definition immediately.
Bilingual dictionaries for PDAs provide translations for words with the tap of a stylus. English learners can download ebooks on PDAs that they can carry in their shirt pockets and read at their leisure. Appendix 2 includes the names of Web sites where public domain literature can be downloaded free of charge.
THOSE BORING VOCABULARY LISTS
Vocabulary lists may not be particularly popular, but they serve an important purpose. However, students should not be expected to know a word simply because they have seen it on a list. Learners should hear, say, read, and write each word several times in a variety of contexts. Use the words in context in class several times, present them with pictures if possible, and create situations that oblige the students to both say and write them. Have students periodically do a self-check in which they read over the week’s vocabulary and note and study those words they do not understand. While you should not expect students to learn vocabulary just from a list, let the list support vocabulary learning.
LAYERED VOCABULARY LEARNING
It is important to remember that we do not learn all of the aspects, definitions, and nuances of a word at once. From the sentence, “There was a lovely gardenia in the bouquet that Johnny gave to his mother,” one can conclude that a gardenia is a flower. When learners see a picture of a gardenia, their knowledge of that flower increases. If they see, touch, and smell a real gardenia, that knowledge increases again. If they study the life cycle of the gardenia in biology class, they will know even more.
Students might learn the meaning of the word accolade from a television sports announcer who was referring to an honor that had been conferred on an athlete. They might later see the word in print, sound it out, and add it to their reading vocabulary. Later still they might learn from a dictionary or deduce from a book of medieval history or a novel about King Arthur that accolade also means a tap on a knight’s shoulder with a sword. When practice has embedded words solidly in students’ minds, it is a simple matter to add more meaning to those words at a later time.
Working With Younger Students
The older the student, the more useful bilingual dictionary use will be. Picture dictionaries will be useful for all ages. The Oxford Picture Dictionary is appropriate for upper elementary school and beyond. Several illustrated picture dictionaries are on the market for younger children. Films are useful for all ages, although the subtitles do not work well for the younger ones.
Small children seem to be better at “absorbing” new vocabulary through mere exposure than are older learners. With very young children, modeling vocabulary matters more than drilling it.