Fighting a losing battle with vocabulary

Arek Peryt

FIGHTING THE LOSING BATTLE?LEARNING VOCABULARY IN NON-ENGLISH

SPEAKING COUNTRY

When students travel they don’t carry grammar books,

they carry dictionaries

Stephen Krashen

Gu, P. Y. (2003). Vocabulary Learning in a Second Language:

Person, Task, Context and Strategies.

Forgetting mostly occurs immediately after we first learn something, and that the rate of forgetting slows down afterward

Operational center : C

C:\English

language\

Vocabulary\

House\

Bathroom\

Toiletries\

Soap

Vocabulary

Receptive Productive

Productive vocabulary is a set of lexis that is recognised in both oral and written form and understood immediately as well as a student can retrieve and produce it at will in a suitable context

“Working with words”- Gairns, Redman, CUP

What do we need to acquire productive vocabulary?

Importance

meaningful presentation

meaningful repetition

Spaced intervals

first heard

Learners who know the most frequent 2,000 words should be able to understand almost 80 percent of the words in an average text.(Francis and Kucera 1982). For spoken language, the news is even better since about 1,800 words make up over 80 percent of the spoken corpus

(McCarthy 2004; Teaching Vocabulary O’Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter 2007)- “Teaching Vocabulary” J.McCarten, CUP

What level student would be expected

to understand and produce 80% of English language?

GE 7GE1 to GE7 315 classes

1900:315=6

6 words per class

Different research suggest that an average student needs between 5 to 12 encounters with an item of lexis to know it in a productive way

The reality is that my students have contact

with English only in the classroom.

“The brain book” Russel claims that we forget

80% within the first 24 hoursHe insists on the first repetition within that period.

Then after 2, 4, 7, 12 20 days and a month 3 month 6months 1 year

The reality of our classes is different.

Typical course

Monday Wednesday Friday

First class with new 6 words and a

repetition at the end of the class!Then a warm-up activity at the

beginning of the next class then a class of interval (without recycling),

then 2 classes of interval, 4 classes and 7 classes

From 7th class 6 new lexis and 18 to revise

In 2 hours is it possible to meaningfully present 6 new lexis and meaningfully recycle 18 old ones?

And what about grammar, listening and writing?

Materials:Books and websites available at the request:

aperyt@yahoo.co.uk