Vocabulary Teaching in ESL

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Recommended: Merits and demerits of language teaching approaches

This report was assigned for us to learn understand language teaching and how it is practiced more. My assigned area is vocabulary learning and teaching. For this I have thought about what my thoughts and believes on the subject of learning and teaching vocabulary were and how they changed after interviewing a teacher of English as a second language and a learner of English as a second language.

In this report I will discuss my beliefs before and after doing the interviews and further research; the believes of a teacher with the help of a concept map; the thoughts of a learner by doing a small interview and what the experts think by discussing extra material I have read and analysed especially for this report.

When I started writing this report I have made a concept map displaying my believes in how vocabulary should be taught in English as a second language, to be referred to as ESL in the remainder of this report.

It shows that my belief rests on 4 pillars. Namely that context, time, balance and variation are essential to learning and teaching vocabulary. Not only in ESL but in any language that is learned.

My believe is that the bulk of vocabulary is not learned in the classroom, but rather out in everyday life by watching TV, movies and listening to music. Since I believe that context is by far the most important contributing factor when learning and teaching vocabulary. It make that a learner makes an association with the word that is something else than ‘I have to learn this word to pass a test and please the teacher’. Since this is not something that will motivate a learner. In a sense learning words in everyday life creates a need for the knowledge that is not as easily created in the classroom.

Next time is very...

... middle of paper ...

... ways and with many different methods, all of them have a different effect, good or bad, on different learners. But as soon as the learners see the point of learning this the biggest obstacle is out of the way and give the opportunity for many types of fun and educational assignments that ultimately learn the learner to communicate at it’s best. Which is the goal every language teacher should be striving to achieve.

Works Cited

Allan, V. F. (1983). In Russell N. Campbell, & William E. Rutherford (Eds.), Techniques in teaching vocabulary (14th ed., pp. 2) Oxford press.
Langhoff, D. (2011). Making words stick. English Teaching Professional, (72), 32-33 - 34.
Langhoff, D. (2011). Stratagies for learning lexis. English Teaching Professional, (77), 46-47.
Rosenberg, M. (2011). Different learners, different learning. English Teaching Professional, 1(75), 16-17-18.

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