Thornbury how to teach vocabulary scott thornbury

An A-Z of ELT

V is for Vocabulary teaching

A teacher educator in Norway reports on how she has used ideas from my book How to Teach Vocabulary (2002) on an in-service course for local primary and lower secondary school teachers. Mona Flognfeldt writes: ‘I have shared with my students a lot of input that I have learnt from you, and a lot of our students have put their new insights to immediate practical use in their classrooms. … As a part of their course, these students have also learnt to make their own blogs.’ These blogs have become the vehicles whereby they report on how they ‘have tried out various activities and types of tasks in their attempts to help their students enhance their vocabulary in English’.

Reading the blogs I am struck by the way these teachers have implemented, in their own classes, a reflective task cycle as part of their ongoing professional development. This has involved background reading and discussion, classroom experimentation, reflection and – by means of the blogs – sharing with their colleagues the insights that they have gained.

To give you a flavour, here is a sample of the kinds of activities these teachers tried. I have grouped them according to five guiding principles of vocabulary acquisition. (Apologies in advance to those whose blog posts I haven’t included, but readers who are interested can find them at the link below).

1. The Principle of Cognitive Depth: “The more one manipulates, thinks about, and uses mental information, the more likely it is that one will retain that information.In the case of vocabulary, the more one engages with a word (deeper processing), the more likely the word will be remembered for later use” (Schmitt 2000: 120).

I picked out 8 words from the text that I wanted my pupils to learn. Then I had my pupils identifying the words in the text. Task 2 was a selecting task where the pupils had to underline the words that were typical for India. They shared their work with a partner, explaining their choices. As task 3 they were matching the words with an English description from a dictionary. They also found antonyms and synonyms. Task 4 was a sorting activity where the pupils had to decide whether the words were nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. Finally, as a ranking and sequencing activity I had my pupils rank the words according to preference, to decide how important they thought knowing each word was. They discussed their ranking with a partner. (Mette B.)

2. The Principle of Retrieval: “The act of successfully recalling an item increases the chance that the item will be remembered. It appears that the retrieval route to that item is in some way strengthened by being successfully used” (Baddeley 1997: 112).

My Vocabulary activity was “Categories” … The students worked in groups of four or five. They were handed out a piece of paper where five columns were drawn up. Each column was labelled with the name of a lexical set: Food, transport, clothes, animals and sport. I called out a letter of the alphabet (e.g. B!). The students wrote down as many words they knew began with the letter to a time of limit which was around 2-3 minutes. The group with the most words won (I did not demand that the words were spelled correctly. (Gunn)

There is also pictionary, where you divide the class into two groups, and one member of each team goes to the SmartBoard. The teacher flashes them a card with a word, phrase or expression and the pupils have one minute to make their team say the word on the basis of their drawing on the SmartBoard; no other clues are allowed. (Vanessa)

3. The Principle of Associations: “The human lexicon is believed to be a network of associations, a web-like structure of interconnected links. When students are asked to manipulate words, relate them to other words and to their own experiences, and then to justify their choices, these word associations are reinforced” (Sökmen 1997: 241-2).

Make true and false sentences about yourself using eight of these words.

I believe this is a good activity for deeper processing of words, because the learners have to relate to the words and phrases personally. I have tried it out in class and found it a motivating activity both for me and for my pupils. We all got to know each other better by sorting out the activities they liked more and liked less. This was a concrete task, easy for them to relate to and to make up sentences from a given pattern. The activity guessing what is false and true is fun and easy to understand. They have to use what they already know about each other to decide whether the statements are true or false. (Anne Katrine)

4. The Principle of Re-contextualization: “When words are met in reading and listening or used in speaking and writing, the generativeness of the context will influence learning. That is, if the words occur in new sentence contexts in the reading text, learning will be helped. Similarly, having to use the word to say new things will add to learning” (Nation 2001: 80).

I showed them the list of words on the projector and introduced the task to them. Their first task was to translate the words and write them in Norwegian. … When the pupils had finished this, they were asked to use at least five words/expressions from each column to write a paragraph on US politics. The task had to be finished before the lesson the week after. This sentence or text creation task required the pupils to create the context for the given words and phrases. In addition to the meaning of the words, the pupils also needed to think about word tense, grammatical behaviour and so on. (Sturla)

5. The Principle of Multiple Encounters: “Due to the incremental nature of vocabulary acquisition, repeated exposures are necessary to consolidate a new word in the learner’s mind” (Schmitt & Carter 2000: 4).

The class was supposed to work with reading comprehension, but before starting the reading, the pupils were given a pre-reading task related to vocabulary in the text. … After a while, the teacher went through the task with the class, asking for the matching words and the definitions. The teacher repeated the answers to model the correct pronunciation.

Then the class was instructed to read the article and use the worksheet on vocabulary while reading and after reading when they were asked to answer questions from the article. This way the vocabulary was met several times. (Anette)

Finally, the last word goes to Mette B. ‘I have also had the pleasure of practising Thornbury’s ways of putting words to work this year. What amazes me the most is how positive even the pupils with elementary skills respond to these types of activities’.

Music to my ears!

Again, heartfelt thanks to Mona and her trainee teachers.

References:

Baddeley, A. (1997) Human Memory: Theory and Practice (Revised edition), Hove: Psychology Press.

Nation, I.S.P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmitt, N. (2000) Vocabulary in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmitt, N. & Carter; R. (2000) ‘The lexical advantages of narrow reading for second language learners’, TESOL Journal, 9/1, 4-9.

Sökmen, A.J. (1997) ‘Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary,’ in Schmitt, N. and McCarthy, M. (Eds.) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary, Harlow: Pearson.

Illustrations from Grad, A. (1958) Vasela Angleščina, Ljubljana: DZS.

Scott Thornbury and his 30 Language Teaching Methods

ELT expert, Scott Thornbury, discusses his book Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods.

Scott chats about why he has organised the methods by what they have in common, rather than by chronology. He also reveals why he has included some approaches which you wouldn’t usually expect to find in a book on methods. Hope you enjoy!

If you enjoyed this video and want a taster of Scott’s new Cambridge Handbook for language teachers, here’s a sample of one of the chapters out of Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods, entitled: Communicative Language Teaching.

Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods (sample chapter)

In 1994, H.D. Brown posed the question ‘Is there a currently recognised approach that is a generally accepted norm in the field?’ and he answered it by saying, ‘the answer is a qualified yes. That qualified yes can be captured in the term communicative language teaching (CLT)’. A quarter of a century later, the answer is still ‘yes’, and still qualified.

The background In the early 1960s, the terms ‘communication’ and ‘communicative’ were all the rage. Communication had been invoked as a tool for post-war reconstruction; mass media were now being credited with turning the word into a ‘global village’. Driven by innovations in technology, university courses on ‘communication studies’ and ‘communication sciences’ proliferated. To sell anything or to get votes, ‘communication skills’ were considered essential. At the same time, a new branch of linguistics was emerging: sociolinguists were training their sights on the relationship between language and society, interested less in language as an abstract system and more in how it is put to use in actual communication.

It was in this intellectual climate, in 1966, that Dell Hymes put forward the idea of ‘communicative competence’, i.e. ‘competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner’ (Hymes 1972). Communicative competence, it followed, involves more than having a command of the sum of the grammatical structures that were enshrined in the typical syllabuses of the time. It involves being sensitive to the effect on language choices of such contextual factors as the purpose of the exchange and relation between the participants. Communicative competence was to become the ‘big idea’ that would underpin Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and give it its name.

How this big idea might revitalize language teaching was the driving force behind the Council of Europe Modern Languages Project that was launched at Rüschlikon, Switzerland, in 1971, and which effectively marked the inception of CLT. It came to fruition a few years later with the publication of a number of courses based not on a syllabus of grammatical structures but on a syllabus of communicative functions – such as making requests, complaining, narrating and so on. As an epigraph to one of the first of these courses, Strategies (Abbs, et al. 1975) the writers quoted David Wilkins (1976), a consultant on the Council of Europe project, to the effect that: what people want to do through language is more important than the mastery of language as an unapplied system.

How does it work?

In the teachers’ guide to the same series, the authors spell out their approach (Abbs & Freebairn 1979):
If emphasis is placed on learning a language for communicative purposes, the methods used to promote learning should reflect this. […] A communicative methodology will therefore encourage students to practise language in pairs and groups, where they have equal opportunity to ask, answer, initiate and respond. The teacher assumes a counselling role, initiating activity, listening, helping and advising. Students are encouraged to communicate effectively rather than merely to produce grammatically correct forms of English.

By realigning the goals of instruction away from grammatical accuracy and towards fluency (however defined), and by making a strong commitment to experiential learning, i.e. that communication is best acquired by communicating, the quality and quantity of classroom interaction was set to change radically.

There was still the problem of the syllabus, however. The Council of Europe had urged the adoption of functional-notional syllabuses, i.e. syllabuses made up of items such as requesting, making comparisons, narrating, duration. Others argued for a task-based syllabus. Either way, allegiance to the grammar syllabus – on the grounds that grammar items are more generalizable, easier to sequence, and, of course, easier to test – was unshakeable.

And, since grammar items are not easily learned by experience, the ‘fluency first’ teaching cycle that had originally been proposed, in which learners communicate to the best of their ability, and then get feedback, was sidelined and re-packaged as Task-based Language Teaching (see chapter 16). It was replaced by a less deep-end version of CLT, in which pre-communicative activities (typically with a structural focus) precede communicative activities. Effectively, the PPP model inherited from Situational Language Teaching (see chapter 14) was dusted off and stretched a little, so as to include more production activities (such as information-gap tasks, role plays and discussions) but not a lot else changed.

For example, the unit structure of a coursebook series that claims to incorporate ‘the best features of proven and familiar communicative methodologies’ (McCarthy et al. 2005) follows this order:

Lesson D, after the first three units, focuses on reading and writing skills while providing additional listening and speaking activities.By the time English language teaching became a global industry in the 1980s and 1990s, it was this ‘weak’ version of CLT that was taken to be the default form. In many EFL contexts there was no ‘communicative revolution’ at all.

Does it work?

If widespread adoption is any indication of effectiveness, then CLT – especially in its weak form – would seem to have worked. Most teachers, teacher educators, publishers and institutions subscribe, in principle, at least, to ‘being communicative’. What this means is not always clear, but there seems to be a general commitment to the idea that fluency is at least as important as accuracy, that language is a skill as much as a system, and that the goal of second language learning is communicative competence, rather than native-like mastery.

However, CLT has not been without its critics. Resistance to CLT in many (especially non-Western) contexts is argued on the grounds that it might not be appropriate in cultures where theoretical knowledge is valued more highly than practical skills, and where accuracy, not fluency, is the goal of language education. Moreover, a method that prioritizes communicative competence would seem to favour teachers who are themselves communicatively competent, which in many – perhaps most – EFL contexts is not necessarily the case.

What’s in it for us?

The lasting legacy of CLT is the idea of the ‘communicative activity’. That is to say, an activity in which there is a genuine exchange of meanings, and where participants can use any communicative means at their disposal. In other words, they are not restricted to the use of a pre-specified grammar item. Whether or not a programme consisting solely of such activities enables language acquisition has been thrown into doubt by research suggesting that a ‘focus on form’ – such as attending to features of the grammar – is necessary. But such activities have made classrooms more interesting, and even fun.

All this month, we’re celebrating the Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers series. If you want to read more, check out 2 of the 100 hands-on tips taken from Penny Ur’s 100 Teaching Tips handbook.