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Post #8: Voluminous Vocabulary



As a voracious reader, I have always had a fairly extensive vocabulary, able to use complex words in a variety of contexts. I remember being complimented throughout high school for my use of technical language in the essays that I wrote. For a while, it surprised me that not everyone was the way that I was, or the ways my high school best friends were. Why would you not want to learn new words that make you sound smarter? Why are there people out there that don't enjoy reading all the time?

I still wonder about that at times, but now I have a different perspective, as a future teacher. My questions are more based on how I, as a Spanish teacher, can encourage the use and acquisition of vocabulary in my students--and why they would be unmotivated to do so.

Traditional vocabulary instruction in Spanish often involves the use of word-to-word translation, vocabulary lists, and forced memorization. That's how I learned Spanish, from the beginning. And sometimes, it seems that way of learning is almost unavoidable, yet it often ends up being ineffective. Students learn their lists of vocabulary for the purpose of the test and then promptly forget them, rather than retaining them and truly using them in real life. I think that is one of the main reasons that students do not progress to higher levels--the inability to store the vocabulary that they learn in class to use in actual conversation.

The Beers reading highlights the importance of meaningful contexts for vocabulary use and acquisition as well as the benefits of multiple encounters with a word--the combination of which greatly affects the chance that a student may actually use the words that she or he learns. This is of even more importance for effective language learning, as we are seeing: useful, meaningful contexts and integration of the theme into real-world forms and functions make learning more applicable to real life, and more interesting for the learners.

When it comes to activities for teaching vocabulary, much depends on the competency level of those being taught. Novice learners will be taught using many cognates and fewer inferences; while we try to reduce explicit learning through images and motions, much of the time we still end up teaching explicitly. Advanced learners, on the other hand, are much more equipped to be able to learn through target-language circumlocution or even through contextual evidence. One of my favorite activities for intermediate to advanced learners is information-gap activities, where they work together with a partner to find the piece of information (be that a detail from a story, a vocabulary word, etc.) that they don't have--without saying what the word is.

For novice learners, images are more useful, and having visuals of important vocabulary words around the classroom is traditionally very helpful for them (in the sense of recurring vocabulary). I think for me, finding ways to contextualize the vocabulary will be difficult with my Spanish 1 kiddos, but I will attempt to adapt the themes and grammatical concepts to use more authentic texts to make the vocabulary more applicable to them.

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