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【Abstract】As is well known, language is learned for the purpose of communication as well as academic purpose and vocabulary is essential to learners in any aspect of language usage.No doubt that it is the first and foremost important part in the study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, it’s no easy task for students to build vocabulary in the EFL context.The teacher can not learn vocabulary for them, but as the facilitator, he/she can facilitate EFL learners acquire vocabulary.Therefore, this article briefly introduces some practical learning strategies and approaches that I have been exploiting to enhance EFL Senior High students’ vocabulary acquisition.
【Key Words】 practical approaches; EFL; vocabulary learning/acquisition
Introduction
The reason why vocabulary learning is one of the most difficult challenges in language learning is that learning it by rote is dull and boring so that learners will easily give up or are so reluctant to learn as to acquire it almost fruitlessly. In this case, it’s vital that the teacher activate the class and mobilize students’ possible positive factors into play.In fact, many English teachers have different ways of teaching EFL students to enlarge their vocabulary .This paper further discusses the practical approaches to vocabulary learning by arousing students’ every positive factor into vocabulary learning and integrating it into the teaching of other basic language skills as my experience in teaching EFL senior high students to improve vocabulary effectively.
1. Attitude and Motivation
The research of attitude and motivation in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been conducted by Gardner and Lambert and both prove to be interactive and effective in SLA.Rod Ellis (1985) states: “Attitudes and motivation are important factors, which help to determine the level of proficiency achieved by different learners.The most successful learners will be those who have a high level of motivation for learning.” Positive attitude and motivation that are dependent on the learners, are far less amenable to be influenced by the teacher than those that derive from a sense of academic or communicative success. In the case of the latter, both can be developed by careful selection of learning tasks to achieve the right level of complexity to create opportunities for success and to foster learners’ intrinsic interest in vocabulary learning.It is positive attitude and motivation that produce effective EFL communicators by planting the seeds of self-confidence in them. They also successfully create learners who continuously engage themselves in learning even after a goal. In order for teachers to motivate them , a number of methods are needed both in and out of class. Hussin, Muar of and D’Cruz state six factors influence motivation in language learning: attitude, beliefs about self, goals, involvement, environmental support and personal attributes. Abovel all, three specific elements are strongly believed to build motivation towards language learning: self-confidence, experiencing success and satisfaction and good teacher-learner relationships as well as relationships between learners. All the three factors are supposed to be correlated to each other in the process of motivation development.So long as the teacher manages to arouse and maintain learners’ positive attitude and motivation by getting them involved in their vocabulary learning through different interesting activities, one of which is to implement the drawing method like this
①Divide students into groups of two and each two, into Students A and B;
②Ask Student A to listen to Student B’s description using both old words and newly- taught ones and draw what is described on paper;
③Coversely, let Student B listen to his partner’s description and accomplish his drawing task ;
④Compare each other’s drawing and find out where the problems lie;
⑤Write out the problems and exchange them with the group close to them for solutions
Such a game is fun and can make the lesson creative and lively, though a bit noisy in a big class. It also captures learners’ imagination besides their memory. Not only will they try every means to find different solutions to the problems, they will also strengthen their memorization of their vocabulary by using it for description in a relaxed and happy way.
2. Personality
Besides, to develop students’ extroverted personality can help dispel their misgivings like fear and anxiety in language study.One of the intuitively appealing hypotheses has been investigated that extoverted learners learn more rapidly and are more successful than introverted learners. It has been suggested that extroverted learners will find it easier to make contact with other users of the target language and therefore will obtain more input. The classroom learner may also benefit from being extroverted by getting more practice in using EFL.The linguist Strong investigated, “only talkativeness and responsiveness were significantly related to measures of language development, i.e.to structural knowledge, playing vocabulary and pronunciation.”The interactionist view sees language development as the result both of input factors and of innate mechanisms. It derives from the collocative efforts of the learner and his interlocutors and involves a dynamic interplay between external and internal factors.Accordingly, students are expected to consolidate the vocabulary they have learned since junior high, practicse the newly-learned vocabulary in senior high and simultaniously build new vocabulary through a series of in-and-out-of-class activities and approaches willingly and happily.
3. Vocabulary Acquisition Through Speaking
One approach is to motivate the students to use new vocabulary to express themselves in class.Speaking can reinforce vocabulary learning in that it can help create an English atmosphere and intensify the learner’s memorization of the new word or phrase by using it flexibly.Students are assigned to describe a realia shown to them with the new words or prepare 2-3 minutes free speeches or make up humours or jokes or short dialogues in pairs on a certain topic they are interested in, using as many words and expressions that have just been taught as possible and to present them to the class either in class if possible or in the next class.The teacher models each of the strategies, making it clear how to go about it first.With their vocabulary increasing and capacity developing, the high-level students can make excellent instructors, explaining to the rest of the class the strategies that work for them.They are encouraged to find their partners for a discussion and a check on what they are going to present in class.The chance to speak is for everyone in a large mixed-ability class, one at a time, in turn according to their seat numbers or student numbers.For example, when my students came to Unit 3 Looking good, feeling good, Module 1(Advance with English) and study the vocabulary in this unit, a girl student gave a short presentation as follows:
“Hello, everyone, the topic of my speech for today is Health and a good figure. As you can see, I am a bit overweight. Sometimes I feel ashamed of my figure and really want to lose weight to look attractive and good. To tell you the truth, I once tried to go on a diet and even skipped meals secretly without my parents knowing it, but I felt hungry all the time and didn’t feel energetic enough to study, so I stopped. I also want to try some weight-loss pills, but I’m afraid their side effects will affect or even damage my health. As a matter of fact, we will feel good if we look good. However, health is more important than a slim figure. To have both, we should eat the right foods, get enough sleep and make the most of our spare time to work out regularly Let’s get moving to get into shape and study well together, shall we?”
The blackened words and expressions in the speech are the new vocabulary that appear in Unit 3.Habit is second nature.Once formed and kept in use, such an approach to the EFL students’ exposure to the vocabulary usage is a practical way for the learner, who is regarded as a language-producing machine, to use the new vocabulary communicatively in the unnatural setting,outputing his/her input timely and effectively.To show off his/her success in performance and gain the approval and praise from his/her audience-both the teacher and the classmates, he/she will make full preparations by picking topics, collecting information in various ways like surfing the Internet, organizing texts, examining the written speech and practising it until he/she can recite it before class and manage to speak without notes. Such an approach to instructing students to acquire vocabulary proves to be popular among students and effectual because the learning task is carried out on the basis of the combination of out-of-class autonomous learning activities with classroom activities as well as arousing students’ every possible positive factor into play.It does help because it provides every student with a training platform to conduct well from fearfully and anxiously to confidently and readily due to the drive from the positive factors in them.Integrating Vocabulary Acquisition with the Development of Other Basic Language Skills.
3.1.Stimulating Vocabulary Memorization Through Listening
Teaching practice has shown that listening is a stimulus to learners in vocabulary learning because doing listening can increase the frequency of the appearances of English words, which facilitates learners’grasping them including the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of the word, but it depends on how the listening activity is carried out to unfold the information and the meaning of a new word so as to be incorporated in the teaching and learning of vocabulary items in the classroom. Jim Scrivener suggests the following guidelines for using listening tasks in class.
①Lead-in to the listening material
②Set clear tasks before listening
③Keep the recording short
④Play the recording a sufficient number of times
⑤Break down longer recordings into ‘chunks’
⑥Let students discuss their answers together
⑦Play small bits of the recording again and again until it’s clear
⑧Give help if the students are really struggling
⑨Don’t let them lose heart!
Some students can find listening exercises quite stressful and feel as if they were in the ‘test’situation.Therefore, it’s crucial for the teacher to make them feel more confident by providing them with proper listening strategies such as recognition of context, lexis, grammar structures, register etc.by answering questions or taking notes and predicting what they expect to hear by guessing definitions or doing gap-fill exercises with proper key words and so on. Apart from the listening material allocated to the textbook, it’s necessary to select appropriate listening materials that contain sufficient new vocabulary for the students to listen to.
3.2.Reading texts provides opportunities to study new language vocabulary , for instance,through guesses or predictions according to the message of the context. Readers’guesses or predictations are based on the accumulative information and syntactic structure they have learnt as they have been reading.Students should be encouraged to utilize the context to decide what words mean and find the language sense to make intelligent guesses which can fit both the grammatical and semantic sense of what they are reading.By reading texts in contextual realms, readers can also learn word formation like conversion, derivation and compounding, synonyms, antonyms and relevant phrases as well as the grasp of the text and key words in it. Take the phrase “step up” as an example.When we pick it out of the text as a key phrase, we should not only tell our students what part of speech it is (transitive verb), what it means ( to increase in size or speed), how to use it in the sentence (e.g. We have to step up our teaching and learning before the exam.) and what its opposite is (slow down), but we also need to tell them that the word “step” can be used as intransitive verb and converted to a noun with several collocations such as “step out into the street/step forward/step aside/ step on one’s foot/take one step backward/take effective steps to do sth/sit on a door step/step by step/in step/ out of step/watch one’s step”etc.Besides, at this point, I think it’s easy for students to acquire its compound words, so we can show them some like “stepparent/ stepfather/stepmother/stepchild/stepbrother/stepsister/stepladder”etc.
4.Conclusion
To summarize, teaching EFL learners vocabulary efficiently in the non-native English situation is a knotty problem, but a successful EFL teacher can adopt selected vocabulary teaching approaches and implement applicable integrated learning activities in daily teaching to meet the requirements of vocabulary acquisition.Rome was not built in one day.There is no perfect method to enhance vocabulary learning in one or two days, nevertheless, students’vocabulary bank can be extended and enriched gradually in everyday teaching and learning so long as the teacher can arouse their positive factors and take appropriate measures to aid them in finding, learning, understanding and applying new words.With a rich vocabulary, the students will surely find EFL learning much easier and greater fun.
【References】
[1] Carter, R. and McCarthy. 1988. Vocabulary and Language Teaching (M). London: Longman.
[2] Notion. P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Rod Ellis. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition.Oxford University Press.
[4] Wilkins, D. A. 1972. Linguistics in Language Teaching (M). London: Edward Arnold.
[5] Zhang Zhengdong. 1999 Neo-methoduics in Foreign Language Teaching (M). Beijing: The Science Press.
【Key Words】 practical approaches; EFL; vocabulary learning/acquisition
Introduction
The reason why vocabulary learning is one of the most difficult challenges in language learning is that learning it by rote is dull and boring so that learners will easily give up or are so reluctant to learn as to acquire it almost fruitlessly. In this case, it’s vital that the teacher activate the class and mobilize students’ possible positive factors into play.In fact, many English teachers have different ways of teaching EFL students to enlarge their vocabulary .This paper further discusses the practical approaches to vocabulary learning by arousing students’ every positive factor into vocabulary learning and integrating it into the teaching of other basic language skills as my experience in teaching EFL senior high students to improve vocabulary effectively.
1. Attitude and Motivation
The research of attitude and motivation in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been conducted by Gardner and Lambert and both prove to be interactive and effective in SLA.Rod Ellis (1985) states: “Attitudes and motivation are important factors, which help to determine the level of proficiency achieved by different learners.The most successful learners will be those who have a high level of motivation for learning.” Positive attitude and motivation that are dependent on the learners, are far less amenable to be influenced by the teacher than those that derive from a sense of academic or communicative success. In the case of the latter, both can be developed by careful selection of learning tasks to achieve the right level of complexity to create opportunities for success and to foster learners’ intrinsic interest in vocabulary learning.It is positive attitude and motivation that produce effective EFL communicators by planting the seeds of self-confidence in them. They also successfully create learners who continuously engage themselves in learning even after a goal. In order for teachers to motivate them , a number of methods are needed both in and out of class. Hussin, Muar of and D’Cruz state six factors influence motivation in language learning: attitude, beliefs about self, goals, involvement, environmental support and personal attributes. Abovel all, three specific elements are strongly believed to build motivation towards language learning: self-confidence, experiencing success and satisfaction and good teacher-learner relationships as well as relationships between learners. All the three factors are supposed to be correlated to each other in the process of motivation development.So long as the teacher manages to arouse and maintain learners’ positive attitude and motivation by getting them involved in their vocabulary learning through different interesting activities, one of which is to implement the drawing method like this
①Divide students into groups of two and each two, into Students A and B;
②Ask Student A to listen to Student B’s description using both old words and newly- taught ones and draw what is described on paper;
③Coversely, let Student B listen to his partner’s description and accomplish his drawing task ;
④Compare each other’s drawing and find out where the problems lie;
⑤Write out the problems and exchange them with the group close to them for solutions
Such a game is fun and can make the lesson creative and lively, though a bit noisy in a big class. It also captures learners’ imagination besides their memory. Not only will they try every means to find different solutions to the problems, they will also strengthen their memorization of their vocabulary by using it for description in a relaxed and happy way.
2. Personality
Besides, to develop students’ extroverted personality can help dispel their misgivings like fear and anxiety in language study.One of the intuitively appealing hypotheses has been investigated that extoverted learners learn more rapidly and are more successful than introverted learners. It has been suggested that extroverted learners will find it easier to make contact with other users of the target language and therefore will obtain more input. The classroom learner may also benefit from being extroverted by getting more practice in using EFL.The linguist Strong investigated, “only talkativeness and responsiveness were significantly related to measures of language development, i.e.to structural knowledge, playing vocabulary and pronunciation.”The interactionist view sees language development as the result both of input factors and of innate mechanisms. It derives from the collocative efforts of the learner and his interlocutors and involves a dynamic interplay between external and internal factors.Accordingly, students are expected to consolidate the vocabulary they have learned since junior high, practicse the newly-learned vocabulary in senior high and simultaniously build new vocabulary through a series of in-and-out-of-class activities and approaches willingly and happily.
3. Vocabulary Acquisition Through Speaking
One approach is to motivate the students to use new vocabulary to express themselves in class.Speaking can reinforce vocabulary learning in that it can help create an English atmosphere and intensify the learner’s memorization of the new word or phrase by using it flexibly.Students are assigned to describe a realia shown to them with the new words or prepare 2-3 minutes free speeches or make up humours or jokes or short dialogues in pairs on a certain topic they are interested in, using as many words and expressions that have just been taught as possible and to present them to the class either in class if possible or in the next class.The teacher models each of the strategies, making it clear how to go about it first.With their vocabulary increasing and capacity developing, the high-level students can make excellent instructors, explaining to the rest of the class the strategies that work for them.They are encouraged to find their partners for a discussion and a check on what they are going to present in class.The chance to speak is for everyone in a large mixed-ability class, one at a time, in turn according to their seat numbers or student numbers.For example, when my students came to Unit 3 Looking good, feeling good, Module 1(Advance with English) and study the vocabulary in this unit, a girl student gave a short presentation as follows:
“Hello, everyone, the topic of my speech for today is Health and a good figure. As you can see, I am a bit overweight. Sometimes I feel ashamed of my figure and really want to lose weight to look attractive and good. To tell you the truth, I once tried to go on a diet and even skipped meals secretly without my parents knowing it, but I felt hungry all the time and didn’t feel energetic enough to study, so I stopped. I also want to try some weight-loss pills, but I’m afraid their side effects will affect or even damage my health. As a matter of fact, we will feel good if we look good. However, health is more important than a slim figure. To have both, we should eat the right foods, get enough sleep and make the most of our spare time to work out regularly Let’s get moving to get into shape and study well together, shall we?”
The blackened words and expressions in the speech are the new vocabulary that appear in Unit 3.Habit is second nature.Once formed and kept in use, such an approach to the EFL students’ exposure to the vocabulary usage is a practical way for the learner, who is regarded as a language-producing machine, to use the new vocabulary communicatively in the unnatural setting,outputing his/her input timely and effectively.To show off his/her success in performance and gain the approval and praise from his/her audience-both the teacher and the classmates, he/she will make full preparations by picking topics, collecting information in various ways like surfing the Internet, organizing texts, examining the written speech and practising it until he/she can recite it before class and manage to speak without notes. Such an approach to instructing students to acquire vocabulary proves to be popular among students and effectual because the learning task is carried out on the basis of the combination of out-of-class autonomous learning activities with classroom activities as well as arousing students’ every possible positive factor into play.It does help because it provides every student with a training platform to conduct well from fearfully and anxiously to confidently and readily due to the drive from the positive factors in them.Integrating Vocabulary Acquisition with the Development of Other Basic Language Skills.
3.1.Stimulating Vocabulary Memorization Through Listening
Teaching practice has shown that listening is a stimulus to learners in vocabulary learning because doing listening can increase the frequency of the appearances of English words, which facilitates learners’grasping them including the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of the word, but it depends on how the listening activity is carried out to unfold the information and the meaning of a new word so as to be incorporated in the teaching and learning of vocabulary items in the classroom. Jim Scrivener suggests the following guidelines for using listening tasks in class.
①Lead-in to the listening material
②Set clear tasks before listening
③Keep the recording short
④Play the recording a sufficient number of times
⑤Break down longer recordings into ‘chunks’
⑥Let students discuss their answers together
⑦Play small bits of the recording again and again until it’s clear
⑧Give help if the students are really struggling
⑨Don’t let them lose heart!
Some students can find listening exercises quite stressful and feel as if they were in the ‘test’situation.Therefore, it’s crucial for the teacher to make them feel more confident by providing them with proper listening strategies such as recognition of context, lexis, grammar structures, register etc.by answering questions or taking notes and predicting what they expect to hear by guessing definitions or doing gap-fill exercises with proper key words and so on. Apart from the listening material allocated to the textbook, it’s necessary to select appropriate listening materials that contain sufficient new vocabulary for the students to listen to.
3.2.Reading texts provides opportunities to study new language vocabulary , for instance,through guesses or predictions according to the message of the context. Readers’guesses or predictations are based on the accumulative information and syntactic structure they have learnt as they have been reading.Students should be encouraged to utilize the context to decide what words mean and find the language sense to make intelligent guesses which can fit both the grammatical and semantic sense of what they are reading.By reading texts in contextual realms, readers can also learn word formation like conversion, derivation and compounding, synonyms, antonyms and relevant phrases as well as the grasp of the text and key words in it. Take the phrase “step up” as an example.When we pick it out of the text as a key phrase, we should not only tell our students what part of speech it is (transitive verb), what it means ( to increase in size or speed), how to use it in the sentence (e.g. We have to step up our teaching and learning before the exam.) and what its opposite is (slow down), but we also need to tell them that the word “step” can be used as intransitive verb and converted to a noun with several collocations such as “step out into the street/step forward/step aside/ step on one’s foot/take one step backward/take effective steps to do sth/sit on a door step/step by step/in step/ out of step/watch one’s step”etc.Besides, at this point, I think it’s easy for students to acquire its compound words, so we can show them some like “stepparent/ stepfather/stepmother/stepchild/stepbrother/stepsister/stepladder”etc.
4.Conclusion
To summarize, teaching EFL learners vocabulary efficiently in the non-native English situation is a knotty problem, but a successful EFL teacher can adopt selected vocabulary teaching approaches and implement applicable integrated learning activities in daily teaching to meet the requirements of vocabulary acquisition.Rome was not built in one day.There is no perfect method to enhance vocabulary learning in one or two days, nevertheless, students’vocabulary bank can be extended and enriched gradually in everyday teaching and learning so long as the teacher can arouse their positive factors and take appropriate measures to aid them in finding, learning, understanding and applying new words.With a rich vocabulary, the students will surely find EFL learning much easier and greater fun.
【References】
[1] Carter, R. and McCarthy. 1988. Vocabulary and Language Teaching (M). London: Longman.
[2] Notion. P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Rod Ellis. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition.Oxford University Press.
[4] Wilkins, D. A. 1972. Linguistics in Language Teaching (M). London: Edward Arnold.
[5] Zhang Zhengdong. 1999 Neo-methoduics in Foreign Language Teaching (M). Beijing: The Science Press.