Carol: What do teachers need to know about
vocabulary? Prof. Ranalli: One really useful distinction
for teachers to keep in mind is that between incidental vocabulary learning and intentional
vocabulary learning. Incidental would be where our students pick
up new words without meaning to through reading or listening. Research suggests that a great deal of second
language vocabulary can be learned this way. That’s why we need to be doing things like
encouraging our learners to do a lot of reading
outside of class—reading for pleasure, extensive
reading--and also listening to English language radio programs or podcasts or English pop
songs or English language movies or TV shows that provide some form of comprehension support
in terms of captions or subtitles or something like that. These aids help them make connections between
form and meaning and acquire new words incidentally. But as I said, we can’t just rely on incidental
learning. Our students also need to be learning words
intentio
nally, which means making a deliberate effort to identify words that’ll be useful
to them and also doing things that’ll help those words stick in their memories so that
they’re available to be used later. Intentional learning can involve things like,
at the very beginning stages, studying vocabulary lists, which are just high-frequency words
in the target language listed next to their equivalents in the student’s first language. This is a perfectly acceptable way of trying
to learn vocabulary in
the beginning stages—just trying to memorize these lists. Later in their careers, students can use vocabulary
notebooks or word cards or flashcards, either paper-based or digital, and nowadays some
of these digital flashcard systems even feature spaced-repetition algorithms that help you
focus on just those words that you need more practice with. So, incidental learning and intentional learning—that’s
an important distinction. One more important word that teachers want
to remember is incrementa
l. Vocabulary is learned incrementally. We have to remember that it doesn’t all
happen at once. You don’t learn all you need to know about
a word in a single meeting with that word. We learn what we need to know through repeated
exposures to words in different contexts of use such that our knowledge builds up over
time. And so it’s important to find opportunities
in our teaching to give students those repeated exposures, and in doing so, to draw students’
attention back to those words and to try
and find new things about them that we can point
out to our students. Carol. Professor Ranalli said that there are two
ways of learning vocabulary: incidental vocabulary learning and intentional vocabulary learning. Incidental vocabulary learning occurs when
students are working together in conversation or reading, and their focus is on what they
are talking about or what they’re reading about. Students may be picking up vocabulary without
realizing it. In contrast, students can engage in inten
tional
vocabulary learning, meaning that they are focusing on the words. They are using an app to practice their vocabulary
knowledge or a corpus to expand their knowledge of word use. Professor Ranalli pointed out that both of
these processes are very important for students to learn enough vocabulary. Professor Ranalli has already provided some
useful concepts about vocabulary. I asked him specifically for some ideas about
how to teach vocabulary and here’s what he said.
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