VOCABULARY

Knowing vocabulary (words and phrases) is the most important aspect of language proficiency. Students need words more than they need grammar. We need vocabulary to decode messages and produce utterances. How much vocabulary? How is it acquired? Is it best picked up incidentally or through explicit teaching and practice?

Reading

Peta Baxter and colleagues (2021) delve into how we build our mental lexicon and what teaching practices this might suggest (Time: 25 minutes)

Norbert Schmitt has many of his journal articles available on his site NEW 23.5.23

This 1997 chapter by Nick Ellis considers the importance of multi-word units (collocations, chunks, stock phrases etc) (Time : 25 minutes)

A short 2022 article by Paul Nation about ‘learning how to learn’ vocabulary (Time: 5 minutes)

Nakata and Elgort (2020) explore the issue of spaced versus massed learning of vocabulary (Time: 25 minutes) NEW 14.3.23

Bower and Clark (1969) on the power of stories over traditional learning for vocabulary retention (Time: 5 minutes)

A short research summary about instructed second language vocabulary instruction from the University of York OASIS database, based on Schmitt (2008) (Time: 4 minutes).

A good overview of principles and practice by Norbert Schmitt (Time: 10 minutes)

A short article by Paul Nation entitled Teaching Vocabulary. This contains practical ideas based on research. (Time: 5 minutes)

A summary of research into vocabulary learning from Language Teacher Toolkit (Time: 5 minutes)

This 2020 metastudy, summarised by OASIS, found that learning words from lists or flashcards was more effective for later recall of those words than using gap-fill or writing exercises (Time: 5 minutes)

This book chapter from Teaching Vocabulary to English Language Learners (Graves et al, 2012) covers a lot of ground, with reference to learning English, but relevant to other languages also (Time: 35 minutes)

An article by Gonzalo Galián-López about automatising vocabulary knowledge, includes a few pedagogical techniques (Time: 5 minutes)

A Paul Nation article about the principles for using extensive reading to help learners acquire vocabulary (Time: 15 minutes)

Gianfranco Conti explains how the “mental lexicon” is thought to function, with implications for teachers (Time: 10 minutes)

A paper by Hilda van Zeeland and Norbert Schmitt about incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening (reading is also referred to) (Time: 30 minutes)

There are too many words in a second language to teach explicitly. Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter explain, with an example, the possible use of “narrow reading” to help learners acquire vocabulary incidentally (Time: 15 minutes)

A 2020 study by Christian Andrä and colleagues supporting the use of gestures and pictures for word retention (15 minutes)

This paper by Elena Suberviola and Raquel Mendez examines the mental lexicon and strategies for teaching vocabulary (Time 20 minutes)

An example of a piece of research by Ehsan Rassaei (2015) into ways to best acquire vocabulary. Summarised in the OASIS database (University of York, England) (Time: 2 minutes)

This study by Marie-José Bisson et al suggests an advantage for vocabulary retention when pictures are presented with text during incidental learning (Time: 15 minutes - the abstract summarises the key points)

This summarised study by Tatsuya Nakata and Yuichi Suzuki (2019) from the OASIS database examined whether it’s better to do massed vocabulary or spaced vocabulary learning. They also considered if it’s better to avoid presenting vocabulary in themed clusters (Time: 3 minutes)

Curated by Steve Smith @spsmith45 Images my own, from pixabay.com or Squarespace