Discovering Techniques of Vocabulary Teaching in M

ABSTRACT:
Grammar provides the overall patterns, and vocabulary is the material to put in the patterns. Without grammar we can convey a little, but without vocabulary we can convey nothing. Vocabulary teaching is an indispensable part of English curriculum. But some traditional vocabulary-teaching methods seem to isolate the words from the context or break away from the scientific rules, that they can’t help students to develop a language competence in the long run but cause them to lose interest in English. Middle school English teachers should take great responsibility for this, since they are the premier ones who introduce students to the field of English. In this paper, I would provide eleven scientific vocabulary-teaching techniques. I think they could be valuable for middle school English teachers during their teaching process.

[KEY WORDS]
Technique vocabulary context competence

摘 要：
语法是语言的基本模型，词汇是语言的基本材料；如果没有语法 ，我们几乎不能明确地表达思想；而如果没有词汇我们则完全无法表达任何东西。词汇教学是英语教学中不可或缺的一部分。一些中学英语教师在讲授词汇时，把词汇从上下文中脱离出来，忽略了科学的学习规律；从长远来看，这种传统的词汇教学方法不仅不利于学生形成和提高英语语言能力，反而会导致他们对英语失去兴趣。作为中学生学习英语的启蒙老师，中学英语教师应对此承担一定的责任。在该论文中，我提供了11种较为科学的词汇教学方法，我希望在这11种方法对中学英语教师会有一定的参考价值。

[关键词] 教学方法 词汇 语境 语言能力

INTRODUCTION

In China, English teachers have sometimes tended to overlook the importance of the lexical system. This is especially obvious in the middle school. This phenomenon might have resulted from the fact that linguists have worked out a perfect equivalent Chinese vocabulary system to English vocabulary system, so that teaches and students can more easily deal with the vocabulary than with the grammar and sound of English which are quite different from the Chinese grammar and sound system.
Lexical items may also have appeared to be of secondary importance because they have sometimes been seen as that which is used to “flesh out” the structure or to exemplify parts of the sound system. However, without lexicon the major meaning-caring element in language is missing. Therefore, the acquisition of vocabulary is an integral part of English teaching.
On the other hand, there are teachers who have tended to overemphasize the learning of words in the lengthy vocabulary lists. The old English textbook (JUNIOR ENGLISH FOR CHINA, People’s Publisher of China, 1990) bears silent witness to such an approach.
The solution here is to seek scientific techniques of vocabulary teaching. Students should be exposed to the vocabulary needed to express the ideas they want to communicate. The vocabulary items should not be strictly limited, nor should vocabulary acquisition be stressed to the exclusion of other parts of the language system.
In the following part, I will discuss four topics: I. The importance of vocabulary teaching in middle schools. II. The drawbacks of several traditional vocabulary teaching methods. III. Three distinguishing features of English words and 11 scientific techniques for middle school teachers to deliver vocabulary teaching. IV. By adopting scientific vocabulary teaching techniques, teachers can help students improve their language acquisition ability and language competence.

I. The importance of vocabulary teaching in middle school:
Word is one of the three basic language units(sound, word , grammar). It is essential to communication. One of the famous linguists Wilkins once said that, “Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.”(Wilkins, ENGLISH STUDY, Foreign Language Study Institute, 1987) Little children learn to speak in isolated words and then in chains of nouns and verbs. A child who says “Mum bye-bye bike” is easily understood by English-speaking adult. Students who are immersed into a new linguistic settling tend to pick up vocabulary first, and then gradually develop a more accurate, structural framework in which to use these words. And they must continually be learning words as they learn structures and as they practice the sound system. Therefore, vocabulary teaching is an indispensable part of English lessons in middle school, and an important task for the teachers. Whether a middle school English teacher can follow scientific methods to teach vocabulary or not directly bring good or bad influence toward the students. If his methods are suitable for the students and beneficial for them in the long run, he could arouse their interest on English and help them to develop a solid foundation of language acquisition ability; whereas if he fails to do so, it might result in the students’ diffidence toward themselves and might cause them to disgust English.

II. The drawbacks of several traditional vocabulary teaching methods:
i. Teach words in isolation:
Middle school English teachers in china usually ask students to learn vocabulary lists in which words are isolated from the context. In one case, they let the students pick out all the new words in the text, list them on a paper, and consult the dictionary for the Chinese or English meanings; for example, “display” mean “show”, “arrive” means “reach”. In another case, they try to get the students to associate each word with an image or an object; for example, they hold up a picture of a car and say “This is a car.” Both these teaching techniques imply that learning vocabulary means learning individual word one at a time. These two methods may save time and be fast-effective. However, the relationships between words are as important as the meaning of the word in isolation: how “car” contrasts with “bus” and “truck”, and how it is related to “driver” and “engine” are as important as the word itself.
Neglecting the study of the relationships in English vocabulary system might result in students’ slowness in comprehension and inappropriateness in exploiting the English words. Being taught in these ways without a change, students might have difficulty in working out the meanings of some words, such as “time” in the following three sentences:
①She is near her time. (means “She would die soon.”)
②The umpire called time. (means “The umpire called for a stop.”)
③He is in the time of his life. (means “The days he is experiencing are very enjoyable.”)
And many Chinese middle school students often make such sentences as:
①The policies adopted by the Chinese Communist Party is beneficial.
②My spoken-English is very bad.
Students who make such sentences only know the meaning of each individual word, but they are poor in the proper use of “beneficial” (which should “be beneficial for” people) and “bad” (which should be changed into “poor”).
ii. Teach English words in one-to-one correspondence to Chinese words：
Many English teachers tend to teach English words in one-to-one correspondence to Chinese words; for example, English “glass” is “玻璃” in Chinese, English “cup” is “茶杯” in Chinese, and so on. This traditional translation teaching method which has been adopted in china for a long time is considered to be helpful. But in the long run the overuse of this method is harmful to the development of students’ language competence. Especially in the elementary stage, this method should be avoided as possible as it can be.
When students say that they know the meaning of an English word, they usually mean that they have found an equivalent word in Chinese language, but this equivalent word may be misleading. Let’s take the word “with” for example. In the sentence of “I have milk for breakfast”, the word “milk” in Chinese culture refers to hot milk, because Chinese people are used to drink milk hot; while the word “milk” in the American culture refers to cold milk, because Americans never drink boiled milk as we Chinese do. This example shows us that the same word “milk” has different social meanings in different cultures. In fact, many linguists believe that no word can be exactly translated into another language. Learning the vocabulary of a second language is not just to memorize the equivalent words of language one, but to learn the meaning relationship between “milk” and all other words in English within the context of cultural life.
iii. Treat all words equally：
Some English teachers treat all vocabulary equally. That is, they generally imply that students should be able to produce all vocabulary presented. But as is suggested by the linguists that words can be classified into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary according to the needs, language levels and professions of the learners. They point out that all speakers are able to recognize more words than they usually use on a productive level. Productive vocabulary is that utilized in everyday speech. Receptive vocabulary, on the other hand, although needed for comprehension, is not necessarily essential for production in speaking and writing. Teachers who do notice this fact ask students to concentrate equally on the acquisition of both receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. This method of vocabulary teaching adds much burden to students, and would cause them to become tired of vocabulary learning.
iv. Neglecting the cooperation of sense organs：
According to the experiments of linguists, an average English learner will better remember a new word and make it become an active one if he observes, speaks out, hears, and writes as well as recites it. But many teachers seem to be unaware of this rule that there are not a few students remember vocabulary by incorrect ways. On one hand, they treat the new words as if they are telephone numbers. They read the new words letter by letter without observing the pronunciation rules. For example, when they read the word “classroom”, they do it in this way: “c-l-a-s-s-r-o-o-m, classroom” instead of “cl[kl]-a[a:]-ss[s]-r[r]-oo[u:]-m[m], classroom”. This stupid method adds the difficulty in memorizing new words. On the other hand, since the teachers do not ask students to notice the key parts of the new words, they meet much difficulty when remembering them; for example, when a teacher teach the word “mouth” and “month”, if he ask the students to pay attention to the key parts of these two words, and to underline “ou” in mouth with [au] above it and underline “on” in month with /^n/ above it, students would easily remember these two words without a mistake with their attentions to key parts. But many middle school English teachers, especially those in the non-standard ones lack in the study of pedagogy. They do not see the advantage of concentrating on key parts, that they arbitrarily require students to write down [ ]as well as machine completely and perfectly with the false belief that the more you can write down, the better you remember it. Finally, most students do not cooperate the functions of eyes, ears, mouth and hands when memorizing new words. Generally, a new word would well turn into an active one in students’ minds after at least three stages: The first stage is known as forming an acoustic link. That means students are able to link the pronunciation to the word when they hear it in a conversation. The second stage is probably forming a usual link. That is to say, when students come across this word in reading materials, they can understand it. The third stage is more difficult to achieve but very important. It is to form mental image of the word. That means they can imitate, choose and give the reign to it freely and accurately in speaking and writing as if it is their native word. Most students can only achieve the first and second stages but never reach the third stage partly due to their poor cooperation of the sense organs.
v. Fail to follow the memory rule：
There are two types of memory processes---short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory means that the storation of input only stay in your memory temporarily; while the long-term memory means the storation of input can stay in your memory for more than 10 days, ever for the whole life. In fact, our memory process is a recycling process. According to the survey of linguists, the more times the word is used, the better you remember it. But many teachers partially emphasize the function of short-term memory. They seem to care more about the amount of vocabulary input than those actually stay in students’ memory.
Being forced to remember a large amount of vocabulary in this way, students are treated as if they were a funned. In appearance they take in thousands of new words, but in effect only a few which are frequently used really stay in their store and can be exploited. It is not amazing that a senior middle school student who is required to master 3000 words has misused or made mistakes in 60 words when asked to write down a passage of 100 words because of his poor vocabulary storation. Many of teachers put all the blame to the students’ laziness. They explain for themselves that those students are too lazy to enlarge their size of vocabulary.
There might be some teachers seeing the long-term memory rule. However, they never succeed in applying the memory rule in classroom. They claim that the time of each period of class is limited that they can’t spend so much time on the repetition of vocabulary teaching. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think their excuses make any sense. What matters is their ignorance of scientific teaching techniques and irresponsibility for the development of students.
vi. Harmful method of punishment：
I think the worst method of vocabulary teaching is the adoption of harmful method of punishment---copying new words for 100 even 1000 times. There are still some teachers in favor of the copy method. These teachers force their poor students to copy many times of new words which they make mistakes in. This awkward punishment often cause students to fear and worry about English lessons. It is true that most of the middle school students are interested in English at first, because it is a new subject that is full of novelty and interest. And they like their English teacher, too. But with the misuse of teaching methods by teachers, they might begin to feel discouraged in English learning and even disgust their English teacher.
The six traditional methods of vocabulary teaching which I have mentioned are frequently used by many middle school English teachers, especially those working in common middle schools in rural areas where teacher-dominant classes are typical. Being taught in these ways, although students take painful efforts in vocabulary learning, they achieve little. As a result, they can’t find much pleasure in English and become more and more lazy in study. Not only are their English ability not improved, but they are discouraged in English learning.
It is particularly important and necessary to try to make vocabulary teaching interesting and affective for the students. Their study will become a lot more effective if the students come to the classroom willingly instead of being forced to. That is to say, how can teachers succeed in arousing the students’ interest in English and making the students more active and aggressive in thinking by vocabulary teaching? To do so we should discard the drawbacks of traditional vocabulary teaching methods, reserve their advantages and combine them with scientific vocabulary teaching theories. But how?

III. Three distinguishing features of English vocabulary and 11 scientific techniques to teach them:
3.1. The there distinguishing features of English vocabulary:
Before studying the better techniques in vocabulary teaching, we had better know about the characteristics of English words. English words are quite different from Chinese characters, the former one is a spelling system while the later is a stroke system. English words have three distinguishing features:
i. Firstly, the pronunciation of each word is corresponded to its spelling, for example, look at the following two lists of words:
①old, cold, hold, whole, so [ ]
②smart, artist, mark, garden [a: ]
In list① the letter “o” in the five words are all pronounced as [ ]; and in list② the letter combination “ar” in the four words are pronounced as [a: ]. If students have noticed this relationship between English pronunciation and spelling, they would be easier in pronouncing and memorizing new words.
But with a long history of development and variation, and with the influence by other languages, the spelling of English words don’t always observe this rule; for example, the letter “u” is pronounced differently in the following words:
Uncle[ ], until[ ], full[ ], music[ ], truth[ ]
In another case, with the influence of American accent, the word “clerk [ ]” is also pronounced as [ ].
ii. Another feature of English words is that they frequently have more than one meaning. The word “book”, for example, obviously refers to something you use to read from (a written work in the form of ) a set of printed pages fastened together inside a cover, as a thing to be read. According to one learner’s dictionary. But the same dictionary then goes on to list eight more meanings of “book” as a noun, two meanings of “book” as a verb and three meanings where “book” preposition makes phrasal verbs. So we will have to say that the word “book” sometimes means the kind of thing you read from, but it can also mean a number of other things.
When we come across a word, then, and try to decipher its meaning we will have to look at the context in which it is used. If we see a woman in a theatre arguing at the ticket office saying, “But I booked my rickets three weeks ago.” we will obviously understand a meaning of the verb “book” which is different from a policeman (accompanied by an unhappy-looking man at a police station) saying to his colleague “we booked him for speeding.” In other words, students need to understand the importance of meaning in context.
iii. The third characteristic is that English words can change their shape and their grammatical values, too. Students need to know facts about word formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical contexts. Thus the verb “run” has the participles “running” and “ran”, the present participle “running” can be used as an adjective and “run” can also be a none. There is a clear relationship between the words “death”, “dead”, “dying” and “die”.
Students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. How can we make the words potent and expensive opposite in meaning? Why do we preface one with in- and the other with im-?
Knowing the three distinguishing characteristics of English vocabulary will help teachers to deliver vocabulary teaching.
3.2. Eleven scientific techniques to teach English vocabulary:
After careful observation of the middle school English classroom and the study of pedagogy in the aspect of English teaching, as well as with my personal experience of English learning, I would like to suggest 11 techniques of vocabulary- teaching which I consider would be valuable for both teachers and students in middle schools:
i. Using visuals:
1). Labels: For a beginning class the teacher can prepare labels for objects in the classroom; for example, in the classroom the door might have a label reading “CLASS TWO”; above the chalkboard might be a sign saying “STUDY HARD”.
2). Magazine pictures: The teacher cuts out magazine pictures that illustrate words in a dialogue or basic sentences. These are placed on the chalkboard or on a magnetic board with magnets. The teacher points to the objects and gives their foreign language equivalents: This is a restaurant.
3). Props: If the lesson is about foods, the teacher could bring to class a basket of plastic fruit.
Teacher: what is this?
Student: It’s a tomato; it’s a pear; it’s an orange.
In teaching about the house, a doll house with furniture can be used to teach the names of rooms, floors, parts of the house, and articles of furniture.
4). Classroom objects: The calendar may be used to teach “today”, “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, as well as “last week”, “next week”, “next month”, “in two weeks”, and so on.
5). Slides: Slides furnish an excellent medium for conveying the connotative cultural meaning of ordinary words in a foreign language.
For example, the word “house”, to American students, denotes an American type of house; while to Chinese students, it denotes a Chinese-style house. With the facility of slides, teacher can show students what American-style houses look like.
Slides of daily contemporary scenes of foreign countries can frequently be used in vocabulary teaching. Items of clothing might be taught first, with the help of drawings or pictures. A slide of several people going shopping provides an opportunity for the students to talk about what the people are wearing. In this way, foreign words slowly absorb the connotations they have in their own culture.
ii. Using gestures
Gestures may be used to convey the meanings of some words. Certain descriptive adjectives, such as “tall”, “thin”, “fat”, “happy”, and “dumb”, can lend themselves to gestures.
Prepositions of place can also be effectively taught by movements; for example:
Teacher: The book is on the table. The pencil is on the book. The book is under the pencil. Now the pencil is behind the book.
Action verbs can be acted out: The teacher is eating. The teacher is drinking. The teacher is reading.
Teacher: What is the teacher doing?
Students: The teacher is eating.
iii. Drawings
Drawings illustrating vocabulary may be hung around the classroom. These