Effective Approaches to Vocabulary Teaching for College Students

1. Effective Approaches to Vocabulary Teaching for College Students Tang Chongwen Hebei University

2. I. Introduction • Learning a foreign language is based on the master of its vocabulary. Vocabulary is one of the “bottlenecks” in learning of English. • Both teachers and students need to pay much attention to the learning of English vocabulary.

3. The importance of learning vocabulary in language learning • Vocabulary is a key element in language learning because a widely productive vocabulary is essential in enhancing the five language skills. • Without a large English vocabulary, no one can claim a good command of the language. • In China, how to help students develop skills to enlarge their vocabulary is always a great issue that English teachers are faced with.

4. II. Strategies for the improvement of teaching and learning vocabulary • 1) Extensive reading and contextual guesswork: Students need to acquire new words and learn new meaning of many of the words they have already known. There are many skills for guessing words in context that can be taught to learners. Student should be encourages to make use of their previous knowledge to guess the meaning of new words.

5. 2) Word unit analysis: • The essence of the model is to help students to enlarge their existing basic vocabulary. This model is established on the assumption that students are already familiar with basic words. On the basic of basic words, teachers can help students to realize other word forms and increase the number of meanings. • As students are quite familiar with “over”, “work” and “sleep”, they can easily understand and remember the peripheral word forms.

6. 3) Communicative activities and small-group work When students are asked to manipulate words, relate them to other words according to their own experience, and then to justify their choices, these word associations are reinforced. Many students think group-work is helpful for studying and practicing vocabulary, which is a widespread impression that vocabulary study is an activity best achieves individually. By doing so, students can learn from each other and will learn many useful English words.

7. 4) The use dictionary • Students naturally turn first to dictionaries which define English words in their mother tongue. • Some students like to use small English-Chinese dictionaries and electronic dictionaries , which do little more than give one word equivalents, thus is very inadequate and misleading in their advanced English study. • The best dictionaries for college students are learner’s dictionaries, such as the Oxford Students’ dictionary of American English and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

8. 5) Developing independent learning ability • Teachers can never give students a command of all the words they will need. Each student must be responsible for much of his own learning. • When students have been taught how to deal intelligently with words they need, they can continue to learn vocabulary for the rest of their lives. • Helping students develop a personal plan of vocabulary acquisition is a ideal way since most vocabulary learning will take place outside of the classroom

9. 6) Applying CAI and internet to expand vocabulary • With the development of modern science and technology, CAI and internet are popular in foreign language teaching and learning

10. III. Cautions to be taken in teaching and learning vocabulary • Tell the students to pay attention to the connotations of some English words. • Direct students not to overlook the collocation of some English words . • Connotation and collocation are two important aspects in vocabulary for Chinese students.

11. Thanks