TEACHING OF ENGLISH WORDS

Teaching of English Words

Teaching of English Words

The latter part of the twentieth century and the first few years of this century have witnessed an explosion of knowledge; it is estimated that human knowledge has been doubling every ten years. Accompanying that explosion are new words invented to label new discoveries and concepts. The most up-to-date unabridged dictionary, Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed.), which contains 2,500 pages and more than 315,000 entries, is a silent tribute to the richness of our language. For its latest printing, the editors added hundreds of new words, providing clear evidence that the English language is alive and thriving. Even the largest dictionaries, however, contain only a small proportion of the words in the language, with many technical terms never making it into a general lexicon. When these terms are included in the count, the English language has approximately 5 million words. (Baumann, 2004)

This rich store of words allows us to transmit knowledge with precision and imagination. The abundance of new words also poses a challenge to students, who, to be fully literate, must acquire a larger vocabulary than has any preceding generation. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that there are 110,000 words in printed school English when homographs and important people's names are included. Many of these words are relatively rare, however; approximately half would occur only once in a billion words of running text. Even so, students have a good chance of encountering some 55,000 words in their school-related reading.

Seven Principles of Developing Vocabulary

Developing vocabulary is not simply a matter of listing ten or twenty words and their definitions on the board each Monday morning and administering a vocabulary quiz every Friday. In a sense, it is a part of living. Children learn their initial 5,000 to 6,000 words by interacting with parents and peers, gradually learning labels for the people, objects, and ideas in their environment. As children grow and have additional experiences, their vocabularies continue to develop. They learn pitcher, batter, shortstop, and home run by playing or watching softball or baseball. They learn gear shift, brake cable, kick stand, and reflector when they begin riding a bicycle. They learn magnify, microscope, slide, stage, stage clips, high-power objective, low-power objective, coarse, and fine adjustment as they use a microscope in science. (Coady, 2007)

1. Building Experiential Background

The first and most effective step that a teacher can take to build vocabulary is to provide students with a variety of rich experiences. These experiences might include trips to a weather station, a factory, a planetarium, a museum, or an office. Working on projects, conducting experiments, handling artifacts, and other hands-on activities also build a background of experience.Not all activities can be direct. Viewing computer simulations and demonstrations, films, videotapes, filmstrips, and special TV shows helps build experience, as do discussing, listening, and reading. The key is to make the activity as concrete as possible.

Talking Over Experiences

Although experiences form the foundation of vocabulary, they are not ...