A principled approach to teaching vocabulary
By Michael Rabbidge
The teaching of vocabulary is often seen as an ancillary to receptive or productive language skills in the second language classroom. This can especially be seen in the design of textbook materials which place vocabulary-based activities as part of a ‘warm up’ to the main learning of a given unit.
This may lead teachers to downplay the importance of having a generally coherent plan when it comes to teaching vocabulary. However, in recent times, there has been a more concerted effort to create a more principled approach to teaching vocabulary that can guide teachers in making better decisions regarding how to organize and approach vocabulary in their lessons and curriculum.
One such set of principles founded on research into what constitutes effective teaching and learning of vocabulary in a second language is that created by Joe Barcroft, Professor of Spanish and Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Washington University.
Professor Barcroft’s principles are grounded in the input-based incremental (IBI) approach to effective vocabulary instruction, which emphasizes
1. presenting vocabulary regularly with significant and adequate comprehensible input
2. understanding the limited cognitive processing abilities of learners
3. creating tasks that target specific processing and learning abilities of learners
4. incrementally developing the vocabulary knowledge of learners over time
These principles call on teachers to develop and implement vocabulary acquisition plans that present new words frequently and repeatedly in the input. They also promote the use of both intentional and incidental vocabulary learning opportunities as either form of teaching is often insufficient by itself.
Aligning itself to more communicative language teaching principles it emphasizes the primacy of meaning-bearing input that challenges learners and engage with language rather than just being presented with examples of language use.
Helping students to notice the target vocabulary is also key, so enhancing the manner in which it is presented via variations in voice as well as text is called for.
Taking care not to force too much output early in the acquisition process gives the learners more time to effectively process what they are learning before being asked to produce the target language. This means ensuring that activity types are not overly demanding early on but also that activities do ask more of learners as they progress with their knowledge of the targeted vocabulary.
Such guiding sets of principles can be used to improve a teacher’s understanding of how to effectively use vocabulary activities in textbooks, as principles are not bound by the page, but are adaptable to any given context. For more on Barcroft’s principles I suggest reading his module from the Routledge e-series, as found in the citation below.
Barcroft, Joe. (2015). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Routledge