Thoughts on Teaching Vocabulary

I was surprised by the many different ways vocabulary can be taught, and also perplexed by how I m ight be able to incorporate these ways into my daily lessons.

First off, I loved what Alicia showed from her group presentation on Prior Knowledge.  The use of pop culture icons and videos in order to elicit responses from the students to teach them various words was truly inspirational.  I was encouraged by the way she got students to think for themselves, while actually enjoying expanding on their vocabularies.

In seeing this, it made me think about what I currently do, which is unfortunately not the best strategy.  Due to the fact that we are given a vocabulary book of 15 chapters for our students to complete in one semester, in addition to the fact that we need to get through the assigned 7-8 texts, I have the students teach the vocabulary to themselves.  I think if we were able to pick and choose essential words, thus limiting the number of words required in a semester, I might be able to actually teach the vocabulary and spend time on it.  However, there simply is not time with the chapters given.  That being said, I do think the vocabulary text we use has some positive aspects.  For instance, it looks at synonyms, antonyms, and various other components while having the students practice each of the words.

The group plan that we came up with for vocabulary focused on a foreign language classroom, and used pictures of in fashion and out of fashion clothing styles to teach new Spanish clothing words.  By looking at pictures, students reviewed what they knew by stating things about the pictures in words they were familiar with.  On the second day, these same pictures were paired with paragraphs in Spanish describing them.  Therefore, now the students could use the pictures and context clues to help them learn what some new vocabulary words were.  With all of this review and introducing new words, the students then spent the rest of the class and next couple of classes creating their own fashion critiques.  They created and or found pictures, wrote descriptions, and presented the material to the class.  I liked this progression of steps, and thought it exemplified ideal vocabulary learning very well. 

These discussions and multiple ways of teaching vocabulary have inspired me to talk to my department head about why we assign so many words per semester, and if there is any way to limit the number so the students will learn the words for mastery, instead of just performance means.