39 ESL Vocabulary Activities: For Teenagers and Adults - Jackie Bolen, Jennifer Booker Smith 2015

The case for an integrated vocabulary program

Vocabulary in ESL can be a strange animal, partly because some students really love to study it in isolation. This is particularly true when they are only studying English to get an all­important high test score. Other reasons why vocabulary is easy is because it is straight memorization, it can be studied alone and assessment couldn’t be easier: you either know a word or you don’t. Given that an individual’s language fluency is often fraught with inconsistencies, knowing exactly where he or she stands can be quite reassuring.

However, no matter how fervently your students lobby for more vocabulary or, worse, ask about studying lists of words, there are pretty compelling reasons for integrating your vocabulary study as much as possible into your broader lessons. First, reading comprehension and vocabulary size have been connected in studies for decades. To state the obvious: you can’t understand the content of a text if you don’t know the words being used.

Reading comprehension relies on recognition of words, but even so, various studies have shown that between ten and forty exposures to a word are necessary for learning. The more your students read, the more words they will be see and the more quickly those words can become part of their working vocabulary.

Unfortunately, your students are pretty much guaranteed to feel sure they know a word (and will be sick of studying it), well before it has worked its way from short-term memory to working vocabulary. That’s where this book comes in: using games and activities can disguise the same old thing as something, if not new and exciting, then something that is at least passably engaging.

A good vocabulary program will create an awareness of words as a single aspect of fluency.

When planning a lesson, you should take into account using the terms in context, creating opportunities for multiple exposures to new terms using a mix of the four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing. Don’t forget to activate prior knowledge to integrate new terms into their existing vocabulary, all while making it fun!

Don’t get overwhelmed. Take a two-pronged approach: choose vocabulary based on usefulness to your students using the texts you have available and combine with the activities in this book to bring the fun. As always, recycle, recycle, recycle because learning a language is all about repetition.