The Importance of Teaching and Learning Vocabulary English Language

Hello everyone! 

For our final project, me and my partner chose vocabulary as the skill we wanted to teach, so all our project revolves around that. That’s why I chose this topic for today’s blog, as I wanted to show why did we decided on this topic specifically and why is it so important.

Vocabulary represents one of most important skills necessary for teaching and learning a foreign language. It is the basis for the development of all the other skills: reading comprehension, listening comprehension, speaking, writing, spelling and pronunciation. Vocabulary is the main tool for the students in their attempt to use English effectively. When confronted with a native English speaker, when watching a movie without subtitle or when listening to a favorite English song, when reading a text or when writing a letter to a friend, students will always need to operate with words. In what follows, the focus of this introductory chapter will be on why vocabulary is important, on what makes words difficult, on the main reasons for which students often forget the words they learn, and, on some techniques, which help them remember the vocabulary.

Why is Vocabulary Important?

People need to use words in order to express themselves in any language. Most learners, too, acknowledge the importance of vocabulary acquisition. In my experience as a student and future teacher, I noticed the fact that students usually find it difficult to speak English fluently. They usually consider speaking and writing activities exhausting because they keep on using the same expressions and words and very soon their conversation is abruptly interrupted due to missing words. And the main reason for such communication problems is the lack of vocabulary. Other students are confronted with the problem of forgetting the words immediately after the teacher has elicited their meaning or after they have looked them in the dictionary, and this also a cause of the lack of vocabulary. The more words students learn, the easier they memorize them.

The teacher has an essential role in helping students to improve their vocabulary. Unfortunately, vocabulary teaching has not been enough responsive to such problems, and teachers have not recognized the tremendous importance of helping their students to develop an extensive vocabulary. If we look back in the past, we discover that for a long time, English used teaching approaches such as Direct Method and Audiolingualism which emphasized the primary importance of teaching grammatical structures. Since the accent was on grammar, few words were introduced in such courses and most often, they were limited and related to the grammar structures taught.
Nowadays, there is more freedom in choosing the methods to be used during English classes. The English syllabus is organized around both vocabulary and grammar structures. Since there is a certain number of classes allotted for each item in the syllabus, teachers usually have the necessary time to insist on teaching and practicing vocabulary. Vocabulary is no longer treated as an add-on and teachers become more aware of the importance of vocabulary and attention is paid to the grammar of words, to collocations and to word frequency.

Techniques for Memorizing Vocabulary

In order to be able to have a rich vocabulary, not only do students need to learn as many words as possible, but they also need to remember them because, in fact, learning is remembering. Unlike grammar learning, which is based on a system of rules, vocabulary knowledge implies accumulating individual items. It is a learning process that relies primarily on memory.

Learners are different in terms of how easily they memorize vocabulary. The fact that students forget vocabulary from one lesson to another, demonstrates the fact that it is not enough to have a long-term memory. It implies students’ efforts and teachers’ witty techniques when learning and teaching vocabulary. The great challenge for language learners and teachers is to transform the material from quickly forgotten to the never forgotten.

It has been designed several techniques meant to help learners efficiently memorize words and to help teachers make the process of learning easier for their students. Repetition is an important technique in learning vocabulary. In order for the words to be kept as long as possible in the memory, it is necessary that they be repeated at frequent periods of time. However, repetition alone will not be effective. It must be accompanied by the understanding of the meaning of those particular words and by correlation with other similar already learnt words.

Another important technique is using the newly learn words. In this case, the teachers’ role is also valuable. In the classroom, teachers should insist on practicing the news vocabulary by encouraging students to speak as much as possible and by designing vocabulary-centered activities and games. At home, students need to be motivated to individually keep on using the new words until they are stored in the long-term memory.
Practicing vocabulary is strongly connected to applying vocabulary to students’ real-life events.

Another witty technique to be taken into consideration when both learning and teaching vocabulary is imaging. Students will easily learn new words if they are taught to associate them with their picture. Thus, it is extremely important for the students to visualize the words they must learn. This will help the learning process and will keep the words in the long-term memory.

In conclusion, vocabulary is the most required skill when learning a foreign language. It is on vocabulary that all the other skills, reading, writing, speaking, and listening are based and developed. This writing has shown why it is important to learn new words. And finally, it has suggested methods and techniques that help to understand the new vocabulary by using the working memory and to transfer it in the long-term memory. And for sure some of those methods, if not all will be used in the project, as they have shown to be more than successful.

Thank you all for reading my posts!

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