Vocabulary Building Skills

Developing vocabulary building skills provides a crucial foundation for learners to become competent language learners and users. A good sight vocabulary enables learners to recognize a bank of high-frequency words for reading and spelling. Learners need knowledge and strategies to decode and figure out the meaning of a large number of unknown words encountered in tasks and reading texts, and to memorize some for future use. Explicit teaching of vocabulary building skills is useful since it empowers learners to carry on learning on their own. With such skills, they can guess the meaning of unknown words and organize known words for use in new contexts.

Guessing and Inferring Meaning

Learners need to understand how to make guesses and inferences about new words. Explicit teaching of reading strategies provides learners with ways of working out meanings for themselves. In Reading Workshops as well as in other English lessons, teachers demonstrate how proficient readers make use of their semantic, syntactic and graphophonic knowledge to guess and infer the meaning of unknown words. The use of big books and thinking aloud is effective with learners at an early stage of learning, as the enlarged texts enable all learners to see how the teacher makes use of pictorial and contextual clues to work

teacher and the learners use real books. Learners are supported to make intelligent guesses when they encounter new words.

Organizing Vocabulary

Organizing vocabulary is useful as an aid to learn new words or memorize words in some cases. Learners need to learn how to sort and organize the words they have learnt and retrieve them for use when it is necessary.

Studying how words are formed is one way of organizing vocabulary for learning and teaching. The use of topic as a framework for vocabulary organization is very common too. Maps and grids are one way of presenting words according to meaning-relations. They can be used as visual presentation devices, as gap-filling activities for group work, as reference devices, or as a recording device in the vocabulary notebook.

They offer no guarantee that the words will be better remembered or more correctly used, but they do offer an alternative to the disorganized word list or the more conventional ways of arranging related words in lists of synonyms and antonyms.

Word Formation

Learners can increase their word power if they understand the three main ways in which words are built:

• affixation is the process of adding prefixes and suffixes to the base word and modifying the meaning and/or part of speech

• compounding is the formation of words with two or more separate words which can stand independently in other circumstances

• conversion is the process by which an item may be used in different parts of speech, yet does not change its form

Learners’ attention can be drawn to the method of word formation when they come across words in natural contexts. Common forms such as prefixes (un-, dis-,) and suffixes (-ly, -ful, -less) can be pointed out to learners. This helps them understand how some new words can be decoded and enables them to infer the meanings of words. It is feasible

to teach the more advanced learners some generative rules for compounding (foot+ball=football) and conversion (cook, a cook) as well as derivation (excite, exciting, excited, excitement).

Word Association

Learners should develop the awareness that words can be associated in sets. To enrich learners’ vocabulary and to help them remember words learnt, word association activities can be designed. In a word association activity, learners are given a word or a list of words (e.g. drink) and asked to respond by saying or writing another word or words that come to their minds (e.g. eat, water, bottle). Learners listen to or read each other’s words and try to understand how they are associated with one another. Such activities can be used to raise learners’ awareness of how words can be related to each other. Follow-up work such as collating or building phrases can be done to extend learners’ knowledge of the meanings of words. Homonyms (e.g. “catch” – catch a bus, a cold, a thief) are also interesting and useful in vocabulary learning. They can often be acquired through fun activities.

Vocabulary Books

Learners in primary schools are encouraged to take an active role in learning. They can be taught to keep a vocabulary book for recording words or simple expressions that they have learnt or come across in different contexts, including those outside the classroom. Learners may be encouraged to draw pictures, keep cut-outs or copy down examples to help them record the meanings of the words. They can be taught to organize the newly learnt items in meaningful groups, e.g. colours, furniture, feelings. The teacher is the most appropriate person to work out the possible group categories for the learners at the beginning of the term since he or she knows what words the learners will probably come across during the term. Learners are encouraged to add other word groups, writing down not just the meanings but also sample sentences in which the words are used. This vocabulary book is used for the learners’

Using and Making Dictionaries

Learners should learn to use a picture-dictionary towards the end of Key Stage 1. They have to be trained during lessons to make the best use of the dictionary for spelling and finding out the meanings of words.

Learners can also be encouraged to make their own dictionaries, with the words they have learnt in the textbooks, readers or any other contexts. It is useful to have a theme for each of the dictionaries they make, e.g. a dictionary of games, clothing.