(gentle music)
- When it comes to teaching vocabulary
in your English classroom,
you'll find that you have lots of different opportunities
and lots of different methods for doing so.
One of the most common opportunities for teaching vocabulary
is pre-teaching before giving a text or a listening.
So it's very common for you to choose
a handful of words from that text
that'll help them understand the text,
that'll be new words for them,
and pre-teach them
before exposing the learners to that text.
There's a lotta different ways to teach that vocabulary
and I'm someone who believes in teaching vocabulary
and grammar inductively.
And what that means is focusing on the meaning
before focusing on the form.
So, let's look at the general best practices
for teaching vocabulary inductively.
When attempting to pre-teach vocabulary inductively,
there are six basic steps that you'll need to follow.
So let's look at an example of me teaching this way
in front of a classroom.
For this example, I'm using a text that I wrote.
It's a funny story, a true story, about me and my wife.
This would be for a pre-intermediate
or low-intermediate class,
a class that's been practicing the past simple,
and this is reading input for a writing lesson.
The first step is to choose the words,
so you'll be looking at the text you're going to use
as input in your presentation stage.
You'll choose a handful of lexical items,
which can be words or groupings of words
that you wanna focus on that you wanna pre-teach,
and these would be things
that would either be new for the learners,
the learners need to practice and hopefully
that will help them with their comprehension of the text.
Second step is to take an individual word or lexical item
and try to elicit it, so you're gonna use miming,
images, realia, or maybe try to discuss the meaning
to see if the learners can kinda guess the word
that you're trying to teach,
and you can kind of also give them hints
about the sound of the first letter,
start to say the word.
Does anyone know what this is?
Have you seen this before?
Uh huh, it's the Washington
M, Mon, Monument.
All right, so I have another word.
Oh, oh!
What did I just do?
Yeah, I saw it, but I,
so I saw it, I,
I didn't see it and then I saw it.
I nuh, starts with an N,
I nuh, note,
notice, notice.
I noticed the pencil.
Yeah, to notice something.
It means to see something
or you can hear it or you can smell it.
You did not do that before and now you do.
You notice it.
One more word.
This, what is this?
Does anyone know?
Starts with a P, puh, puh.
My pants, these are my pants and this is a pah,
pah, pocket.
The third step will be,
once they've guessed the word
or you've had to tell them the word
to repeat that word many times
and to have the students repeat them.
You can do that chorally, whole class repetition
and then individually.
Call on them to repeat the word.
You're saying it nice and loud, repeating it many times.
So this is an example of a monument, all right.
Can you repeat after me?
Monument.
Good, good.
Monument.
Uh huh, monument.
Monument.
Good, good.
I noticed it.
Okay, repeat after me.
Notice.
Pocket.
Good, pocket.
Pocket.
The fourth step should prepare in your mind or written
some concept check questions
and these are words, these are questions
that contain the target word.
They're simple questions, usually yes or no.
They can be open, but they're designed
to get the learners to hear the word in context many times
and to process the meaning over and over again.
Do you know other monuments in the United States?
Yeah, Mount Rushmore, good.
Mount Rushmore is a monument, all right.
Are there monuments in your hometown?
Do you notice anything different about me today?
Did anyone notice?
Yeah, yeah, I shaved.
I shaved, I had more hair on my face yesterday.
Thank you for noticing that.
Do you notice anything different about the room today?
When you came in, did you notice?
Yeah, we moved some of the chairs.
Good, you noticed that.
I noticed that Ahmed is sitting in a different place.
He normally sits back in the back
and now he's over here.
I noticed that when I came in the room.
Does anyone have a shirt with a pocket?
Yeah, okay.
I see you have a pocket and you have a pocket, yeah.
Step five would be after that
you've said the word, you've elicited it,
you've repeated it many times,
you've done the concept check questions,
go ahead and write it on the board clearly.
And sometimes I like to use different colors
for different parts of speech.
A monument.
And we have "a" because it's countable,
one monument, two monuments, yeah?
Good.
All right, so that's a verb,
so I'm gonna write it in red.
To notice and I'm gonna put "something"
because we usually notice something.
We'll put it right here.
A pocket.
Step six, repeat these steps
for all of the words on your list.
You'll do these one at a time
and you'll go through the list.
And so that is one method
of teaching vocabulary inductively.
I encourage you to use that to pre-teach vocabulary
for your presentation stage input.
You'll find when you use it in the classroom
it's very dynamic, it's very engaging for the learners.
You'll also find that it's very easy to work in all five
of Freeman and Freeman's facets of understanding,
the phonological, the morphological,
the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic.
So I encourage you to experiment with this method
when pre-teaching vocabulary in your language classroom.