Teaching Vocabulary

Teaching Vocabulary

Now that we are three weeks into the school year, some patterns have started to emerge.  One is that I have become the vocabulary maven.  The arrangement here is that my counterparts and I co-plan and co-teach classes.  This means that we need to agree on what we’ll do, how we’ll do it and who does what part, including who prepares material.  It’s not hard to understand that it takes some time to co-plan a good lesson, more than the counterparts are used to spending, or frankly than I would spend if I were teaching by myself.  Collaboration is time consuming.

 I have to be especially careful about dividing tasks more or less equally. After we plan a class I always ask who will do what part.  And invariably the answer is that I get the vocabulary part. This is because the teachers here have “pena” or embarrassment or shame at their pronunciation of English words.  At first I thought that this was a manifestation of a kind of vanity, but it’s not.  The truth is that English is a bitch to pronounce.  I’m really aware of this when I teach “straight’ or ‘’prefer”.  How is one to know by looking at them how to say those words?  In the university the would-be English teachers are taught phonetic symbols to help them with pronunciation.  I don’t need anything of the kind learning Spanish where each letter has its sound with a few exceptions.

Anyway, the challenge for me is how to find an interesting way to teach vocab.  A beginning principle is to teach without using Spanish vocab if you can.  And I try.  I make pictures (diagrammatic), I use actions, I use “realia” (real stuff).  I used photos from magazines my friend Pat and her mother cut out and sent to me. With concrete nouns it’s easy.  Abstractions like “hospitality” are hard, but luckily there a lot of cognates (like”hospitalidad”) that give the kids the meaning if they think about it and they do.  They often are interested to know.  Despite my efforts to make kids think a little re vocab, one of my counterparts insists on giving translations.  In one class I had pictures of a dozen barnyard animals.  After the students did their own identifying of the Spanish names of the animals, my counterpart put up a list of animals in Spanish and English.  When I ask her why, she says that the kids will just ask her for the translation if she doesn’t.  Maybe she’d right, but I think they learn the name better if they sort of have to figure it out.  But the culture of copying lists of vocab without thinking much continues.

My favorite technique so far, the one that has worked best, is to present some reading, like a dialog or short narrative, and to pull the vocabulary from the reading.  The trick is to get a reading that 1) the students care about and 2) that is on the cusp of being too hard, but is not too hard if they can learn a few words.

  For example, from the Peace Corps TEFL manual, I found a letter written from a cousin in Miami to a cousin he only just learned about in Nicaragua.  The letter recounts that the Miami cousin’s father had a fight with his Nica brother and they hadn’t spoken in years.  When the Miami cousin found out about his Nica relative he wrote asking the Nica to come to Miami to meet the family, all expenses paid.  This letter had my class rapt.  The hooks were the Nica story, the Miami connection which many Nica families have, and the word “fight” which they remembered from last year.  They were motivated to understand that story. The story was short enough – about 10 good-sized sentences--and we went though it sentence by sentence, the students identifying the words they didn’t know and me explaining meaning.  I used more Spanish than I like because there were a lot of adverbs (no cognates, no pix) but by the end the class was able—and interested –to answer questions about the meaning of the story.  I was jubilant because of the student motivation.  There is not much to motivate students to learn English, little to none tourist activity, no business to speak of where dual languages would be an employment asset. All we got here is learning for learning’s sake and that means, has to mean, excellent instruction.

Anyway, at first I didn’t like being the vocabulary maven, but now I do.  I figure I’m teaching the counterparts as they watch me get at vocab in various ways. But I think in a short time the counterparts and I should share the job so that they get past their pena and get the idea of teaching vocab without lists of translated words.

Can this possibly be interesting to anyone who isn’t doing it? I have to say that there isn’t an original idea here—ESL teachers have been doing this stuff for years.  I always taught literature and thought this language teaching dull, but it’s not and the real thrill is watching the students trying, their minds working.  What a kick.

Erata: In my last post I used the term ropas americanas.  Bad Spanish.  Ropa means clothing.  It’s already plural.  So the phrase is ropa americana.