Педагогические науки/5. Современные методы преподавания.

Kovalska N., Prisyazhnyuk N.

National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”

The Role of Vocabulary Learning in Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this article is to share with colleagues some ideas on our approach to teaching vocabulary in the ESL classroom. Any foreign language teacher has to be aware of the importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension because reading is one of the four fundamental skills. Moreover, all the four skills should be given its balanced weight.

The All-Ukrainian National Test for School-leavers as well our entry university tests have shown that there is room for improvement in teaching reading comprehension through vocabulary learning. To fulfill all the requirements listed in National Curriculum for Universities and to ensure that our students can do well in the tests is not an easy task and there should be changes in teaching vocabulary. We shift our focus from passive to active learning starting from the first day our students step into the university classroom. Also, teachers have to design some activities in order to help them.

Vocabulary learning can be and should be a part of every lesson as far as there is a direct link between knowledge of vocabulary and reading comprehension. It is dependent on the number of words a student has in his/her active and passive vocabulary.

Students’ success in reading relies on the automatic skill to recognize most of the words they read. Such a view was expressed by D.E. Eskey (1988) who characterizes this process as decoding one. He states that rapid and accurate decoding of language is important to any kind of reading and especially important to the second language reading. Good readers know the language. They can decode by a kind of automatic identification that requires no conscious cognitive effort.

So we can make a conclusion that we are stored in semantically related networks/fields moreover, working with advanced students we can say that their vocabularies are build up on semantic clusters, while low-proficiency students tend to recall words on the basis of acoustic clusters. That is why such word games as spider- grams, word-trees, word-forks help students spontaneously to come up with words related to the given core-word/topic-word.

Therefore it has to be underlined that automatic lexical access is essential in reading comprehension. Teachers have to go further and turn up not only with vocabulary lists to memorize but to be flexible and creative in preparing exercises and activities in order to facilitate automatic skills in recognizing and using vocabulary.

The main teachers’ task here is to ensure lexical repetition that in its turn leads to reinforcement of the vocabulary and its automatic recognition and usage.

Vocabulary enrichment is also based on the concepts and topics. Here teachers are responsible for helping students to arrange words according to the themes/topics/concepts. The benefits are significant as students are able to build up and expand word/vocabulary networks. But the main thing is automaticity in vocabulary recognition and vocabulary usage.

Vocabulary learning is usually incorporated into reading classes because we do not often have the opportunity to take intensive vocabulary-building ones. Interactive and communicative vocabulary activities during reading classes can lead to better word learning. Our students usually have a separate vocabulary class that meets two hours per week and use a vocabulary-building textbook. Students read self-selected and assigned reading passages and are engaged in activities that require them to use the vocabulary words they were learning while interacting with one another. Thus we propose to discuss ways to help students understand the complexities of vocabulary learning during vocabulary classes.

Three main assumptions are usually outlined:

1. Word learning is a complex task.

2. Some word learning occurs incidentally in such activities as reading.

3. Word knowledge involves a range of skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening).

The first assumption is important for teachers to acknowledge and for students to understand, because they are to identify all the major aspects of word learning: part of speech, pronunciation, meanings, register, connotations, spelling, grammar usage, context, and so forth.

The second assumption relates to the source of vocabulary items. In our reading classes, we do not always use separate vocabulary builders. Instead, the words on our vocabulary lists come from the context of the reading passages and discussions about them. Words that are new for all or most students make the vocabulary list.

The third assumption is that learning will be enhanced by giving students various types of activities with the words, they must learn about the words in a variety of interactive ways.

For teachers who would design the interactive vocabulary lesson we may propose a triangle of purposes to be covered at each level of proficiency:

Fig. 1 Triangle of purposes

“Word exposure” means clarifying the meaning of the word and illustrating appropriate usage.

“Word expansion” is using the appropriate word form in the context.

“Word expression” is a demonstration of word knowledge in either oral or written original expression using the target words.

The proportion of class time spent on activities and exercises for each purpose will vary according to the level of the students (beginning level, intermediate level and advanced level).

The most important is to spend time on vocabulary instead of dealing with it in passing, because for students to learn a word they need many opportunities to see and use it. Students often do not have a clear understanding of how to go about really learning vocabulary. Helping students understand how complex a task they are facing, giving them tools to learn vocabulary actively can force them to develop more systematic ways of learning vocabulary.

References:

1. Eskey, D.E. 1988. Holding in the bottom: An interactive approach to the language problems of second language readers. Interactive approaches to second language reading, ed. P.L. Carrell, J. Devine and D. E. Eskey. Camridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Boyd Zimmerman, C. 1997. Do reading and interactive vocabulary study make a difference? An empirical study. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 1, pp. 121-140