Teaching vocabulary in Japanese universities : Some things our students need to know

概要

論文の詳細を見る
I get the impression from talking to my fellow teachers that most feel that developing a large vocabulary is important for their students. However, most teachers seem to feel that it is just too big an area to cover, especially given the constraint of 90 minute classes that only meet once a week. The general consensus among vocabulary acquisition researchers is that the best way to deal with vocabulary in the classroom is to concentrate on a small core of the most useful words of English and to teach strategies to help learners to learn the rest independently (Nation, 2001). Learning vocabulary is an individual activity, it is a suitable area for independent learning, and can be left to learners to do in their own time, freeing up class time to concentrate on strategies. This paper is intended to give classroom teachers a brief overview of vocabulary acquisition theory and suggest some practical ways that they can be applied to the classroom. Firstly, I will provide a short summary of the nature of vocabulary and of vocabulary acquisition. Then I will outline some methods for memorising useful words and then reinforcing them. Finally, I will suggest some ways that learners can use bottom-up and top-down processes to guess word meanings from context, and find the connect meaning in a dictionary.
松山大学の論文
2004-03-01