One of the concerns about vocabulary learning is that undue focus is put on the meaning and spelling of words. Students’ attention is seldom drawn to the different dimensions which students should master in vocabulary learning. Below are some of the dimensions that warrant attention:

• pronunciation, including knowledge of letter-sound relationships, rhyme and alliteration (see LT 1.17, LT 1.18, LT 1.19, GA 6, GA 7, GA 13, GA 17)
• word families, e.g. nouns, adjectives, verbs (see LT 1.4, GA 3)
• word formation, e.g. compounding, blending, affixation, derivation (see LT 3.6, LT 3.7, GA 1)
• polysemy, e.g. ‘hot’ meaning ‘spicy’ and ‘at a very high temperature’ (see LT 1.4)
• synonymy and antonymy, e.g. ‘large’ is a synonym of ‘big’ but an antonym of ‘small’ (see LT 2.7, LT 3.9, GA 4, GA 11)
• hyponymy, e.g. fruits – apples, oranges, bananas … (see LT 1.6, GA 8, GA 12, GA 17)
• lexical field, e.g. sports – ‘baseball’, ‘football’, ‘pitch’, ‘court’ (see LT 2.10, GA 2, GA 6, GA 7, GA 10, GA 13, GA 15, GA 17, GA 18)
• style and register, e.g. formal or informal vocabulary, vocabulary specific to particular contexts (see LT 2.3, LT 2.7, LT 2.16, LT 2.17, LT 3.6)
• connotation, e.g. ‘slender’ carrying a positive connotation and ‘skinny’ a negative one (see GA 5)
• word combination, e.g. multi-word units, which include formulaic expressions and idioms (see LT 1.15, LT 3.3, GA 14); collocations, such as ‘go’ + ‘shopping’, ‘make’ + ‘bed’ (see GA 9)

For descriptions of the dimensions of L2 vocabulary knowledge, please see McNeill 1994 or Nation 2001.

Merely mentioning word meanings and having dictations based on the target words do not guarantee that students can use the target words correctly. Vocabulary learning involves not only the study of individual words but also word associations and how they are used in different contexts.

Knowing a word and understanding how to use it appropriately is a continuous process. If vocabulary learning and teaching is integrated into regular lessons and students’ attention is drawn to the different word dimensions in varied contexts, they can assimilate the new knowledge over time.

There are two major reasons why students forget words easily: insufficient recycling and interference. Research has shown that a learner needs to meet a new word between six and twenty times for the word to be remembered (Rott 1999; Zahar, Cobb & Spada 2001). For better retention of words, students need multiple exposures to the target words, preferably over a spaced period of time and in different contexts. As regards interference, students tend to forget previously learnt words when they have to learn a large number of words within a short time. To avoid overloading students, a careful choice of target vocabulary items is needed.

Recycling of words does not mean re-teaching the target words in the same way, nor does it necessarily take up a lot of lesson time. The following are some suggestions to achieve this:

• Task Design: The target vocabulary items can be repeated and incorporated into different sub-tasks leading to a main task. In the unit ‘Helping out in Our Mini-restaurant’, for example, opportunities are provided for students to use/be exposed to the target words (i.e. food items) in different ways: reading a restaurant review and menus (see LT 1.2, LT 1.5 & LT 1.10), listening to the conversation about shopping in a grocery (see LT 1.8), writing a restaurant menu (see LT 1.11) and role-playing a customer and a waiter/waitress in a speaking activity (see LT 1.16). Learning the target words through different language skills not only enhances students’ understanding of both the written and spoken forms of the words but also adds variety to vocabulary learning.
• Vocabulary Games and Activities: Vocabulary games and activities such as those included in this resource package (GA 1 – 18) can provide a fun and quick way for students to revisit or learn more about the target vocabulary. They can be used as a warm-up activity before a lesson, a follow-up/take-home activity for consolidation or an extension activity for deepening students’ knowledge about the target vocabulary.
• Reciprocal Learning: Students can be asked to select a number of words they want to learn more from the text studied and share with their partners how they remember the chosen words or what they have found out more about these words in a dictionary or other reference materials.
• Short Quizzes, Competitions and Meaningful Dictations: Engaging students in short quizzes and competitions, such as writing as many names of fruits as possible in groups within three minutes, helps increase students’ motivation to learn vocabulary. To promote autonomy in learning and consolidate the learning of vocabulary under different themes, students can be asked to collect more vocabulary items not found in the textbooks when they prepare for dictations.
• Informal Interaction: The target vocabulary items can be recycled through informal interaction when you talk about an event or a person with your students using these words during the lead-ins or breaks in the lessons. Teachers should take every opportunity to use the target items in class.

The EDB wordlists are produced for teachers’ reference only. The words from the lists are not intended for dictation purposes, nor should they be taught as discrete items. Asking students to learn the words by rote only kills students’ interest rather than facilitating better retention. Preferably, vocabulary should be taught in meaningful contexts, which not only show how the words are used but also contribute to better retention.

The use of contextual clues to guess word meanings is no doubt a good strategy to improve reading ability. However, several research studies have shown that there are limitations in such a strategy in enhancing vocabulary power, especially in L2 contexts (Hulstijin, Hollander & Greidanus 1996; Laufer & Shmueli 1997; Nassaji 2003). First, students may find it frustrating to guess word meanings from a context that contains too many unknown words. Second, they may take a wrong meaning as the right meaning, and they will remember whatever meaning was guessed. The best way to learn vocabulary is to ask them to infer word meanings from the context and then confirm them using a dictionary. Moreover, by looking up the words in a dictionary, students can explore the different dimensions of the words, thus further enhancing their understanding of the words. A good dictionary also gives information about how common a word is and whether it belongs to a special register. In fact, inference and dictionary activities are both essential and complementary to each other in vocabulary learning.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a powerful tool to motivate students to learn vocabulary both in class and by themselves. The interactive platform and the interesting activities can always capture students’ attention. Here is a list of useful websites for vocabulary learning:

• Flashcards
  1. http://www.studystack.com/ - where you can create your vocabulary notes, flashcards and games in one site
  2. http://quizlet.com/ - where you can create and share flashcards with pictures
• Online concordancers
  Online concordancers provide a list of occurrences of words being searched from authentic language contexts, where you can check how words collocate with one another.
  1. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk
  2. http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance/
• Visual thesauruses and dictionaries
  Visual thesauruses and dictionaries present related words in semantic maps or present word meanings in pictures.
  1. http://www.visuwords.com/
  2. http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
  3. http://visual.merriam-webster.com/index.php
• Other vocabulary games and quizzes
  1. http://www.freerice.com/ - where students can enter a word quiz
  2. http://www.spellingcity.com/ - where teachers can create a spelling quiz
  3. http://www.puzzle-maker.com/ - where teachers can create different kinds of crossword puzzles
  4. http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/ - where comics can be created with the use of the target words
  5. http://jeopardylabs.com/ - where teachers can create a word jeopardy game online

One effective way to help students remember words is providing them with opportunities for active involvement in connecting the new words to their mental lexicon. Vocabulary building involves a process of network building, so that the words acquired become interconnected. To this end, activities which help students understand the paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations of words should be designed. You can find a number of activities in this resource package which are designed with these two approaches in mind. (see LT 1.6, LT 3.7, GA 12, GA 15, GA 17, GA 18 for activities illustrating paradigmatic associations; see LT 1.4, LT 1.19, LT 2.10, GA 9 for activities illustrating syntagmatic associations)

Another way to achieve the same purpose is to help students personalise their learning, so that the new vocabulary can be ‘integrated’ into their existing knowledge base. Therefore, activities which allow students to make their own choice and help them relate new words to their personal experience can be designed. They should be encouraged to explore their personal associations for the vocabulary they study.

There is no ‘rule of thumb’ about how to design vocabulary learning activities to cater for the needs of individual learners. However, learner diversity can be basically addressed in terms of task demand and learning styles.

Task Demand:
According to Thornbury (2002), some vocabulary building activities are more cognitively demanding than others. These activities can be divided into the following categories, which are arranged in order from the least cognitively demanding to the most demanding:

• identifying, e.g. Unscramble (GA 8), Word Search (GA 16), listening out for particular words in a spoken text (LT 1.8)
• selecting, e.g. selecting words for further study according to one’s own choice, Odd One Out, Word Jeopardy (GA 5)
• matching, e.g. matching activities (LT 2.7), Word Pair Race (GA 9), Match and Slap (GA 15), Pelmanism (GA 14)
• sorting, e.g. putting words into different categories (LT 1.19, LT 2.10)
• ranking, e.g. comparing things (GA 2), arranging words according to different levels of intensity (GA 11)

Besides the activities discussed above, some productive activities, ranging from slogan writing to role play and proposal writing, also require different levels of cognitive abilities. Teachers may like to choose the activities appropriate to their students’ needs and abilities.

Learning Styles:
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which are divided into nine categories (i.e. ‘Linguistic’, ‘Logical-mathematical’, ‘Spatial’, ‘Bodily-kinesthetic’, ‘Musical’, ‘Interpersonal’, ‘Intrapersonal’, ‘Naturalistic’ and ‘Existential’), provides a reference for understanding students’ learning styles (Gardner 1999). The seven intelligences or learning styles which are most relevant to English vocabulary learning are listed in Table 1:

Table 1: Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles

The examples listed in Table 1 show a variety of vocabulary learning activities with reference to different learning styles. In fact, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach does not help in catering for learner diversity. Careful planning should be made to ensure a sufficient variety of vocabulary learning activities to suit the different needs, abilities and interests of students.

To expand students’ vocabulary and enable them to become autonomous learners, it is crucial to teach them how to learn through incorporating vocabulary building strategies into the learning tasks and activities. The English Language Curriculum and Assessment Guide (Secondary 4 – 6) (2007, pp.147-150) highlights seven major vocabulary building strategies, which are listed below:

• Knowledge of word formation (see LT 3.6, GA 1)
• Knowledge of collocation (see GA 9)
• Knowledge of lexical relations (see LT 1.6, LT 2.7, LT 2.10, LT 3.9, GA 2, GA 3, GA 4, GA 5, GA 6, GA 7, GA 8, GA 10, GA 11, GA 12, GA 13, GA 15, GA 16, GA 17, GA 18)
• Guessing and inferencing (see LT 3.3, LT 3.6)
• Using a dictionary and thesaurus (see LT 1.4, LT 3.6, GA 11)
• Recording words (see LT 1.4, LT 1.6, LT 2.4, LT 2.11, LT 3.9, GA 9)
• Retaining words (all games and activities are designed to facilitate better retention)

In this resource package, vocabulary building strategies are highlighted under the ‘Learning Objectives’ of the learning and teaching units and the ‘Vocabulary Building Strategy’ section of the vocabulary games and activities. To develop students’ vocabulary building strategies, explicit instruction should be adopted to encourage students to make conscious efforts and employ various techniques to learn and retain new words. Students should be provided with opportunities to categorise and organise newly-learnt vocabulary (e.g. using graphic organisers) and to analyse words and identify patterns in the target vocabulary (e.g. using concordancers). They should also be taught to use different vocabulary building strategies to learn and retain new words.

Merely copying the word definition and the part of speech of a word from a dictionary to a vocabulary notebook does not guarantee success in its retention. Besides, recording too many new words at a time can be tedious and may ‘overload’ students. In fact, keeping a vocabulary notebook can be an effective strategy provided that:

• the number of entries each time is kept to a level manageable to students;
• students are allowed to choose their own vocabulary for recording; and
• opportunities are provided for students to ‘personalise’ the new words.

Personalisation is the process of using a new word in a context that is personally meaningful to the student. The ways to personalise new words include association and application. The former encourages students to make personal association of the word, e.g. why/when/where they think it is used, what image it evokes, what words it is associated with, who would usually use it, etc. The latter requires students to use the word, for example, in a sentence, a short dialogue or a comic strip, preferably involving someone they know or drawing on their real life experience. Teachers may like to vary the ways of recording to make it more interesting. (LT 2.4, LT 2.11, GA 9)