Materials for Vocabulary and Grammar

“How have you learnt vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language?”

“Do you have any particular strategies to learn or ‘remember’ the vocabulary and the forms of grammar?”

For me, ‘just-cramming’ is the key. Through my learning of English experience as a student in Japan, I had crammed all the vocabulary on the lists that my teacher gave and prepared for a vocabulary test next class. I had written down all the vocabulary on my note until I finally remembered all of them. During a summer holiday, we (all students) were told to copy a whole English grammar textbook at least three times on the notebooks as homework. This is because we needed to prepare for the university entrance examinations, which heavily requires your vocabulary and grammar knowledge on reading comprehension.

At that time, I was proud of myself remembering a whole vocabulary and grammar books. However, it did not mean that I was successfully able to output all the words and grammar that I had remembered in communication with people in English later on, although my ultimate goal of learning the language was to speak English fluently. Does it mean that I did not ‘remember’ vocabulary and grammar enough? Or did I ‘remember’ vocabulary and grammar in wrong way?

– Once I reflect myself as a student, I have not ‘learnt’ how to use them in real life. –

I am not saying that remembering all the vocabulary and grammar in a textbook is a wrong way to learn a foreign language for Japanese people. I personally think that in essence, Japanese learners need to remember enough vocabulary and grammar to certain extent because there is a linguistic distance between English and Japanese, but at the same time, the learners need to ‘learn’ how to use them and when to use them effectively.

– Once I reflect myself as a teacher in a Japanese secondary school, I have let students drill the target vocabulary of a textbook with digital flashcards, given them the words list and target grammar exercises. –

 Materials for vocabulary

For me, a vocabulary list was useful thing to measure how many and what kind of vocabulary my students had known or must have known so that I could create grammar exercises’ worksheets based on the measurement. Students also wanted to have a vocabulary list of every chapter so that they would know which words they need to ‘remember’ for the vocabulary tests and each term’s examinations. Without the lists, most of them were likely to be anxious.

In the class, I took time for the target vocabulary input and used digital flashcards using my iPad and TV screen, which was distributed to each class by the city government. To create flashcards, I exploited Keynote, which is Apple’s app and works like PowerPoint from Microsoft. On the up part of a flashcard, I put an English word, whilst I put a Japanese translation on the down part.

This is the step.

1. I show students an English vocabulary part first
2. Students repeat pronunciation of each word after me
3. I show them a Japanese translation
4. Once we go through all the target vocabulary, students read out it again to drill in the second sets
5. In the third sets, students read out English-Japanese, English-Japanese… with a rhythm
6. If time allows, students read out, this time Japanese-English, Japanese-English… with a rhythm.

This is the vocabulary list that I provided to students. With the list, students can practise spelling and check the Japanese translation. (Please click to view)

The vocabulary selection on the list was based on the coursebook. In terms of vocabulary selection, I would like to share my thoughts about it after I read through the chapter of Materials for vocabulary and grammar written by Mishan and Timmis (2015). Here, I reflected the materials for vocabulary that I used, my context and myself. According to Mishan and Timmis, ‘frequency’ is a common criterion for the selection, and the materials writer uses large corpora such as COCA and BNC to access collocation, lexical phrases and frequency lists for specific purposes. They also stress that we need to take other criteria into consideration.

          – Frequency of use

          – Coverage: e.g. ‘go’ can be used in a wider range of contexts than ‘walk’ (O’Dell 1997)

          – Range: words which can be used in a wider range of texts should be prioritised, e.g. ‘acquire a language’ may be common in language teaching texts, but ‘learn a language’ can be used in a variety of texts

          – Availability

          – Learnability

          – Opportunism

          – Centres of interest

                                                                   (Mishan and Timmis 2015: 143- 144)

Japanese secondary schools textbook writer might have adopted the some of criteria above, but as a teacher, I have asked myself “Can I apply the criteria for selecting vocabulary on the textbook when I create the vocabulary list and teach in a classroom?” “Am I allowed to select which vocabulary on the couresbok I want to teach and don’t want to teach?” “Can I teach vocabulary which are not on the couresbook based on the criteria and corpora?”

Probably, I do no have rights to make decisions in my context. Generally speaking, we, as Japanese public school teachers, are supposed to follow the coursebook and teach what’s on the coursebook to prepare students for the examinations. Furthermore, Mishan and Timmis (2015) point out that teachers need to consider collocations and lexical phrases when they teach vocabulary. However, I have been said before in terms of the teaching of additional vocabulary that it might overload students since they have just started learning English, and as you can see a chapter of Japanese coursebook, sometimes students need to deal with a lot of new target vocabulary at once. Thus, the teaching of collocation and lexical phrases in addition to target vocabulary in my context should be considered carefully and Japanese teachers need to judge whether their students are able to deal with those in addition to target vocabulary.

Materials for vocabulary

In terms of materials for teaching grammar, what caught my attention in the reading from Mishan and Timmis (2015: 156) is that “the practice needs to be meaningful – practice is not just a matter of quantity, but also of quality.” Through my experience in Japan, I had looked over the importance of quality.

From my experience, in most Japanese secondary English classrooms, English grammar is taught deductively in the Japanese language mostly and based on (I would say) Present, Practise, Produce (PPP) approach. For example, as an introduction, a teacher tries to do a warmer to introduce the target grammar and draw the students’ attention in the beginning of the class. The teacher presents the form of grammar and explains the meaning and use with English sentence and Japanese sentence explicitly. After that, students practice the use with repetitive drills using a workbook and worksheet. At the end, students can produce the grammar through pair work or personalise the use of grammar on worksheet individually. However, the production time is a little. Bearing such traditional way of teaching in mind, what kinds of materials could I use to change the matter of quantity to the matter of quality in practice?

As Mishan and Timmis (2015) mention in ‘beyond PPP’ and ‘principled eclecticism’, there are various approaches that I could adopt in order to create meaningful materials according to students’ age, level, students’ expectations, abilities and nature of the language point to be taught. For instance, with input-based approaches, I need to consider which principle (e.g. discovering the grammar form, meaning and use individually) I would take so that I can adapt or create appropriate materials. In addition to input-based approaches, there are output-based grammar practice tasks and activities as part of learning grammar. Mishan and Timmis (2015) talk about, in particular Thornbury’s ‘grammaring’ task that requires students to add grammar to lexis. In this task, a teacher can compare and check students’ use of grammar. I am very interested in ‘grammaring’ using in my future teaching but I need to consider the students’ factors carefully (e.g. students’ age and level). Even though the traditional teaching has been deeply rooted and students may expect me to teach in that way, as a teacher in Japan, I should bear in mind the importance of quality of practice and ‘principled’ teaching for my future teaching.

Designing App for vocabulary learning

At the end of the last seminar: week10, we created principles and frameworks of a digital material for vocabulary learning App in groups. Initially, our group set target users that are Japanese English learners who want to improve their speaking skills, and came up with three principles that were Authentic, Visual (pictures) and Fun. As frameworks of our app, we created a list:

• Initial needs analysis: once you connect your phone to your computer, the app will analyse your vocabulary needs based on your online footprints.
•  Spoken input and output: you can listen to colloquial phrase and practise speaking to your phone.
•  Immediate feedback: the app analyse your pronunciation and give you immediate feedback.
• Authentic/ realistic language and contexts: you can see the context of the phrases.
•  Rewards/ points: this might be a motivational factor.

Even though the principles and frameworks were for the app, I will exploit them for my teacher-made materials in the future teaching. This is because I personally think that I particularly value on the three principles when I create and supplement my own materials.

Manami

Bibliography

Mishan, F., & Timmis, I. (2015). Materials development for TESOL. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.