I was so excited when I saw the names of Paul Nation and Averil Coxhead in the IATEFL conference booklet so I marked this panel as my first session to attend in my planner immediately. I was a little disappointed to see that they were actually participating online from New Zealand since I missed that information. In any case, it was a  rewarding experience for me as a whole since the Vocabulary Project we have been conducting at the institution I work for (which I would be talking about in two days in the same conference) were based mainly on Paul and Averil’s researches and I got the chance to meet two other respectable academics who have dedicated their work on this essential aspect of the ELT.

My Notes from the session

Norbert Schmitt started off by quoting from the manager of English National Football Team, Fabio Capello who said he used 100 words to give instructions to the team.. (my comment: .. and makes his living way better than us who use a lot more words than he does :)) But ‘Is that sufficient for us’ asks Norbert and replies his own question by saying ‘Well, it depends..’

Paul Nation mentions his study on the number of words necessary to reach 95% written and spoken discourse coverage. He says that even with 98% of written text coverage readers see three unknown words a minute.

Diane Schmitt questions the issue of how much of these words that have been taught are actually recycled. She says that it has been claimed that most course books up to C1-C2 levels are written considering the first 2600 most frequently used words. Then she asks how are we going to fill the gap?

By the way, it is noteworthy that the knowledge of the first 3000 words is considered as low level competence in terms of vocabulary.

The panel agrees that teachers’ perspective is more important than teaching. It is not feasible to deal with so many words in class. So- Skills based instruction

– Encouragement of reading graded readers which can lead themselves to meaningful writing tasks. Extensive reading is really important.

– Communicating with language exchange partners

– Encouraging students to deliberate word study

– 40 words a week, approx. 2000 words a year.

– Increasing exposure to the words in different contexts both in listening and reading.

– Developing materials in such a way that the words are recycled.

– When exposed to the words in contexts students can know more about the words, not just see them as items and incidental learning can take place in contexts where content words can be naturally grasped.

– Teaches should work with good learner dictionaries to be able to provide students with appropriate /accurate examples, definitions, grammatical features, collocations etc so that students can understand them.

– Teachers can conduct Classroom Research to understand what works well in vocabulary teaching.

– For a simple revision and cognitive involvement, just list the words on the board ask students what part of speech they are and tell them the topic to be studied the next day. Ask them which ones can also occur in the lesson next day’s topic.

– Lots of video games, internet games help students be exposed to many words. However, students see gaming like a full time job, some of this time can be allocated to deliberate vocabulary learning.

– Word Cards method is still the most useful tool while learning vocabulary. now there are online versions of these.

The panel also agree that students need many more words than the teacher could teach in class. Surely, not all the words worth the worry. Students can make individual decisions to on what words they can learn or prioritize. They also agree that the learning goal is huge when all the words to learn to reach fluency are considered.

Explicit teaching can’t be enough neither can incidental learning. Then what lexical items need to be taught explicitly? Should the teacher give importance to meaning, spelling and pronunciation? Can you teach all the collocations of the word-maybe one or two.

Nation says that reading and listening that is, loads and loads of exposure to the words in a wide variety of context is necessary.  Students gain intuition on collocations and on how a word may or may not be used. Speaking and writing tasks for students to produce the language are obviously useful.

Actual teaching may cover 30 or 40 % of actual teaching.

Learners dictionaries define 50,000 words by means of 2000-3000 words.

So the first goal is the first 3000 words for general English.

If you want to watch this panel here is the link:

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2011/sessions/2011-04-16/which-words-are-worth-worry