Reflecting on my development as a teacher over the course of this semester, the area of teaching where I have developed the most is in teaching vocabulary. In readings, I was challenged to think about how my students learnt vocabulary. Immediately, I thought of the Reading Booklets (reading logs) that are implemented in my school. Unlike other classes, I insist my students to choose 9 unknown words from their Daily Readers and then to look up the Chinese translation in the dictionary. I thought: does a mere 15-second translation of an English word suffice? Do students know the vocabulary word? Will they be able to use it in a sentence or (ideally) in their writing?
In class, we discussed two aspects of vocabulary teaching which were pivotal in shaping the way I teach vocabulary. The first one was ‘What types of knowledge are involved in knowing a word?’ The answer: form, meaning and use. Challenged, I reflected on the Reading Booklets. Form: vaguely. Meaning: for about 15 seconds. Use: definitely not. I decided to implement a new spelling challenge system where students were to revise the 9 words each day and to spell them the next day. Now, of course, for a 9 year-old language learner, that can be a lot, and I did not want to burden these children with yet another thing to study. Thus, to foster intrinsic motivation to study these words, I did not require students to learn vocabulary words for the Spelling Challenges on Monday to Thursday. Students were rewarded if they received 8 or 9 marks (one mark for each correctly spelled word) for 10 days, receiving a prize or letter home that praised their work ethic in their homework diary. I only required students to study for the Friday Spelling Challenge, which was an accumulation of words learnt from Monday through Thursday. Through spelling challenges, students learnt of word form. The other two, word meaning and word use, were addressed in the second aspect of vocabulary teaching.
During class, the concept of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge was discussed. Requiring students to copy 9 new vocabulary words a day in their Reading Booklets sufficiently covered a breadth of vocabulary words. In addition, the quality of vocabulary words learnt at breadth were usually thematic since they were from the same book and were at appropriate English levels since students read at levels according to the PLP-R programme. Now what about depth? With 9 new words acquired by 34 students each day, a total of 306 words are learned each day. How nice would it be if at least one of those words were “explicitly” defined for them? The next day, I implemented a Word of the Day system, where three students had the opportunity to share and teach the class one of their vocabulary words. After explicitly defining the words, all students chanted the Word of the Day song and voted for their class’s word. Then not only was depth achieved but also word meaning. The word was then copied into student Reading Booklet’s, followed by a very basic sentence which featured the word of the day. The part of speech was also written beside the word. All these were created in hopes that students would be able to grasp the word use.
Although good in theory, I found that, after a week or two, students easily forgot the words and meanings of previous word of the days. As a result, I told students that if they studied the words of the day (revisiting vocabulary) and wrote it in their spelling challenges, they would receive double the marks for that word. Also, if students remembered the Chinese meanings of each word and wrote them in their spelling challenges, they would receive two bonus “Chinese” marks. These ensured word meaning was revisited and consolidated in students.
Finally, in order to further consolidate the depth of student vocabulary learning, I created a space on the display board entitled “graffiti,” where students were required to choose one word – their favourite word – from the Reading Booklet to create a piece of graffiti on A-4 paper, with the English meaning beside it. Student graffiti pieces were featured on rotation. They were also highly encouraged to go to the display board to learn from each other. Additionally, I opened a thread on an online forum which I’d made for my students entitled “Word of the Week,” where students were asked to submit their word and meaning every weekend.
Although rigorous in the amount of vocabulary learnt each day – with spelling challenges, 9 Chinese definitions, and about 5 minutes of precious lesson time devoted to the Word of the Day, it was my hope that students would not just learn new vocabulary words, but have fun learning the vocabulary words as they offered words for the word of the day and drew pictures of their favourite word in graffiti. Over the course of the past 5 or 6 weeks since implementing these systems, I have seen improved vocabulary usage in student writing, with more and more students willing to take risks to use newer and bigger words learnt. This has been across students of varying English language ability. Additionally, the Reading Booklet has become a natural resource for students to facilitate writing as I often see them take out their Reading Booklets in both Process Writing and General English lessons. These results have been so encouraging and have made all the heart and hard work invested worth it. I am excited to see what the next term has in store for the ever-evolving vocabulary teacher inside me!