Vocabulary is key, not just for the productive skills but also for the receptive ones. In my experience, those students who know the most vocabulary are always the ones that perform the best in public examinations.
How can we make sure students learn and widen their vocabulary repertoire? These are some practical ideas that work for me and my students.
Making productive vocabulary stick
I think it is important to establish the difference between productive and receptive vocabulary.
This is interesting as the current MFL Content proposals advocate for not such a distinction. I think this is a mistake. In my lessons, we use Sentence Builders. Depending on the Year group, we can spend up to 6 weeks working on a particular Sentence Builder at KS3 or about two weeks at KS4. Below an example of a Y10 SB.
This is the productive lexicon that I expect students to know inside out and use confidently by the end of a unit in oral and written tasks. To achieve this goal, modelling and practice of the structures in lessons are key but also vocabulary/structures learning. Every Sentence Builder is linked to different sets of Quizlets for KS4 or Memrise for KS3. These courses use the structure of the Sentence Builder so, sometimes students learn words, but others a whole chunk, like in the example above. Learning the whole chunk “no había hecho nada”, helps students to embed the structure into the long term memory and later in the course to manipulate it, when we spot patterns, for example by inferring "they had done nothing" ("no habían hecho nada". However, by learning the chunk, from day one, students can use the Pluperfect tense fluently while we plant the seed for the use of another tense.
Students learn the Sentence Builders as homework tasks only after these have been extensively practised in lessons and we test this learning via quick vocabulary tests. These tests are carried out weekly and are marked by the students themselves. They always involve testing from English into Spanish, regardless of ability, and consist of 10 chunks or small sentences created from combining bits from the sentence builder, rather than testing individual words!
For example: That day I was worried because I had failed my exam
To help students learn the sentence builder vocabulary, in context, so that they can create sentences from it, I combine the use of Quizlet with Textivate.
Textivate is a great tool which allows students to practise structures, hence learning them, via the creation of short sentences and/or paragraphs, encouraging them to treat vocabulary and grammar (lexicogrammar) as part of a continuum, which reduces cognitive load and improves fluency. In Textivate the teacher creates their own activities based on their own texts and/or words or chunks. In my case, students work on their Textivate activities either in lessons or as homework as a tool to learn vocab! Textivate example on vocabulary of Environment Y11
Created by Martin Lapworth (the creator of Textivate and TaskMagic) in conjunction with Gianfranco Conti, the SentenceBuilders site is another great way to help students learn our Sentence Builders! In this site, you can select pre populated Sentence Builders, or create your own one, extremely easily, and select assignments for students, based on a wide range of activities aimed to help them learn and memorise key structures, integrating skills such as listening, reading or translation! The range of activities available is impressive and include all the favourite activities from the EPI teaching pedagogy. I use this site, like Textivate, in the classroom but also as homework tasks to help students. Please, click on Jerome Nogues’ video to see a review of this new site and how to navigate it.
Functional versus Content vocabulary
By functional vocabulary I mean essential structures that come over and over again and we want our students to master from day one but also, great “high impact” expressions that we introduce as from Y7 and we recycle through the whole language learning journey in all contexts, so they stick!
“Me hace sentir bien” “me gustaría que mi madre fuera” “me ayuda a relajarme” “si pudiera me gustaría” “suelo” “puede ser “ “puedo” “después de” “nos gusta” “le gusta” “iba a” “quería” are some of these structures, to mention a few. It is important, when designing the curriculum, to decide on our Functional Vocabulary/Structures to ensure that they are introduced little by little, in as many Sentence Builders as possible from Y7 to Y11. These structures normally involve giving opinions, justifying or sequencing ideas. This ties up with Elena Díaz’s 20 Keys nicely.
By content vocabulary I mean specific topic vocabulary, although, this must also be recycled in different contexts as much as possible!
Retrieval Practice
For structures/vocabulary to stick, they need to be encountered many times, experts say a minimum of 6 times. Students may score 20 out of 20 in a vocabulary test. However, we have all experienced the situation that weeks later such vocabulary has partially or totally been forgotten. Here comes the power of retrieval practice and interleaving topics. This requires careful planning into a SoW but also from the teacher in their day to day lessons.
How can we incorporate structures from two weeks ago or a month ago in our lessons, mixed up with new material? This can be done in the shape of starter activities where students need to recall old vocabulary, hence helping them to transfer information to their long term memory using Retrieval Grids for example, but also by incorporating such structures in our main planned activities for a lesson. For example when carrying out an information gap activity, during the Practice Stage of learning, students may be required to talk about past topics at the same time as practising structures from current ones. When modelling new structures I always include content from past topics!
Carousel Learning is great for this! Carousel Learning is another tool, which you populate with your own questions (or sentences in the case of languages) from all topics, via a spreadsheet. The tool allows you to create mini quizzes whose content you select from your range of topics and questions previously downloaded into the site. Doing this for homework and/or in the classroom is a powerful retrieval practice tool, as you can include a selection of sentences from as many past topics as you want!
Key questioning via short oral quizzes with the use of mini whiteboards is also powerful for retrieval practice and learning vocabulary and structures for the students, while it allows teachers to check for understanding at a glance, see strengths and where there are gaps, to inform your planning accordingly. When doing these quizzes, I always use sentences, so students are forced to use structures in context and mainly translations from English into Spanish.
Receptive Vocabulary and being independent
How can we tackle this? From Y7 I ask students to create their own Memrise or Quizlet courses for each topic, which we call “My random vocabulary”. Every piece of vocab that appears in reading, listening activities, past papers or pre populated sites such as Languagenut or This is Language, my students add it to their Random Quizlet/Memrise sets.
Every so often students are given the opportunity to learn this vocab. They choose what to learn so the vocabulary/structures vary from student to student, which gives them independence and autonomy. Normally, I don’t expect students to produce this vocabulary in writing and speaking tasks, but to recognise it in a reading or listening situation.
However, many of my students transfer much of this vocabulary to the production category as they choose to use it over and over again in oral or written tasks. This is my ultimate goal: to encourage students to be independent, learn their own vocabulary and reuse it freely.
It is not an easy task at all but it can be achieved! Of course, especific exam boards Quizlet vocabulary sets fall into this category too. I also create Quizlet courses with the most used expressions that I can spot in the reading and listening GCSE papers. This has made a huge difference in some of my low attainer students when facing the Reading and traditionally difficult Listening exams.
Discussing strategies!
Finally, although it should be on the top of the list, we must discuss learning strategies with students and teaching them how to learn! I use lot of technology but I have to recognise that some students will not like that approach and I need to give them alternatives.
The looking, saying, covering and repeating method can work extremely well with students as well as creating their own physical flashcards. It is important to have a departmental strategy to learn vocabulary and as Danielle Warren does, to send such a strategy to parents so they can also be involved in the learning of their children. We are planning to do so as from September!
By applying these strategies and learning vocabulary in context (lexicogrammar approach) with the use of technology and planning/interleaving its practice, students learn vocabulary and this starts becoming sticky!
