Vocabulary

We all recognize that words are the bedrock of languge learning. Micheal Lewis in his book, The Lexical Approach, quotes Earl Stevick as saying, "When students travel, they don't carry grammar books, they carry dictionaries." And yet, vocabulary is a part of teaching that sometimes gets overlooked…

 

Whatever your emphasis in teaching, students need some way to record new vocabulary they come across. This is something students might take upon themselves or it can be an area in which teachers can offer guidance, directing students to either keep word cards or online records or personal vocabulary notebooks. The ABAX Workbook is one such notebook, a place for students to record new words and expressions they come across. And mindful of the need for recycling, the notebook is designed with activities to have students go through their lists again and again and again and look at different aspects of the words they've recorded, something that makes it quite different from other notebooks. Because there's another Earl Stevick quote in Michael Lewis' The Lexical Approach: "If you want to forget something, put it in a list." With the Workbook, students do lots of things with their list and so the list should be a place other than somewhere to write words they'll forget...

 

The Workbook was also the model for the backpages for the recording of vocabulary in the Communication Spotlight series. The notebook in the inside back cover pocket of the Fiction in Action books also serves as a vocabulary notebook.

 

Making Sense of Phrasal Verbs by ELB Publishing recognizes the great difficulty this part of the language poses for learners of English. Students are introduced to phrasal verbs in a humorous way and then given the chance to use them.

 

Helbling Language's Teaching Chunks of Language is a teacher's resource chock-a-block full of activities to help teachers help students to learn and use these larger groupings of words. Such chunks make up a large part of our language.