Speaker A
I made a video a few months ago about not wasting time in the classroom, and I thought it would be a one-off, but another pet peeve has wormed its way into my thoughts recently, and so I thought I'd make a video about it.
Jo Gakonga explains why pre-teaching vocabulary before reading or listening tasks can be ineffective and offers practical alternatives.
Key Takeaways
- Avoid extensive pre-teaching of vocabulary before reading or listening tasks.
- Contextual learning after gist tasks improves vocabulary understanding.
- Pre-teach only essential vocabulary briefly, such as key topic words or task-related words.
- Use glossaries to support learner autonomy for low-frequency vocabulary.
- Focus on meaningful, learner-centered activities rather than teacher-led explanations.
Summary
- Pre-teaching vocabulary before reading or listening tasks is often time-consuming, teacher-centered, and dull.
- Words taught before seeing the text are decontextualized and seem random, reducing meaningful learning.
- Low-frequency words in texts are often not useful for learners at that level to learn in detail.
- Pre-teaching is necessary only for essential words, such as key topic words or words in task questions.
- Teaching vocabulary after a gist reading or listening is more effective as learners understand context.
- The depth of vocabulary teaching depends on whether learners need to use the language productively or just understand it.
- For low-frequency words, providing a glossary can promote learner autonomy and save time.
- Texts should be mined for useful language, but pre-teaching should not consume excessive class time.
- Jo Gakonga offers a mini course on vocabulary teaching from texts on her website elttraining.com.
- Overall, avoid wasting time pre-teaching vocabulary that learners will unlikely use again.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and topic overview
- 00:18Jo Gakonga's background and website
- 00:46Common practice of pre-teaching vocabulary
- 01:44Why pre-teaching vocabulary often fails
- 02:26Three reasons pre-teaching is ineffective
- 03:26When pre-teaching vocabulary is necessary
- 04:26Teaching vocabulary after gist reading/listening
- 05:07Depth of vocabulary teaching and learner needs
- 05:58Using glossaries and promoting learner autonomy
- 06:55Mining texts for vocabulary and final advice
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
This time, I'm having a grumble about pre-teaching vocabulary before a reading or a listening text. You want to know what I'm upset about? Keep watching. I'm joking, congrats! I'm a language teacher, I'm a teacher educator, a CELTA trainer,
Speaker A
and assessor, and I've got a website at elttraining.com. So if what I say here speaks to you, then go and check out my other work there. Okay, I see this so often with trainee and novice teachers and teaching observations.
Speaker A
They have a reading or a listening text that they want to use, and they're understandably and reasonably concerned that the learners won't understand all of the language in the text, so they explain it to them all at length before they ask them to read
Speaker A
or listen. This does not usually produce a great learning outcome. Why not? Well, there are three main reasons. The first and most important is that it tends to be very time-consuming, very teacher-centered, and therefore rather dull.
Speaker A
The second is that because the learners haven't seen the text yet, these words are decontextualized, and they seem very random, so they're not hugely meaningful. The third is that the words the learners are unlikely to know are likely to be
Speaker A
lower frequency words that are probably not all that useful to learn at that particular level. Sometimes you do need to pre-teach vocabulary. If the whole text is about aardvarks and they don't know what one is, then showing a picture and giving them the
Speaker A
word is essential, but note that this doesn't take very long. The other criteria for pre-teaching is if a word is in the question in the task, they can't answer it if they don't understand it. But, but, but you say, don't they need to
Speaker A
understand the language? Well, yes, but how about teaching it after the gist reading or listening, when they've already got an idea of the context, where it's no longer random words because it's in a context? It'll probably be easier to understand anyway.
Speaker A
Even when you teach vocabulary that you think is going to be problematic, it's worth considering why you're teaching it and how much detail you need to go into. If you think it's language that you want them to use for productive purposes, then
Speaker A
they are going to have to know the meaning more precisely. They're going to have to know any problematic things with form, like dependent prepositions or irregular past tenses, that kind of thing. But if they just need to understand for
Speaker A
the text and it's not a word that they're likely to need very often, then just a rough idea of the meaning is enough. A picture of the artifact will suffice. We don't need its breeding habits. Another idea where the words are low
Speaker A
frequency and not really worth teaching is just to give them a glossary, either a bilingual one if you've got a monolingual class or one in English. Why not? It helps to promote learner autonomy, I would say, and it's quick.
Speaker A
I'm not saying don't use the language in a reading or listening text to teach vocabulary. Texts are great for this, and I'd really advise you to mine them for useful language. I've even got a little mini course on my site about this, which will
Speaker A
give you some ideas about how you could do that. But for your learners' sake, don't spend half of your reading or listening time pre-teaching vocabulary that they'll probably never use again. It's just a waste of everybody's time. Okay, rant over, as you were.
Speaker A
Thanks for watching. Bye.
Topics:pre-teaching vocabularyELT traininglanguage teachingvocabulary teachingreading comprehensionlistening skillslearner autonomyteacher trainingCELTAJo Gakonga
