Teaching Vocabulary To Young Learners

VOCABULARY
Building up a useful vocabulary is central to the learning of a foreign language at primary level. Children are still building up their first language, and this development is intimately tied up with conceptual development. In planning and teaching a foreign language, we need to take account of this first language background to know what will work and what may be too difficult forchildren. It also becomes quickly apparent that learning a new word is not a simple task that is done once and then completed.
VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE LEARNING
THE WORD AS UNIT
Vocabulary development is about learning words, but is about much more than that. Vocabulary development is also about learning more about those words, and about learning formulaic phrases or chunks,finding words inside them, and learning even more about those words.
Children will ask what a particular word means, or how to say a word in the foreign language, and, in learning to read, the word is a key unit in building up skills and knowledge.
The role of words as language units begins with the early use of nouns for naming objects in first language acquisition, and of use of other words toexpress the child’s wants and needs. Infant go through a period of rapid vocabulary growth as they start to name, as well as interact with, the world around them.
We need to be aware, as Vygotsky warned, that although children may use the same words as adults, they may not hold the same meanings for those words. The acquisition of word meanings takes much longer than the acquisition of the spokenform of the words, and children use words in their speech long before they have a full understanding of them.
Production races ahead of our comprehension, and vocabulary development is a continuous process, not just of adding new words but of building up knowledge about words we already know partially.
Vocabulary development is about learning words, but that learning words is not something thatis done and finished with. Learning words is a cyclical process of meeting new words and initial learning, followed by meeting those words again and again, each time extending knowledge of what the words mean and how they are used in the foreign language. Each time children meet familiar words again, they too have changed and will bring new first language and conceptual knowledge to thevocabulary.
WHAT IT MEANS TO KNOW A WORLD
World knowledge is always a matter of degree, rather than all or nothing. The pupil seems to have some receptive knowledge of the word, but not yet to have sufficient productive knowledge to be able to produce it automatically on demand.
A further type of knowledge about a word is metalinguistic, concerning the formal properties of the word, e.g. to know that atractor is a noun.
In summary, knowing about a word involves knowing about its form (how it sounds, how it is spelt, the grammatical changes that can be made to it), its meaning (its conceptual content and how it relates to other concepts and words), and its use (its patterns of occurrence with other words, and in particular types of language use).
DEVELOPING MEANINGS IN CHILDHOOD
The depthof word knowledge does not happen automatically in a foreign or second language, even in what seems like the most favourable circumstances where children are immersed in the language through their schooling. Learning a word takes a long time and many exposures to the word used in different situations.
Conceptual knowledge grows as children experience more and more of the world in their dailylives. There are also maturational factors that seem to affect the nature of conceptual knowledge about first language vocabulary at different ages, and that can be expected to have a knock-on effect for foreign language learning. One of these factors is the “syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift” that occurs between 5 and10 years of age. This shift refers to the types of associations that children make...