GOOD FOR EAL, GOOD FOR ALL
In the third article about using EAL teaching techniques in other subject areas, Barbara Stoecker looks at active vocabulary acquisition using glossaries.
New approaches for a new generation
Being a part of the early Millennial generation, technology entered my life in my teens and only had a moderate impact on the way I was learning. I still remember evenings and weekends spent memorising word lists for English or French lessons by re-writing them dozens of times to ensure that the correct spelling stuck.
Times have changed and our young learners are all about maximising their learning time in lessons, which they expect to leave feeling the knowledge, skills or understanding have already been embedded. This places significant pressure on teachers, who have to think and rethink strategies to make lessons not only clear, but also engaging and metacognitively effective and efficient.
The need to acquire new vocabulary is central to all learning, and in this context some of the theory developed and applied for effective EAL teaching and learning may well be useful in any subject area.
Implicit versus explicit vocabulary learning
Theories of vocabulary acquisition distinguish between two main approaches: explicit and implicit learning (Hulstijin, 2001; Nassaji, 2003). Incidental vocabulary learning refers to acquiring words without deliberately trying to learn them, or when vocabulary is learned as a by-product of another activity, where the learner’s main focus lies elsewhere (Laufer & Hulstijin, 2001, p. 10). So, let’s focus on maximising our learners’ time in our lessons with glossaries used actively to make the vocabulary ‘stick’ without students even realising.
Glossaries in action
Whilst as EAL teachers we understand the importance of sharing an exhaustive list of Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary necessary for success in our subjects, you can never take it for granted that they will use it.
Central to good EAL teaching is to encourage – or require – students to keep lists of new words which they define using their own words as they encounter them. Once the idea of what such a glossary involves is understood, here are three ways in which it can be used to have fun with words, without students even realising that new meanings are becoming embedded:
1. Meaning and spelling activities
For younger learners provide dual-coded glossaries and use them with word gaps at regular intervals between lessons. You can do it as a starter/warm up activity or in a plenary. For EAL, the idea is to provide the pictures, and potentially the word in our EAL’s students first language and to leave out the English words for them to fill in. Providing the first letter of the word is always a good idea to get things started or for some lower achievers.
You can also think of adding a ‘fun’ factor to this task and to ‘scramble’ the target vocabulary, for students to re-order the letters back into what gives the correct term. Again, provide the first letter of the ‘scrambled’ terms to make it a bit easier.
Here’s an example for teachers:
Gsloasrire udes aetclviy pvrodei ALF ootprnitupeis.
2. Oracy and spelling activities
For older or more advanced groups you can build True or False tasks focused on key terms, or get them to do it and quiz themselves! Once again, if you want to introduce a ‘game-effect’ into your lesson’ why not convert the ‘T or F?’ tasks into ‘Two truths and a lie’ about the key terms from our glossaries?
3. Dictations and glossaries
Deemed controversial by some educators, a good old-fashioned dictation has never hurt anybody in my experience. They don’t differ a lot from our expectations of students taking notes loosely when we talk. In the end, it is about transcription skills and the metacognitive links and processes happening in our students’ brains whilst transferring the words they hear onto paper.
To adapt them for younger students or those with lower levels of proficiency in English, you can provide dual-coding in the form of icons or mini pictures in brackets for words missed out in a partially prefilled text.
The glossaries that the students are building can also serve as answer keys immediately after the dictation, with students self-or peer-marking, thus reducing teacher workload and providing a brilliant AfL opportunity.
Resources and impact
Generating resources around these ideas by using AI tools has never been easier and if practised regularly in any subject area, as a student’s vocabulary grows, so will their insight and their ability to express themselves clearly.
Barbara Stoecker is EAL and Multilingualism Coordinator at Claremont School in the UK.
