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Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time?




Those of you who have been to my workshops or read my articles on TeachingEnglish are perhaps surprised why someone who advocates teaching vocabulary in chunks would even pose a question like this. However, several research papers I read a few years ago while doing my Master's in TESOL made me rethink the issue of contextualisation and try out new things. Besides, as you will see in a moment, learning  words in chunks and learning vocabulary in context are not the same things.











In and out of context 





Traditionally, in the first lesson of the New Year I discuss with my students the main events and news stories of the past year - a
news roundup of some sort. This normally involves a quiz which I prepare based on various
news items: politics, entertainment, sports, disasters as well as some quirky
news stories - (see the 2011 one here). The questions in the quiz are not aimed so much at testing
students’ general knowledge, but rather stimulating discussions, encouraging
them to look up information on the web and focusing on vocabulary - I make sure
that the quiz is lexically rich.


        

While discussing
the news stories we focus on useful lexical items as they come up. For example (taken
from last year’s news quiz)


Great
Britain’s Conservative Party returned
to Number 10 Downing Street after they won the election by a narrow margin. Who
became Britain’s
new Prime Minister?


Fans
around the world gathered in December 2010 to mark the 30th anniversary of John
Lennon’s death. Where was the former Beatle killed?


Here we would focus on “win the election by a narrow
margin” and “mark the anniversary’ etc.





However, recently I’ve started experimenting with decontextualised
vocabulary teaching. Last year after the news round-up I gave my upper-intermediate students seven
items to learn at home (Go home and look up):





go to the polls


adaptation


caught on camera


blockbuster


strain (of a virus)


pay tribute


left stranded


outbreak





The students had to study the items independently and, as a follow
up, try to relate them to the news stories we had talked about in class. For
instance, “go to the polls” could be related to the British election story,  “pay
tribute” could be a reference to John Lennon’s anniversary, “blockbuster” and
“adaptation” to various movies discussed in the lesson. Does it still count as
decontextualised? I believe so, as the items were given out of context and had
to be contextualised later on in the follow-up task.





What happens next


In the following lesson we reviewed the items that came up in the
previous lesson and then checked the ones students had to look up at home.
Overall, they liked the self-study activity; however the results of their
look-ups were mixed. While “caught on camera” and “outbreak” did not pose much
difficulty, “go to the polls” was interpreted by some students as “taking part
in a survey” – I guess they had previously encountered “polls” as in “opinion
polls”. When dealing with “strain” some students once again fell back on the
previous knowledge of “strain” as “pressure” (despite the word “virus” given in
brackets as a hint). One of the students misconstrued the word “adaptation” as
“adoption”. Therefore further engagement with the items was necessary in order
to clarify, further elaborate and, in some cases, re-teach certain chunks


            While most of my
students are trained in using mono-lingual dictionaries (paper or online), some
resorted to a bilingual dictionary of the Morfix variety, which do not provide
collocations or examples of usage. Ironically, it was the most advanced student
who went one step further and tried to make his own sentences with the given
items and got almost all of them wrong.


            *Today we have
to pay tribute to the passengers of Air France flight 447 that crashed…





My informal study


            A week later I decided to administer a test (aka "post-test") which involved a gapfill task without a
word bank but with the first letter (sometimes first two letters) given. I wanted
to see which items were learnt better: the ones taught in class
(contextualised) or the ones studies at home (decontextualised). And the result was... There were no significant differences between the items
which were introduced in context and the ones assigned to students to learn at home. 




Do you find the results surprising? Is context overrated? Should we go back to giving our students word lists to memorise at home? I would like to hear your thoughts before posting the conclusions I've drawn from this experiment.




To read the conclusions, click here






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