Page 117 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Vocabulary Focus

Figure 7.1
Pupils Recycling Animal
Vocabulary by Creating
Improbable Animals from
Different Animal Parts

they have been bought. It is more like a continual process of trying to keep a
house clean; the cleaning (or learning) can be done one day, but needs doing
again the next’ (Cameron, 2001, p. 84).
In order for the children to internalise the new vocabulary, they have to
be exposed to it several times in a variety of different contexts. Teachers
are often frustrated to realise that the vocabulary from the previous lesson
has been completely forgotten by the children after a week. It is unrealistic
to assume that the learners will remember a list of vocabulary items after
the first lesson. The new words will have to be recycled again and again in
different activities and situations. For example, in teaching the learners the
names of different colours, we can start by teaching the children a song (e.g.
‘The Rainbow Song’) in the first lesson, then in the next lesson play a game
(e.g. a memory game or a simple TPR activity in which learners follow the
teacher’s instructions: ‘Touch something blue!’), then present the children
with a colouring page and ask them to colour the picture according to the
teacher’s instructions and so forth. In addition, different activities aimed at
recycling the new vocabulary will have to be carried out in the next lesson,
after a week, a month and again and again until we can see the pupils have
acquired it.
Perceptive teachers will use every opportunity to activate the new vocab-
ulary, for example asking learners to take the pencils of a particular colour
before starting drawing or going around the classroom and commenting on
the colours of the children’s clothes (‘I really like your blue sweater!’). In addi-
tion,Linse(2005)pointsoutthatlearnersshoulddealwithnewinformationat
a deep-processing level, which involves higher-order cognitive skills and the
learner’s personal interest. Deep processing will help the learners to remem-
ber the new words more efficiently, for example by connecting them with
their previous knowledge, which is much more effective than rote learning

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