ADVANCED learners can generally communicate well, having learnt all the basic structures of the language. However, they need to broaden their vocabularies to express themselves more clearly and appropriately. Solange Moras, an English teacher in Sao Carlos, Brazil, offers some methods on how to teach vocabulary to advanced students.
The most important aspect of vocabulary teaching is to foster learner independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Therefore guided discovery, contextual guesswork and using dictionaries should be the main ways to deal with discovering meaning.
Guided discovery involves asking questions or offering examples that guide students to guess meanings correctly. In this way learners get involved in a process of semantic processing that helps learning.
Contextual guesswork means learners can make use of the context in which the word appears to get an idea of its meaning, or guess from the word itself, as in words of Latin origin. Knowledge of word formation, e.g. prefixes and suffixes, can also help guide students to discover meaning.
Students should start using EFL dictionaries as early as possible, from intermediate upwards. With adequate training, a dictionary is an invaluable tool for learners, giving them independence from the teacher. As well as understanding meaning, students are able to check pronunciation, the grammar of the word and different spelling, as well as examples that illustrate usage.
Another strategy for advanced learners is to turn their receptive vocabulary items into productive ones. Task-based learning can help teachers to provide authentic tasks in which students engage to achieve a concrete output, using appropriate language for the context.
As the task-based approach suggests, teachers need to use authentic material to expose students to rich, contextualized and natural language. For example, on the topic of holidays, teachers can choose a number of holiday brochures (about 25) and tell students to read them through and try to notice recurrent patterns of lexis. This shows students a large number of collocations, especially adj.+noun ones and that some are extremely common, such as golden sandy beaches, rolling countryside and others.
