[Music] we have a very special guest today we have mr uh paul nation paul nation from uh new zealand he's going to be covering uh vocabulary teaching vocabulary with you guys today paul are you there yes i'm here can you hear me yes i can hear you just need your camera i'll be handing it off to paul um just pay attention to the chat i will be sending out the handout link very shortly so i'm going to go ahead and hand it off to mr paul nation here who will be helping you guys with how to teach vocabulary so i will see you guys in an hour so enjoy the presentation and thank you paul for taking the time out to do this webinar for us no problem now just let's just check that everybody can see uh can you see the powerpoint yeah good okay right so today i want to talk about um paul sorry to interrupt yeah we need to share one more time oh okay that's the one okay good and we want to do full screen is that right yes from beginning okay perfect okay thank you good okay so today i'm talking about teaching vocabulary to young children and in many ways the topic of this talk is is actually a strange topic because it's got teaching in the title of the topic and really i hope the message that you'll get from today is that in order for young children and indeed for anybody to properly learn vocabulary teaching is only a small part of the learning and so a better title for this would be helping young children learn vocabulary so we'll come we'll come to that soon but what i want to begin with is first of all to find out what vocabulary children need to learn so let's uh oops here we are yeah and so i think for young children uh the first thing and and for anybody is to focus on the high frequency words of english the first two thousand to three thousand words there's been some interesting research in europe which finds that children who have never studied english before actually know quite a lot of english when they come to the first english class and the reason is because largely because of the internet they meet up with a lot of english vocabulary through doing things on the internet and it seems that european children who speak languages which are closely related to english actually know a lot of english vocabulary before they begin to learn english i have a suspicion that that's the same probably throughout the whole world and that's because of the effect of the internet on learning we know that in japanese for example about half of the high frequency words are already used in japanese by japanese speakers as lone words and even though sometimes the meaning that they give to those words is not exactly the same as the meaning that the words have in english at least part of the form of the word is already known and some kind of part of the meaning is known so it's it's interesting then to try and find out how many words young children know and one of the tools that we develop to do that is called the picture vocabulary size test and you can find access to this tool in the website which is listed uh and what you can see on your screen if you haven't got time to write it down don't worry because it's on the handout and if you also type paul nation resources into google it'll take you to that website so a few years ago a colleague and i developed the picture vocabulary size test and this test tests the first oh i've got a mistake here it says sixty thousand but it should be six thousand now it tests the first six thousand words of english and it does it simply using pictures and sentences that children listen to we've used this test with young native speakers native speakers who are six years old and eight years old we've tried it with five years old and it works okay for some of them but for others it doesn't work because they they're more interested in playing around rather than sitting the test but this test is freely available and you can you can download it and use it to test your own children or the learners in your class in order to take the test the learners don't have to be able to read but if they can read then the written version of each sentence is all is available in the test if learners are quite good at reading english then you don't have to use the picture vocabulary size test and you can use one of the levels tests and the levels tests are made up of five different levels which test the first thousand second thousand right up to the fifth thousand words of english you can find um hard copies if you like of these tests on my web web resources page so there are a couple of tests then that you could use to find out how many words your children know i think it's useful to do this at least for some learners in the class so you get a feeling for what their vocabulary knowledge actually is i think that most parents and teachers might be surprised to find that their learners actually know quite a lot of english vocabulary already so if they don't know the first two or three thousand words of english it's really important that these words are dealt with first because these words occur very very often in english in in any language we have a small number of words which occur very often and which are really important for using the language and we have a large number of words which are not used very often these large this large number of words this vocabulary is important but it is not as important as the high frequency word so it's really important that learners learn the most useful vocabulary first because then they'll be able to use what they know more easily now let's move on from what vocabulary to look at how vocabulary is learned in a well-balanced language course vocabulary is learned across four equal integrated strands now integrated here means each of the four strands covers roughly the same material it should include the same vocabulary and ideally would include the same content material now each of these strands is equal so that means if you look at a language course then equal amount of time should be spent on each one of the four strands so a quarter of the time should be spent on listening and speaking listening and reading sorry and listening and reading means real listening and real reading and that that means using material which is the right level for the learners but reading in order to enjoy a book reading to get information listening in order to understand listening in order to really get the message of what's being listened to these these kinds of listening and reading are often called extensive listening and extensive reading and they are really important for vocabulary development it's possible for learners to read enough and to listen to enough to learn around about a thousand words a year if they are doing this with material which is at the right level for them so that means about a quarter of the time in a good english course should be spent reading graded readers which are very easy and at the right level for the learners and listening to material which is really easy and interesting and is at the right level for the learners i'm waiting for the day which i think will come very soon when listening material can be edited to get out the words which are not high frequency words and replace them with low frequency words so that the learners can listen to material which is at the right level for them in the same way as which they can read where the low frequency words have been taken out and replaced with high frequency words okay i see a few questions does anybody want to ask a couple of questions now before i continue gary can we handle that yep that's fine so if you guys want to put some questions in the chat i did see one earlier um we had a question from julian how about infrequent words such as lion and tiger etc no matter what use you make of english there will always be topic words which you have to make which you have to use if you're reading a story about a lion it's pretty hard not to use the word lion the main thing is make sure that these topic words which are which are not high f but make sure that they are repeated within the material so that they have a chance of being learned the big problem with low frequency words is that they are often not repeated in the material they occur only once and then they're not seen or heard again so i think it's okay to include topic words which relate to the particular topic being focused on but make sure that each of those topic words are repeated and if they're not repeated then see if you can just get rid of them any other question okay so we have some in the q a uh we have one so what can you do if you are working with students who do not have a good grasp of the basics that your curriculum expects them to [Music] well i think you could i think you should do what i'm telling you to do now and that is make sure that they have a good balance of opportunities for learning if they don't have a a very large vocabulary but a very small vocabulary then you need to use material which is at the right level for them now for english this is actually not difficult because there are graded readers which start at the 100 word level the foundation series of graded readers consists of books which are written using only 100 different words so it's not hard to get material which is at the right level for learners so that's what you need to do you need to make sure that they are covering the four strands with material which is at the right level for them okay one more question and then i move on okay so we've got one more from laura what do you think about giving vocabulary about a topic before a reading is it meaningful the research on this is not very encouraging the pre-teaching of vocabulary has to be done rather thoroughly in order for words to make the subs the following reading easier and that means spending two or three minutes probably on each word i would not spend much time doing pre-teaching of vocabulary except perhaps for some topic vocabulary that i think they might have great trouble dealing with i would probably let them get on with doing the activity and try to provide some supports such as a glossary or something like that during the activity pre-teaching takes quite a lot of time and the the research on the effects of deliberately teaching vocabulary also isn't very encouraging if you look at experiments on this after vocabulary has been taught by the teacher you're lucky if half of the learners can get it right on a test which follows the teaching and that's on a receptive knowledge test if you use a productive knowledge test you're lucky if a third of them get it correct i think it's not a bad idea to do a little bit of background knowledge teaching bringing in the vocab like that but it will just be the first meeting with the vocabulary but in general i wouldn't spend a lot of time pre-teaching i would rather the learners get on and experience the input itself okay so the first strand then of course where we would expect a lot of vocabulary learning to take place is the strand of input and that is learning through listening and reading and i call them strands because they have a strand as you know your hair consists of strands of hair i used to pull out a piece of my hair each time i taught a class to demonstrate what a strand was how something which is long and continuous in my present state i can't afford to do that so you'll just have to put up with my demonstration of showing you the strand rather than pulling out my hair the second strand in a well balanced course is a strand of output and that is learning through speaking and writing and teachers can design material which support the learners in their speaking and writing which gives them a chance to to use productively the words that they have met in listening and reading and having to produce these words and speaking and writing gives a much stronger knowledge of the words so about a quarter of the time in a well-balanced language course should be spent on doing speaking and writing activities where learners make use of the vocabulary knowledge and the grammar knowledge that they've met in listening and reading this speaking can involve things like prepared talks and many conversations doing some problem solving speaking using memorized dialogues when you begin to learn another language memorizing sentences is a very excellent way to begin because you can start using the vocabulary immediately i am actually very fluent in about five or six languages but i'm only fluent in a few sentences in those languages and when i speak to someone who speaks those one of those languages they think wow this guy is very fluent in fact i only know about 10 or 12 sentences in those languages but i have learned them very fluently because i want them to be able to produce them in output now your learners should be learning to produce the high frequency vocabulary that they know through speaking and writing activities and memorizing sentences and phrases is a very good way to start off this process okay any more questions before i move on it looks like we have a lot of questions so maybe if we have time at the end we can uh have a q a session yeah that's no try a couple now it's quite good if otherwise i don't want people to get left behind okay yeah so let's go with so we have one here from benjamin you said about children being able to learn thousands of words a year how many words a year do you think adults can learn because children arguably absorb quicker and better than adults native speakers of english up to the age of about it's up to their teenage years so let's say 16 or 18 learn about a thousand words a year and this then drops after they reach about say i think maybe 15 16 000 words this rate drops not because of lack of ability but because of a lack of opportunity because there are so few words which are repeated enough times to be learned i'm not saying that young children learn thousands of words a year young native speakers learn around about 1 000 words a year some learn at a slightly higher rate than others but even the ones learning at the lowest rate are still learning several hundred words a year children who learn english as a foreign language don't seem to match that and i think it's not because of a lack of ability but simply a lack of opportunity in that the courses do not provide enough opportunity for input and output which is realistic i think if language courses provided lots of input reading input so the children were reading and listening to thousands and thousands of words a year then they would learn a lot of vocabulary each year up up to a thousand words i also think that adults can learn a thousand words a year but you have to do lots of reading to do that if you want to read about this you can go to my web resources page and look in my publications and around about 2015 i think it was there's an article about how much input reading input you need to learn the first thousand second thousand third thousand words and so on like that and you can get information about the quantity of input needed for learning any other question yeah let's grab one from chat uh so we have one from meenaquan is deliberate learning involve or yeah does liberty learning involve memorizing and using the dictionary rather than assumption of the meaning out of the context uh you you're a step ahead of me but the answer is yes it involves using dictionaries giving deliberate attention to words and being taught words i'll move on now then to the third strand so the third strand is deliberate learning and this is what teachers and learners think about when they think of language classes they imagine the teachers standing up in front of the class and teaching them words and teaching them grammar and and they might imagine themselves doing exercises and course books and so on in fact this should make up only about one quarter of the time in the world balance course deliberate learning of vocabulary is very effective learning using flash cards with the word the english word on one side in its translation on the other side or using a flash card program which involves them looking at a word and then having to recall what the meaning is are very effective for learning vocabulary but this deliberate learning should only make up one quarter of the course time the other three quarters of the course time involve making use of the language through input output and fluency development so i think language courses should include deliberate learning but unfortunately most language courses include too much deliberate teaching and i think one of the ways in which to improve language courses is to cut down on the teaching and start increasing the amount of input and output and fluency development and there's plenty of research to support this the fourth strand of a course is the fluency development strand and in fluency development learners get really good at using what they already know in the fluency development strand there are no there's no new vocabulary no new grammar and largely familiar ideas but the learners get really good at becoming fluent in listening becoming fluent in reading becoming fluent in writing and becoming fluent in speaking in reading for example there are speed reading courses available you can find many free ones on my web resources page they're at the 500 word level i think yes the 1000 level the 2000 3000 academic word list level there are speed reading courses which help learners get fluent in reading the words they already know there are also many activities for fluency development in listening there's the activity of listening to stories where the teacher chooses a really easy story for the learners to listen to and reads it to them starting rather slowly repeating each phrase or sentence and as the story continues like a serial a few minutes each class the story gets a bit faster and a bit faster and the learner's knowledge of the story and the knowledge of the topic vocabulary makes it easier for them to understand as the story continues and the learner and then the teachers can then increase the speed at which they are delivering and reduce the repetitions so that by the time they get about halfway through the book that they're listening to the teacher is reading at a normal speech level in terms of speed one of my favorites fluency development activities for speaking is the 432 activity where learners work in pairs and one learner in each pair is a speaker and the other is a listener and the speaker talks about a very easy topic that they know a lot about in english and the listener just sits quietly and listens the listener doesn't interrupt or ask any questions but just looks interested and listens to the story and then after four minutes of this the teacher says stop and the learners change partners and the same speakers tell the same story again to their new partner but this time they have to fit it into three minutes and then after three minutes the teacher says stop and they change and then for two minutes the speaker has to tell the same story again to their new partner in their pair but this time has to fit it into two minutes and so by the end of the activity the speaker has spoken for four plus three plus two minutes so a total of nine minutes telling the story or the the description three times and each learner has listened to three different stories one for four minutes one for three minutes one for two minutes with a different partner and so this is really good for spoken fluency development and also helps the listening fluency development of the learners who are listening easy extensive reading is another fluency development activity where learners read graded readers which are way below their present level which are really easy for them but they try to read them quickly uh 10 minute writing is a very useful activity for improving fluency in writing and that is where learners can write about anything that they want to write about anything that they know a lot about and they write for 10 minutes where the teacher says go and the teacher says stop after the 10 minute period and then they count the number of words they've written and put them on a graph and then the next time they write they can continue with the same topic or write about something different but this time they have to try and write more words than they did before so a well-balanced language course then provides opportunity for learning and for vocabulary learning through input through output through deliberate learning and through fluency development and the really important thing to remember about these strands is that each strand should get roughly equal time in a course so if you're a teacher and you want to check whether you're putting the principle of the four strands into practice you should look back over your teaching over the last two weeks or a month and say well what activities that i do in this lesson what strand would i classify that activity into and how much time did i spend on it and you do a little bit of adding up like that to see if you're getting a roughly equal balance of the four strands i'll pause there for a few questions if you like yeah so going off of what you just said we had a few questions regarding i guess um the prioritization of each of these strands so we had kind of a question here of in two hours of week of english uh which strand should be prioritized and kind of a double headed question is it plausible to incorporate these four strands in a single lesson to optimize students lexical gain yeah you don't you don't have to incorporate them in a single lesson you can if you want to but there is no special reason to do that but in terms of prioritization there is no prioritization each strand is important and so you should get equal opportunity to learn through each strand so a quarter of the time on input a quarter on output a quarter on deliberate learning and a quarter on fluency development so prioritization is not an issue at all here each of those four strands needs equal attention any other question do one more before we move on um let's see uh well that's it sorry about this so do you think academic vocabulary should be taught separately from the rest of vocabulary no i think we're getting beyond children here but if we look at academic vocabulary academic vocabulary we divide up the vocabulary of of english in two major ways one way is to divide it up according to frequency and that is to say high frequency words mid frequency words low frequency words and we generally use d accounts to to decide what's the first thousand the second thousand third thousand if you're interested in these words if you look at my resources page you will find that the we have the head words of the first 10 000 words of english listed there for you to look at and use if you want to use another way of dividing up the vocabulary is to look at specialist areas of knowledge and to say well is there a vocabulary for academic study and there is clearly there is in the zero vocabulary a technical vocabulary for each subject and clearly there is and so we can focus on academic vocabulary and technical vocabulary as separate kinds of vocabulary but academic vocabulary and technical vocabulary come from the various frequency levels of the first thousand second thousand third thousand and so on and the reason for focusing on academic vocabulary is if you have a class of learners who are going on to do academic study in english in secondary schools or in universities then one way of quickly getting the vocabulary that they need is to focus on the specialized academic vocabulary so it's a good idea to focus on it if the learners have that purpose for learning english good okay we'll move on so we've now looked at the four strains and in the handout which goes with this there's several teaching activities which are mentioned if you look at my resources page you'll also find that there are many free videos short videos which demonstrate these teaching activities and so you can just click on them and watch for example learners doing the 432 activity or watch learners doing extensive reading our goal is to get about 40 different activities up on the web and free videos so that teachers can see them now we've looked at what vocabulary to learn and we've looked at the general course design and techniques of the four strands principle of making sure that the learners have a chance to learn through input output deliberate learning and through fluency development now let's narrow down and get more particular about vocabulary learn there are two things that really matter in vocabulary learning repetition and the quality of meetings with words the more often the learners meet a word the more likely they are to learn so that's why repetition is important meeting the word again and again and again increases the chances of it being learned there are various kinds of repetition i've listed them there in the powerpoint which is exact repetition where the word occurs exactly in the same form as and through the same listening speaking or reading writing medium as it occurred before or it can occur in a varied repetition that is where either a different form of the word occurs such as plural instead of singular or past tense instead of present or occurs in a context which is different from how it was met before when you learn words through flash cards or word card learning you are using exact repetition because you're just looking at the same word form and trying to recall the same first language meaning when you do extensive reading you are doing varied repetition because through studying extensive reading texts and other reading texts we have found that words typically incur in different contexts each time they occur some words occur in sometimes in exactly the same sentence as they occurred before but typically there is some change in the context and this is good because varied repetition is more effective than exact repetition both are useful but varied is more effective and when learners do extensive reading and extensive listening they get many opportunities for varied repetition now two other aspects of repetition whether it's immediate repetition or spaced repetition are very important this immediate repetition means you meet something and then immediately you look at it again or hear it again and immediately you hear it again so when you are studying word cards or the teachers teaching a word you get immediate repetition spaced repetition involves meeting the word again but a few hours later or a day later or a few days later spaced repetition is much more effective for long-term memory than immediate repetition this is one of the strongest findings in memory research if you want to use repetition to help learning use spaced repetition that is give attention to something now and then give attention to it again in a few hours time give it attention to it again a day later give it attention again a day after that and so on it's much more useful to space your repetitions than to do a lot of immediate hard hard work if you like concentrating doing it over and over again for an hour doing it over and over again for an hour doing exact repetition for an hour exact immediate repetition is not nearly as effective as spacing that repetition using the same amount of time but spacing it across many days or weeks so repetition is important and in any language course teachers should make sure that the same material is met again at least four or five times in the course if you're working from a course book it's really important that you go back to lessons that have been studied previously and quickly do a repetition of the material which was in part of that lesson if there was a reading text in the lesson go back to it a week later when you're on another part of the book and have get learners to quickly read what they read before or take an exercise from a previous lesson and change it in some small way so that the learners have to do it again one of the teachers goals in making sure that learning occurs is to make sure that the same material is met many times in a course so repetition is really important it's the basis for vocabulary learning and for most learning the second factor which is really important is the quality of meetings with words when you meet a word what do you do with that word at the moment that you meet and what i've done in the in the powerpoint is to list deepening ways of the quality of meetings with words simply noticing a word is the most superficial meeting with a word it's useful but it's not a very deep way of processing looking up a word in the dictionary is noticing hearing the teacher explain the meaning of a word is noticing this helps learning and it's a really good first step in learning a word guessing a word from context is noticing now if you want to really learn a word you must then go to deeper levels and the the next level is the level of retrieval and retrieval involves having to recall what you have learnt before so when you learners do extensive reading they'll meet a word that they don't know and either guess its meaning look it up in the dictionary or ask someone to give the meaning of the word then when they meet that word again they have the opportunity to try and recall the meaning that they met before this retrieval is really important for learning and it strengthens the connection between the form of the word and the meaning of the word now even deeper condition than retrieval is varied retrieval and we looked at that in terms of repetition and that is meeting the word again in a new context and having to retrieve or recall the meaning that the word had when you met it before an even deeper condition than retrieval is elaboration an elaboration involves some kind of analysis or association with the words so breaking a word into word parts is a kind of elaboration seeing the word as a word family with its related members is a form of elaboration of a word using a memory trick like the keyword technique is a form of elaboration to help remember a word and the final factor i've got in quality of meetings is deliberate study giving deliberate attention to a word by studying it on word cards is a way of adding quality to the meetings with words so if vocabulary is repeated and if the meetings with the words each time it is repeated is deep and thoughtful then vocabulary has a very good chance of being learned i think we should probably pause there for a few questions yep so going off of that one here so we have a question here in terms of space repetition is it effective for remembering low frequency words it's effective for remembering all words and it's not only effective for vocabulary it's effective for whatever learning you want to do spaced repetition has been researched across a whole range of learning situations learning ideas you know learning facts about the world learning vocabulary learning people's names whatever spaced repetition is effective for all of those kinds of learning do one more here what might be an optimal number of word re-encounters in order to sustain incidental vocabulary learning through listening or reading for example some suggest that six to eight times should be enough while others say 20 times or even more would be required yeah this is what we call the holy grail of vocabulary studies how many repetitions are needed for learning there's no easy answer to that but there is very interesting research about it the reason there's no easy answer is each word is not of equal difficulty when it comes to learning it depends on the relationship between your first language and english if if you're a spanish speaker learning english then a lot of words require very few repetitions indeed because they're almost the same word as in spanish some words are very complicated very irregular and complicated spellings so this requires more effort some words have concepts which are really quite difficult to understand and you have to really experience the use of that word in in a lot of different contexts before you come to a real understanding of what that word means so all words are not equal in difficulty and that's why we don't have a fixed number of repetitions but there's been very interesting research done by norwich schmidt and his students using eye tracking and what they do is they get learners to read a text and they use eye tracking software to see how long they focus on each word that they that they're reading and they can measure what fraction of the second or how many seconds are focusing on each word they find that with about around about somewhere between five and seven repetitions a word which is unfamiliar to the learners once it's met around about five or six seven times they the the amount of time spent focusing on the word is the same as the time spent focusing on already known words so this is quite clever research because it's getting sort of saying well if the learners meet a new word and then they meet it several times how long before it's treated as if it's a known word and it seems to be somewhere around about five to seven repetitions i think however that if you also back that up with a test you would find that their knowledge of the word is still a little insecure and that more repetitions would be much more much would be very useful in strengthening knowledge of that word so we're looking at a a very minimum of saying five or seven repetitions but i think we really need to be looking at something like 15 or 20 repetitions rob wearing wearing and takaki's study of of vocab learning from reading a graded reader found that after 15 or 20 repetitions some words were still not learned other words were learned but some words were not so you really have to have quite a lot of repetitions any other question yeah we're running down about 15 minutes is that going to be enough time for you i'm just checking there yeah yeah that's fine i'm going to get to the end okay all right so we'll do pull one question here from the chat last one does repetition vary according to the age and how intense it should be for little kids that's an interesting question i don't know if if there is a difference in repetition between learners of different ages it's an interesting research question uh if you're thinking of doing a phd that would be a really interesting question to investigate there'd be lots of difficult variables to control but i just don't know the answer to that my guess is that there would not be a difference between children and young adults and even the the relationship between age and learning is a difficult one but i would think that there shouldn't really be a difference but maybe there is uh what was the second part of that question how intense should it be for little kids how intense yeah well it should be spaced and so it repetition so spaced repetitive by intense i'm i'm sort of understanding that you're looking at immediately going into the word again and again and again that's not a good way of learning a good way is to do something with the word meet it in the piece of reading look up its meaning in the dictionary or talk about it a little bit with someone and then come back to it the next day so in that way it shouldn't be intense if intense has the meaning of should the learners be reading lots of material and listening to lots of material then yes very much so the more input there is the greater the amount of learning will be okay let's move on then to the final section how can parent teachers and parents support vocabulary learning number one make sure the learners are focusing on useful vocabulary i talked about this earlier on uh it's useful to know how many words your learners know teachers tend to underestimate how many words their learners know this occurs with both native speakers and non-native speakers and it's useful then to to actually get some of your learners to sit a test to see how many words they know um it depends on your attitude of the learners to test but when we test native speakers in new zealand secondary schools and primary schools we test them individually one by one and this takes a lot of time but one thing that we are sure of is that if we test them individually they are doing the best that they can do on that test when we compared testing learners and groups with testing learners individually we found that for about a quarter to a third of the learners their score in a group situation where they're all sitting you know answering a test without anybody sitting next to them they didn't do nearly as well as people of the same level did when they were had someone sitting next to them keeping them on task and doing the test so initially at least i would be testing learners individually with the teacher sitting next to them and making sure that they're giving it their best shot and using the best test-taking strategy so that's the first thing then find out how many words your learners know and make sure that they are focusing on the vocabulary that they that they need at that level of knowledge is it the high frequency words if it's the high frequency words they need to know is it the first thousand the second thousand or the third thousand if they already know the first three thousand words do they need academic vocabulary or do they just need to go on to the mid-frequency words of the fourth to fifth and so on if they're doing study they may need to be focusing on technical vocabulary second guideline encourage learners to do lots of listening and reading at the right level this is very very important one of the people who has done the most to encourage the uh the idea of the importance of quantity of input is steven crash you know over the years steve krashen has really pushed the idea of the importance of extensive reading for vocabulary i think he's right about that i disagree with him that this should be the major kind of learning in fact the only kind of learning that learners do but i think it's a really important part of the course recently rob waring and i did published a book on learning from extensive reading and we reviewed all of the research that was available to us and sorted out what we thought were the best pieces of research and reviewed them very thoroughly and there's no doubt that getting lots of reading input and listening input is a very good way of increasing vocabulary knowledge there's a few little techniques and strategies which can go with this listening to stories as a listening activity one of my favorite ones actually and i think not quite sure but i think there's a video about that the pause prompt praise procedure is quite useful and that is if you are working with a learner individually if you're a parent helping your children your child learn to read then you shouldn't rush in with answers when they struggle with words in their reading you should pause and then you give the prompt means give them a clue you know the first letter is or something like this and then when they get it right praise them so really what pause prompt praise does a little procedure is to make sure that learners have a chance to do retrieval and you might remember that retrieval is a really important quality condition for vocabulary learning the shared book activity where the learner where the teacher reads a book aloud to the learners and they they interact between teacher and learners about the book of reading of a graded reader is a really good activity for listening and reading input getting learners to do independent reading of graded readers if your learners are not reading graded readers and they know sorry if your learners know less than three or four thousand words and they are not doing lots of reading of graded readers then they're missing out on what could be one of the major sources of vocabulary knowledge for them if you want to make a single the single most important improvement you can make to a language course add an extensive reading program that extensive reading program doesn't have to be in addition to class time if you want to do it within class time you can that's great but there's tons of research showing that if you provide opportunities for an extensive reading course you will get lots and lots of language learning benefits from this the research is very clear about that the third guideline get learners to talk and write about what they have read or listen to get them to do retrieval so that when they talk and write about what they've read and listen to they're they're getting repetitions of what they've met before and they're having to recall their knowledge recall the words recall the meanings that they met before this is retrieval come back to the same part of the lesson several times sometimes doing exact repetition and sometimes doing varied repetition about a third of the time in a language course should be at least should be spent dealing with material which has already been dealt with before but dealing with it in a faster way or in a somewhat different way from how it's been met before quickly give the meanings of words when they are needed using the first language is good for doing this but keep most of the lesson in english there's there's teachers have getting been told that it's not good to use the first language in the classroom i can see the reason for giving that advice and that is the learner should get as much input in english in an english lesson as possible but giving the meanings of words through using a first language equivalent is a very effective way of teaching vocabulary and the research shows that this in fact compared with pictures and dictionary definitions and second language definitions and so on using the first language is by far the most effective way of communicating the meaning of a word develop fluency by working with known material with some pressure to go fast learners need to learn quite a lot of words a lot of vocabulary but you not only need to learn new things you need to learn them to a level in which they can be used fluently so fluency development makes up should make up one quarter of the course time dealing with familiar known material across the four skills of listening speaking reading and writing and pushing to go a little bit faster than would then the learners would normally be able to deal with this doesn't mean going faster than native speakers it simply means going faster so that you start to get to the speed at which a native speaker would be able to speak listen read write teach learners how to learn even very young learners should know the importance of repetition they should know the importance of spaced retrieval they should know the importance of varied retrieval they should know the importance of getting quantity of input and output they should know about the four strings they should know the value in analyzing words into word parts and making meaningful connections between form and men and they shall also know about the importance of learning high frequency words between low frequency rates this is what i mean by cost benefit at any stage of a language course the learner should be getting the greatest benefit they can from the cost of the effort that they put into that learning and this happens by learning words roughly in order of frequency levels i think teaching learners how to learn is very important because when learners can take control of their own learning then they can really learn without the need for a teacher being there and they can learn um outside of the classroom the final thing is teach learners about vocabulary word consciousness i haven't talked about this but there's lots of ideas about vocabulary that learners should really start to deal with and these are ideas for example that words occur in word families so that there are families of words which share the same stem but they have different prefixes they should learn about the frequency levels of words and all of this sort of stuff i've written about this in another book uh which i'll show you in the further reading about what every primary school teacher should know about vocabulary there's a whole chapter on word consciousness in that so i think what i've given here is eight guidelines for you to follow regarding the learning of vocabulary you can apply these guidelines whether you teach from a course book or you use your own material whatever it doesn't matter but it's really important that you follow principles like that so that learners get the opportunity to learn across the four strands okay i'm happy now to answer or try to answer any questions you want to ask so we have about a minute or so here so we can pick about one question um let's see we have just saw a question a second ago uh i think it was in the q a yeah so this one was a bit of a long one so when we have students we tell what they have what they have read or listened to we expect that they would use newly acquired words from the given input in their talk however this is not always the case that students often avoid using the words that they have not fully mastered yet should we still push them to use these newly learnt words in their retelling even though this does not appear to be an authentic task i my feeling would be that you probably should not push them and one of my phd students did some research on this with the idea of using words learned from reading in their writing and they found that as you said that learners were reluctant to use words that they didn't feel they knew well enough i think it's okay for learners to be brave enough to take risks but i also feel that if they feel uncertain about that i think it just adds stress by pushing them to use it i my guess is then that the activity that you're doing should really be based on material which is a bit easier okay and then do one last one here uh can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on visual scaffolding for vocabulary how much does it matter to have images connected to input well i think images connected to input can be a form of elaboration so i i think it can have a very positive effect on learning the only trouble is that you've got to really make a good connection between the visual input and the vocabulary for example having pictures and reading books has mixed effects sometimes it doesn't help reading and the learning of vocabulary because the learners are getting the meaning through the pictures rather than through the text and so there's some research which shows that in fact pictures don't make reading books better at teaching reading comprehension but i also think that having striking visual images where learners associate words can be a form of elaboration which makes words stick in memory so i think the effects are mixed and i think that it should be something that you use rather carefully so we'll go ahead and end it there if you guys have any other questions for paul you can feel free to email us at e-future and we can relay some of these questions to you paul if that is okay that you can possibly answer for them at a later time um getting close to the end here so just want to give these final information for all of our attendees here so thank you so much uh for joining with us um so just to give a big thanks again to paul nation for taking his time out for you know a lot of useful information for for all of you teachers out there hopefully you guys learned a lot i know i did it's great to have all these great questions and have them answered so please feel free to send some questions our way as well here is our webinar schedule again for the rest of the month we have two more uh webinars uh coming up uh the last two weeks of the the month of mostly circled around uh digital tools and uh doing things uh for online classes and digital resources so still be sure to register for those uh regarding the certificates and um and getting the slides uh this these are our partners that you should contact for certificates and for uh if you need or want uh pollination's uh powerpoint so feel free to contact these wonderful people here so these are our partners and for those that aren't in the countries listed here on the very bottom just contact us directly for all of these and again follow us on our all of our social media and all we have facebook and we have youtube the webinar will be uploaded to our youtube channel so for those that want to review all the things that were covered today uh we will be posting the webinar on our youtube channel so don't be don't be too worried that this is a one and done deal we do have it uh on our youtube channel very soon and for all of the updates and everything please follow us on facebook our facebook information is here i'll be sure to update all of our uh webinar postings so when the video is uploaded on youtube we will be posting the link on the september schedule and updating it that way as well so be sure to look out for that and i believe one of my colleagues did post the survey feedback form in the chat so please feel free to fill that out if you have questions for paul or for our future uh webinar uh hosts in the future you can put all the questions in there and send it to us as well as uh suggest any webinar topics that you would like to be covered uh in the future so please fill that out for us let us know what you think and what you would like from us going forward and so once again i would like to thank paul nation again for taking your time out today you know it's been a kind of crazy busy 2020 year but thank you for taking some time out to help the teachers around the world with regards to teaching vocabulary what they can do for their students okay so thank you all for for joining and we'll see you guys soon so take care and i'll put up the contact information one more time so if you need to take a picture of it or see it here we'll be signing off here so thank you again and stay safe everyone you