Acquisition of vocabulary

Vocabulary building is an integral part of second language learning. Very often, my students feel that it is all about memorising though and as time passes, the words will be gone. Therefore, it is particularly important for students to have the learning strategies to make the words stick to their minds and develop the habit of learning on their own, or what we call it 'extension'.

The majority of my students do not know how to acquire vocabulary effectively. As their teacher, I have the responsibility to teach them the strategies to build their vocabulary. In fact, I am well aware that I tend to use my preferred way to teach new vocabulary, for example, synonyms and realia/visuals. In today's session, I have learnt some more, which might interest my students, such as pictograms and flashcards. In the era of e-learning, I should also incorporate more e-learning elements into my regular teaching (e.g. Quizlet flashcards as demonstrated today) and I believe vocabulary acquisition can be facilitated with the many free online resources.

There is one thing that is worth reflecting upon - the use of L1 translation in explaining vocabulary items. Most of my senior students resort to this strategy because of the level of difficulty of the reading passage. Since they don't understand most of the words in the passage, it seems that the only way for them to master it is to check it verbatim. It is such a dilemma to me when students ask me for an effective way to understand the reading material... However, to develop them as life-long learners, it is necessary to introduce to them the 'proper' ways of learning vocabulary items.