Some traditions in language teaching are very hard to shift. Two key ones, as I see it, are teaching with a grammatical syllabus and setting vocabulary to learn. I want to look at the second and suggest five reasons why vocab learning (and tests) are a bad idea. 1. What does knowing a word mean? Paul Nation has for many years reminded us that knowing a word is much more than about knowing what it means or how it translates. A bilingual translation of an isolated word is a starting point (and is of course useful), but there is much more to it than this. As well as meaning, we need to know about FORM and USE of words. Form refers to aspects such as spelling, morphological form (is it a noun, a conjugated verb, an adverb based on an adjective?), what it sounds like (phonology) and how its sound relates to its spelling (phonics). USE refers, for example, to other words which commonly go alongside a word, namely collocations (think of what appears when you start a Google search) and, at a m
This is the fourth and final part of this mini-series of posts based on Charles Dodson's 1967 book. Each post has been based on a chapter but this one, though I will refer to elements of Chapter 4, is mainly a reflection on what we have seen so far. Chapter 4, which is brief, considers the role of the technology being used in the late 1960s, namely the reel-to-reel tape recorder and language laboratory. He does not have an awful lot to say about these, but essentially sees the role of these as replicating what a teacher would do using his method. One value he sees with the language lab is that the students can work at their own pace. He suggests how exercises might be designed to maximise the number of 'listening and speaking contacts', as he likes to call them. He quickly returns to his main arguments, however, notably that second language learning is unlike first, except for infant learners. (At this point the notion that only young learners had access to natural language