The most overrated things in TEFL Part One
Preteaching vocabulary
The case for the prosecution:
- I’ve had to train people on a “CELTA equivalent” course to teach three to five pieces of vocabulary, but if they ever asked why it couldn’t be two or zero I had no reasons for them
- Preteaching vocab horribly breaks up the staging of a reading or listening lesson, usually adding a long and distracting stage between getting their interest in a topic and letting them read or listen about it. By the time you get through the preteach they have sometimes forgotten what the topic of the lesson is!
- Those three to five words are very unlikely to be ones you would’ve chosen if you could’ve chosen any ones in the English language for that particular class, so why spend classroom time on them?
- If you just change the task a little, they can easily do it without needing to understand that vocabulary
- It takes away from what you are trying to teach them about not needing to understand all the vocab to understand a text
- Guessing what vocabulary they are going to have problems with is usually totally random, so why not just find that out at the detailed comprehension questions stage or when you ask them if they have any other questions?
- They are much more likely to learn the vocabulary if they ask you to explain it after they have come across it in the text (probably in the tapescript in the case of a listening) as they will understand their need for it
- If we believe in teaching vocabulary in context, why teach it out of context just seconds before they are going to see it in context? As an example of that, the most natural way of explaining it that first jumps into my head is often a sentence from the text, which obviously I have to avoid saving giving a future answer away
- They are almost always also unconnected to each other, making them even more difficult to learn
- No student ever complained that there wasn’t enough vocab preteaching
- In lessons I’ve observed, preteaching is often a problem and never a highlight of the class
- There is more than enough elicitation in most CELTA-style English teaching anyway, so why add another stage with it in?
- In my (very unscientific) experience from revising all the most difficult vocabulary later on in a course, students are much more likely to remember a piece of vocabulary in a specific vocabulary lesson than one in a vocab preteach
- It’s impossible to explain the reasons for the preteach stage to low level learners, and the fact that they are often confused by it is a sign of how unnatural it is
The case for the defense
- It’s quicker in terms of planning time to add a preteach stage than to redo the book’s comprehension questions
- It takes less paper to do a preteach than to print out your own comprehension questions
- It might make the teacher feel that they are “teaching rather than testing” while doing a reading or listening
- Uh, that’s it
If you are going to do it, here is my rule of thumb to cut down on it and choose the vocabulary well:
“Up to five or six words that students need in order to do the tasks (rather than to understand the text, which is a nebulous concept anyway), especially the first task”
Want to defend the preteach stage, nominate your own candidate for Part Two or even write Part Two as a guest piece? Comments below or emails through the “contact me” button please:
Tags: guest writers
April 19th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
…and how many parts will this series run to, Alex? ; )
April 20th, 2009 at 12:36 am
I agree, and I never did do much pre-teaching. On the odd occasion I did it went much as Alex outlines above.
I’d say if you have to pre-teach vocab the text/task are too hard for the level.
I prefer a simple gist task – perhaps as simple as 3 questions – What’s it about? Why is it important/interesting? [If neither why are we reading it??] What will happen next? (if appropriate). Then I get the students to use dictionaries or do a matching exercise to learn the vocab. Next, they can do the fiddly ‘test’ questions.
It’s nice to do a skills transfer activity – writing a summary from memory (using the new vocab as a framework) or retelling the story. Split readings are great and all too rare in coursebooks.
When I do preteach vocab I usually use it as a dictionary skill task. But I agree, it’s unnatural and awkward.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Could be quite a few, so if anyone wants to do a similar guest piece get in early before people lose interest in it!
April 20th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Why are you teaching the vocab?
If it will be tested at a later date and is one of the key reasons for actually doing the reading, do it properly and make sure the students really get to grips with it. Exploit its use in context to the full.
If it will merely aid understanding of the text, you could even go as far as giving an L1 equivalent to really speed things up.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Hit the nail on the head there Alex…
Anyone out there actually pre-teach vocab post-CELTA? Might be a survey in the making?
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Well, I guess I still pre-teach vocab :P You’ve got some great points here Alex and you made me question something I never thought about much before. That’s why I love these blogs. It’s the most development we can get sometimes.
I pre-teach for a couple reasons
1) To hit key words that the students will need to understand the text.
2) To eliminate the need to sneak peaks at dictionaries during the actual activity.
3) To create pronunciation recognition. There are so many times my students know a word, but can’t understand it in the listening because they pronounce according to L1 rules.
4) So my students aren’t overwhelmed by new words and shut down. Sometimes I like to challenge my students with something a bit tougher, but, if there is too much new vocab, they’ll give up on the task before we even start.
5) To get my students used to listening to definitions, synonyms, explanations, and sentences in English rather than trying to translate them. Bascially, I’m modeling what I want them to do in the future.
Honestly, I’d have to say I pre-teach vocab at least once a week. You’ve got me thinkin though. I think I’ll try to change that. I also create homework activities the day before, play word games, or actually do a vocab lesson prior to a main activity to get the new words in. Those are probably better and more useful than simply teaching it.
I’m glad you linked back to this or I would have missed it. Count one teacher as influenced :)
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:12 pm
All good reasons, and in fact people’s responses to this post and thinking on it more made me try a new way of pre-teaching by giving them vocabulary lists for the whole unit before we start it. I always expect my students to know every word in the book, including in the tapescripts, by the time we finish it, so that was a way of pointing out what vocabulary is likely to be difficult, useful etc so that they notice it when they read or listen (noticing being a huge vocabulary teaching buzzword) and so have two more stages where it could stick. Many people think you should never introduce vocabulary out of context, but I’m not entirely convinced by that.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
The best reason occurred to me at the gym a couple hours ago: so I don’t have to explain the same words to every student 25 times as they read a text rather than only explain it once.
On your comment, I am one of those people that doesn’t like to introduce vocab out of context. I think you’re right and it can be useful for noticing, but I have so many students that like to compile word lists with translations next to them and it’s so ineffective that I don’t want to provide them with an example of a method like that. I saw a post on this somewhere. It sounds like something Darren would write about, but I can’t find it on his blog, so no link I guess.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I think it’s like something I would have written too, but I can’t find it either. I like to be ineffective where I can though.
November 7th, 2009 at 7:44 am
“I am one of those people that doesn’t like to introduce vocab out of context”
But surely that is what pre-teaching is??
Anyhow, in summary, the post is called “overrated”, not “totally useless”. My philosophy of teaching is that people who do it should try and do without (That’s you Nick!) and people who don’t (That’s me!) should give it a go again, but obviously in a different way to how they did it before
November 7th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Did you mean this Nick?
http://www.livesofteachers.com/2009/10/10/what-does-it-mean-to-know-a-word/
Anyway, I used to pre-teach (after all, I did a CELTA). I also used to teach what Scott Thornbury calls ‘Grammar McNuggets’. I could whip you up a past perfect continuous lesson in a flash. But now I prefer to take a bunch of stuff in the room and let the learners make sense of it, add to it, manipulate it. Pre-teaching means that the activity is too difficult, or that the teacher doesn’t trust the learners, or that they don’t have confidence in themselves. They need to learn to deal with unknown vocabulary by ignoring it, guessing it, checking it, negotiating it… whatever. I am only there to pre-teach for 90 minutes a week, so what will they do outside the classroom when they encounter authentic texts / language?
But having said all that, Paul Nation is pretty keen on balance. And he is a chap who knows a thing or two…. http://languagelinks2006.wikispaces.com/file/view/nation,+four+strands.PDF