Vocabulary Development: Vocabulary Development

A foundational aspect of all children’s learning is oral language. Communication orally entails the ability to include four components of spoken language to incorporate, and build on, a child’s vocabulary and grammar. These four elements consist of the phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components. Development of a child’s language skills should form together resulting in literacy success later in life. In order to master the teaching of oral language, three strategies are used. These include, the use of open –ended questions, talking about sophisticated words and incorporating sociodramatic play in to lessons, which in the end, enhance expressive and receptive oral language skills. Fellowes & Oakley and numerous other literature sources explore the significance of oral language in the child’s development.

All students need direct instruction of vocabulary, but it is especially imperative for ELLs. They need much more exposure to new vocabulary than their native-English-speaking classmates. ELLs need to learn cognates, prefixes, suffixes, and root words to enhance their ability to make sense of new lexicon. Beginning ELLs and more advanced ELL students should actively engage in holistic activities to practice new vocabulary because learning words out of context is difficult for these students. If they memorize the meanings of the words on a list, they will not be able to use the words in their own writing or verbal production until they really understand the meanings. When vocabulary instruction includes explicit, implicit, and strategy instruction, students are repeatedly exposed to the target vocabulary in a variety of contexts which increases their individual vocabulary development and the other resources that help in doing so is the Semantic Mapping primary focus on visual relationships, which is helpful to students from all backgrounds.

i. The teaching assistant should help pupils to develop the vocabulary thus - language enrinchment.

The learning provisions for development in literacy are extremely important and can be reached by using their language skills. They learn to communicate with others through three main ways: they are Speaking, Reading and Writing. These three areas interact with each other and develop the Childs self-expression and imagination. They must be given the opportunity within all different subject areas to use and extend their language so that their thinking skills progress to a higher level.

Respond to prompts 4a–c below by referring to children’s range of vocabulary development related to the learning segment—What do they know, what are they struggling with, and/or what is new to them?

o Provide activities which promote the development of vocabulary and the enhancement of language skills.

Dahlgren, D. M. (2008). Oral Language and vocabulary development Kindergarten & First Grade. Nashville: Reading First National Conference. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/2008conferences/language.pdf

Yana is starting to attend a setting, however, she speaks little English (appendix one). This language barrier could affect Yana in all areas of development, particularly her social development as it will limit her verbal communication skills (Davies, 2011). As Yana has English as an additional language (EAL), she may find it difficult to communicate her basic needs with limited vocabulary- Schaffer (1926) views this as a crucial barrier as it will prevent practitioners from successfully meeting children’s needs (Schaffer, 2004). Schaffer (1926) believes that EAL is a barrier to learning, however, Vygotsky (1896) along with Chomsky (1928) believe that language is a skill that can be learnt (Graf & Birch, 2009). Therefore, if language is modelled by the practitioners then Yana should learn new words and soon form sentences which will support Yana in all areas of

The achievement of oral language is a normal development for the performance of most children. The child’s (ren) understanding to communicate will began to increase with age, however, it will not establish the growth increase process right away but it will contribute to the perfection progress as the children starts to read and transform into a more experienced reader. Learning and communicating more adequately

The Grammar Translation method is an old method of teaching a foreign language, it was used to teach classical languages such as Latin and Greek, that’s why it was called “the classical way” to teach a language, this method’s main purpose was to learn and value a language literature, it was also strongly believed that this using this way in teaching would develop the learners’ native language in speaking and writing as the ability of communication using the language learned wasn’t a target for using this method of teaching. As it was mentioned earlier this way was called “the classical way”, so was the roles of students, teachers and the nature of interaction between them either teacher-student interaction or student-student in this method they were traditional and classical, the teacher is the authority in the classroom and the learners follow whatever this authority says or does, they were mainly asked to translate a passage or a piece of reading from a language to another language, they were taught grammar rules and were asked to memorize them to give examples of these rules and for vocabulary learning they get taught words that are similar from the native language to the language learned, as for the nature of interaction inside the classroom is mostly about teacher- student interaction and student-student interaction is rarely used or initiated. The skills that that this method is aiming to enhance and develop are reading and writing because as it was mentioned earlier that the main purpose of this method is to understand and learn literature of the language learned, moreover the native language is frequently used in a grammar translation method class as it is clearly used by students to translate the foreign language to their language and vice versa. The evaluation or the assessment of what have been taught in this method is mostly done in

Although vocabulary is the sub-skill of a language, it plays a very important role in language learning and teaching. In fact, vocabulary is central to language and is of paramount importance to language learners. On the other hand, words are the building blocks of a language that are used to label objects, actions, and ideas. In other words, people cannot convey the intended meaning without knowing vocabulary. It is widely accepted that vocabulary is a very important part in English language learning because no one can communicate in any meaningful way without vocabulary. As McCarthy (1990) stated, the single, biggest component of any language course is vocabulary. Nation (1990) also affirms that vocabulary can be considered as the most important element in language learning because Learners think that many of their

In teaching and learning English, there are two aspects that should be concerned. The first one is the language skills such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The second one is the language components such as vocabulary, and grammar. These two aspects are taught in order to make the students achieve the ability in communicating both in spoken and written forms.

Vocabulary plays a significant role in English as second language learning process. For the majority of English as Second Language(ESL) learners, the ultimate goal of learning the language is to understand (read and listen) and communicate (write and speak) with little difficulty and the lack of sufficient vocabulary may be the constraint of such goal (Folse, 2004). As the bedrock of English and as well as language, vocabulary also facilitates the development of other language skills: lexical richness leads to the progress in the use of language, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing skills (Nation, 1994). Reversely, The improvement in such skills may enhance learners vocabulary size as the exposure to more learning materials improves the capacity to acquire new vocabulary. (The importance of learning vocabulary/ why vocabulary?)

I started learning English as a second language when I was in first intermediate. I still remember my first classes and my first teachers. I remember that my teachers changed frequently in the first year but all of them have much in common. All of them used grammar translation method. They used to write bilingual lists of words on board, then we, as students, were asked to copy these lists and memorize them by heart. All teaching concentrated on reading and writing skills, but there were no activities concentrating on speaking or listening. In addition, grammar rules were taught in that stage of learning the language as mathematics equations, and we were asked to memorize the rules as we

First of all, you need to build vocabulary. Building vocabulary involves learning the meaning of the words, their spelling, and pronunciation. Unlike in English, each word has a gender in many languages like French, Spanish, and German. You need to memorize the gender of a word in order to use it correctly. You also need to learn the conjugations of verbs and adjectives. That is where you cross the border between the vocabulary and grammar.