How to Teach English Vocabulary In English Classes

How to Teach English Vocabulary In English Classes I. Teaching the new words in the English environment.   As we know, children learn to listen and talk first when they learn their mother language. That’s exactly we should do in teaching. Our students seldom speak English out of the English class, so we must make full use of each minute in the class to speak English. Our text books are well arranged by different communicating functions, and we can easily make many conversations according to the target vocabulary. In my English classes, not only do I always use the classroom English, but also the students are encouraged to used English to describe everything, with the least help of Chinese. I am ready to offer help when the students meet some new words that they don’t know, even they never appears in our textbooks. People get familiar with the strange things at their second sight, as the Chinese saying says, students will get familiar with the new words after they listen or speak them a few times. So sometimes, I was surprised to find that I need not to teach a number of the new words, because the students had used and understood them before!II.  Teaching the new words in components."S-t-u-d-e-n-t, student; d-o-c-t-o-r, doctor ...", some of the English teachers used o get the habit of enjoying the loud voice from the classrooms in the mornings, and appreciate the students’ hard working in reading English words loudly. But, seldom have they thought about it. Is it a useful or efficient for the students to memorize the new words?  My answer is "NO!". You may ask for my reasons for the answer. Well, we can recall how we learned the Chinese characters when we were young. Did we read the Chinese characters stroke by stroke loudly? Maybe this is too far for you to remember, so just have a look at the kids, how do they memorize their mother language naturally? I did an experiment to show it for my students. I wrote the character "镓" on the blackboard quickly, which I was sure that most students had never seen them before, and after a second, I erased it. Then I asked my students, "Do you know what was the Character I wrote on the blackboard just now?" Most of the kids said "JIA", which was correct. Then I asked, "Do you know its meaning?" More than half of the students put up their hands, their answer was " a kind of metal. " Of course, the answer was right. Next, I ask the students to write down the character on the paper, and more than 90% of them wrote it down correctly. Next I asked the students, "Why could you read and recite the Chinese characters that you had never seen them before?" The students answered actively, "because it begins with the part ‘钅’, it means a kind of metal"; "because it has the part ‘家’, and we can know it read as jiā. I showed my satisfaction to the clever answers. My next question was, "The character stayed on the blackboard for just two or three seconds, how did you manage to remember it in such a short time?" The students answered that the character was made up with two parts,  ‘钅’ and ‘家’, which they were so  familiar with.  Seemly the students completely stepped into my "trap".Then I asked, "Do you think it is easier for you to memorize it by reading 镓 stroke by stroke like "撇、横、横、横、折、点 ..."? The students laughed. Then came my most important question, "Then why do you read the English words letter by letter?" So far, most of the students agree with me on learning a Chinese character. But how can we do in English? Does each of the English words has its etymons? The answer is true.I ) To teach English words by prefix and suffix.As we know, most of the prefixes has its meaning when they are added in front the English words. For example, we put dis- before a verb to make its negative. So, when we learn like and dislike, able and disable, we can give the students some more: "What’s the negative for appoint, appear and agree?" Of course, we can remind other ways of turning a word into its negative, by using "un-, im, in-" and so on. On the other hand, the suffixes are much more abundant. Let’s take the word "act" as example:  act  n. 动作 actor n. 男演员 actress n. 女演员 action n. 活动 active adj. 活跃的 actively adv. 活跃地 activity n. 活动           II ) To teach compound wordsMost of the languages have their rich and colorful history, so does English. Do you know the word "husband"? It seems quite simple, while it is compounded by two parts: hus and band. "Hus" means a lady who is not so serious in her life, and "band” means control or tie, so can you guess what "husband" mean? That’s someone who ties a lady, it is husband! Is it something interesting?Some of our students get a headache at long English words. For example, you may ask your students: "Can you spell the word internationalist? " I guess most of their answers are no. Then you could teach them part by part: inter-: 交相的  nation: 国家  -al: suffix to make a adjective ---> international 国际的  -ist: 专家，者 Then we can easily understand the meaning of "internationalist": someone who deals with the relationships between the countries.III. To learn English words by guessing the meaning in reading.Sometimes, we have difficulties in understanding a word by studying its prefix, suffix, and also it doesn’t look like a compound word. What should we do? Of course, we can use a dictionary, but you don’t always need to do that, for we can guess its meaning. Some of my students made up their mind to study English well, and they did. They got some reading materials to help improve their English. But the first and the biggest problem they committed was the new words. Some of them uses dictionaries each time when they met a new word, but soon they felt tired and bored, and to continue their studying became harder and harder. Then I asked the students to try to guess the meaning of the new words according to the lines before or after them, instead of looking up them each time. Let’s take the following as an example to explain my ideas:Ventilation，as you know，is a system or means of providing fresh air . It plays a very important part in the field of engineering.What does Ventilation mean? We can understand that it is a system or means of providing fresh air , and d dictionary is not necessary here.Here is another example:The new tax law supersedes，or replaces，the law that was in effect last year.What does supersedes mean? Just look at the phrase next to it before you get worried about it: or replaces, it may means something like replace.According to the different levels of the students, I divided the reading materials into two main parts: intensive reading and extensive reading. Only a few of them belong to intensive reading and needed to be read and studied carefully, meanwhile, the others are only needed to be read fast and briefly. To my surprise, the students can always learn much more words or phrases by the extensive reading without inquiring the dictionaries or the teacher.IV. To learn English words by ignoring them.We can’t understand all of the new words in reading. Since we still can’t get the meaning of them after attempting in the regular ways, and it’s not so convenient to look up all of them in dictionaries, why don’t we just ignore them? As we know, a child seldom uses a dictionary in reading his mother language, but he can also grasp the main ideas. So we can also pay our attention to the interesting stories or knowledge, and put the annoying new words away. Living in the Information Society, we can always get enouth things to read. In this way, we can read a lot, without getting much too annoyed. I have ever encouraged some of my students to read some story books, even full-length novels books，telling them to ignore the words that they really didn’t know. Some weeks later, they told me that they had finished the reading. And to their surprise, they had learned many words and phrases from the books, without asking any one or using the dictionaries. The most important is that they learned them with the pleasure of reading interesting things they love, and this made them attempt to read more.So read as much as possible and ignore the new words can make reading more relaxing and pleasant, and it is really a excellent way to enlarge your vocabulary.Surely it is possible that we can find more effective methods to study English vocabulary, for example, we can teach the new words by playing games, by listening or singing English songs, by watching English TV programs, by writing emails, etc. Most of them are much more interesting and more natural for the students than simply reading the vocabulary lists and copying them over and over, or just spelling them letter by letter. But the most important thing we English teacher should do is that how we can find the most suitable methods to teach our students. When your students find it easier to learn English vocabulary, you may find it easier to teach them English. So remember, a natural way is an effective way.