Kate Harris

Welcome to the EAL/D conversations podcast. My name is Kate Harris, and I am the EAL/D Education Advisor for K-6 with the New South Wales Department of Education. Today I am once again joined by Luke Nolan, who is one of our EAL/D Education Leaders. So welcome back, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Thanks, Kate. Good to be here.

Kate Harris

Last time we talked about what vocabulary is and how students develop their vocabulary. But today we're going to be looking more at some of those teaching strategies that can be used to support EAL/D learners to develop their vocab. But I thought before we talk about teaching strategies, it would be really useful for us to think about well, what makes strategies effective? In other words, what are the ideal conditions for learning vocabulary?

Luke Nolan

Great. So there's two factors to consider repetition and quality of encounters. So for repetition, the more times we encounter a word, the more likely it is that we will learn it. This is supported by plenty of research, but also seems like common sense. One question that people often ask is how many repetitions are needed to learn a word. There's no magic number simply because it depends on so many other details. Seven seems to be a popular number and might be useful as a rule of thumb, but it really depends on the learner and the context. Now repetition is more effective if it includes spacing and retrieval. Spacing is a delay between word encounters that allow time for the chemicals in the brain to make new connections. And retrieval is where the learner needs to find the word in their memory. Every time we retrieve a word, the link is strengthened between the new word and the other words in our long term memory.

To make repetition more effective, we also need to present words in a variety of contexts. For each repetition, the more deeply the word is processed, the more likely it is to be learned. We're talking here about the second factor. I mentioned quality of encounters, as EAL/D teachers when we plan for these quality encounters with words, we're thinking about using message abundancy- giving the same content in a variety of ways, using oral language and using communicative tasks where we scaffold students to use new words in meaningful contexts. Remember that in our first language, we learn thousands of word families very effectively before we learn to read. This is mainly because oral language provides a really rich and supportive context for learning new words. So it makes sense to think carefully about how we use oral language to support our EAL/D learners to develop their vocabulary. So to summarise the ideal conditions for vocabulary learning, we need to provide students with a learning environment where they can encounter new words repeatedly in a way that's spaced, requires retrieval and provides quality encounters.

Kate Harris

You brought up some really good points there, Luke, and I think when you talked about the importance of context and having those opportunities for students to have quality encounters. That's really important, particularly for EAL/D learners, as they need to understand how words are used across a variety of contexts, as context can often change the words that we use and the meaning behind them.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right. And that really speaks to something important for EAL/D learners, which is that they need to develop not just their volume of vocabulary or the number of words they know, but they need to develop their depth of knowledge about the words that they do know.

Kate Harris

We had a bit of a look last time, Luke at the depth of knowledge around words, and you talked about how, when we learn different words there's a continuum of our understanding from I've heard that word but don't really know how to use it to really understanding a word and then the different varieties of that word. So in terms of being able to support our students to develop a depth of word knowledge, what are some effective teaching strategies that teachers can use to be able to support this?

Luke Nolan

I'm going to structure my advice here around four big ideas from an excellent article by Stephanie Chung called Research based vocabulary instruction for English language learners. You can find the link in the further readings list, and I really recommend giving this a read. The four big ideas are number one rich language experiences, number two word consciousness cultivation, three explicit teaching and four word learning strategies. So the first big idea is rich language and word experiences. Learning should be fun. Learning a language should be fun, and when we talk about rich language and word experiences, this includes engaging with these fun diverse quality reading materials appropriate to students levels, interests and background knowledge and modelling and guiding discussion and discussion of new vocabulary. It's important that we read to learners and have discussions around texts.

Research shows that both primary and high school students benefit in vocabulary growth when the teacher reads aloud to them, especially when the teacher briefly explains the meanings of new words along the way. Once new words have been introduced, plan opportunities for students to use them for communication in small group activities. Students learn vocab more effectively if it's required in order to complete a task. So communicative activities such as barrier games and jigsaw reading can be excellent ways of developing vocab. Remember to use stories, games and songs. These can be really engaging and provides spaced repetition and quality encounters that we need for effective vocabulary learning. Now another way of providing rich language experiences by using extensive reading or wide reading programs to increase the volume of vocabulary that students are encountering. For this to work, we need to make sure the texts are comprehensible for the students. Graded readers can be useful here, and we also need to support students by building their field knowledge and teaching strategies for deliberately learning new words when they encounter them. It's also worth using extensive listening in the same way.EAL/D learners need practise listening. And there's good evidence that extensive listening can support vocabulary development because again it provides that volume of exposure to vocabulary. Um, that can support incidental learning. Now the question to ask ourselves is, are we giving students the opportunity to experience repetition or recycling of vocabulary in different language modes in a way that's integrated with meaningful, engaging activities.

Kate Harris

Just before you go on there, Luke, you mentioned right at the beginning the importance of reading to students for both primary and secondary students. And I think this is something that, as teachers, we do quite often, particularly in primary school. But it also highlights the importance of choosing quality text to read to learners to make sure that they are hearing that new and interesting vocabulary, and that there are those opportunities to be able to unpack and discuss new words with them.

Luke Nolan

I think you're exactly right about how this happens in primary school, and it's all about modelling good reading behaviours and apprenticing students into the behaviours that make up effective reading. And this can be something as simple as reading to and with the students and thinking aloud. Now this is something that you find in high schools as well to different extents. But because the subjects become a bit more specialist and discreet from each other in high schools, sometimes it requires a bit of a conscious effort to maintain the same approach to modelling reading behaviours for students across the KLAs.

Kate Harris

I guess to Luke, when you're reading to students, it can also help them with your second point, which is building word consciousness. Would you like to explain a little bit about what it means to build word consciousness?

Luke Nolan

So this is the second big idea, which is building word consciousness, and that means students awareness of how words are used in different contexts. So to cultivate word consciousness, we might use activities where students look forwards beyond the classroom, for example, they could collect examples of target words in a journal and then in lessons they could share the words and discuss their context.

So we want to use activities like this to get students excited about words and support them to reflect on and develop the depth of their word knowledge. Here's an example from when I was teaching a year 10 English EAL/D class. I had a great opportunity because I supported the same class in science, history and geography as a co teacher. When I was co teaching, I noticed that the same tier two vocab was popping up in each subject. For example, words like criteria, impact, external, analyse and so on. Now, at the start of each week in English lesson, I started teaching 10 tier two words a week and made it a competition over the week for students to notice the words in other subjects. This is really good for engagement. Students showed real motivation here, and there was some rewarding moments where you could see them making connections between how academic language is used across subjects. It's also worthwhile thinking about the potential to tap into student's first language resources. I found here that simply having a curious approach and asking some simple questions can lead to really interesting reflections. For example, you might ask students if you translate this to or from your home language. How does the meaning change? Or what words do you have in your home language that have no English equivalent? I've used both of these questions with older learners in group work tasks, and the conversations we've had were very worthwhile and interesting and really reinforced for the students that they have these valuable linguistic resources they can use- their home language for learning and exploring how language works.

Kate Harris

And it's really great to be able to tap into student's first language because also creating those connections, which is something you mentioned earlier, is really important. And when students have a strong home language, they're not only creating connections between words and their meanings, but between words in English and also words in their home language and the similarities or maybe some of those subtle differences that you mentioned as well, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right. So our memories work by making by building these connections and students who are multi lingual, actually literally using more of their brain because those connections exist between English words and like you said, the words in their home language. Um and so they are sort of more complex in that way.

Kate Harris

And within the example that you provided too Luke, You talked about how you introduced students to a range of tier two words and got them to go and listen and find when they could hear those words or see those words being used in other subjects, which I think links in nicely with the importance of once we become conscious of those words, we also need to think about how we explicitly teach them to build meaning too.

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's right. And that goes to something that's very important, which is explicit teaching of words. So this is the third big idea here. A lot of vocab learning is incidental, but here we're talking about deliberate learning of carefully selected target words. The first thing we need to do here as teachers is select words that need deliberate attention and practise. Our criteria for selecting these words depends on the needs of the students, the requirements of the curriculum and the frequency and usefulness of the words.

We might choose technical academic vocabulary, but it's important to also teach everyday words or tier one words, because this is where EAL/D learners often have a gap in their knowledge, and these words are essential as a foundation for understanding more academic registers. So how many target words should we teach? And how often should we introduce new words? Again there are no magic numbers. How many words you introduce depends on the context and the students remembering that you need to plan for the words to be recycled in varied context with opportunities for spaced retrieval. I have found that about 10 words per week has been ideal for some classes, but it really depends on your context. Now, once you've selected the words, you need to present them for the first time in a way so that students can immediately or very quickly understand the meaning. Home language translation and visual support can be helpful here, as is providing a plain English meaning which you can write yourself, or you can find using a learner dictionary. So these are dictionaries that areespecially written for language learners using plain English definitions. When you first present a new word, it's also good to provide some examples of sentences using the word in different ways. This can support students in understanding different forms of the word, and the examples also provide useful models for speaking and writing activities. I've found that it's also useful to point out other aspects of the words, such as how many syllables it has and which syllables are stressed. Other words in the same word family and the parts of the word the root morpheme and the affixes is and how it relates to those other words as well. So all of these details can help students to develop depth of word knowledge.

Once you've introduced the word, you should straight away get the students doing an activity where they use the word so that they process it. You might, for example, ask them to classify the words into groups. This is a good one to do with flash cards, and it doesn't really require a lot of preparation other than just making the cards. You could also ask students to make a set of new words into a story or to respond to true or false statements using the words or to tell about a personal experience related to the word that can be a really good one. For example, if you're introducing the word criteria, you might ask students to talk about a time they bought something special that they've been saving up for and what criteria they used to select what they bought. Models and sentence stems here can be useful. And if the students are working in groups using the word in an oral task, this can be a great opportunity for formative assessment. Next, you need to provide practise over a period of time. So this is activities giving the students the chance to practise recalling and using the word. Quizzes, flash card games and barrier crosswords are all good for this, especially if they're fun and you can work them in as a quick starter and get students working in groups and using oral language. If you have the advantage of being in one classroom the whole time, adding words to a word wall can be an excellent thing to do, and you can then point to the words, and weave the use of them into the dialogue of your lessons. So it gives students plenty of practise. And, of course, as part of explicit teaching, we need to be using effective assessment. With group work there there are plenty of opportunities for informal formative assessment. We can also use quizzes and summative assessments.

There are a couple of considerations for assessment design that I want to point out. Remember that it's important to develop not just breadth or volume of word knowledge, but also depth. Students might be able to identify a word, spell it and pronounce it. But do they know how to use it in different contexts? Do they know different forms of the word? Could they teach the word to another student and teach them how to use it? Now this leads us to think also about self assessment, which can be really worthwhile. It's a good way of raising students metacognitive awareness, their awareness of their own word knowledge and strategies they can use to learn more about words. I've found that a useful strategy here is asking students to rate their own knowledge of each word on a scale ranging from never heard of the word, I've heard of it, but I don't know what it means, I can use it in a sentence, I can teach the word to a friend. Now, the point about assessment and metalinguistic knowledge leads us to the next aspect for an effective EAL/D vocab program, which is the need to teach word learning strategies.

Kate Harris

When you were talking about explicit teaching then Luke, at the end you also mentioned the importance of assessment and having those opportunities for continual assessment to be able to gauge a student's understanding and knowledge of these new words that they're learning in terms of their depth of understanding. And I think that's really important for teachers to be mindful of as sometimes when we're teaching vocabulary, we might assume that a student understands by what they produce in class, but, do they really have that depth of understanding and pinpointing those opportunities for assessment can be really beneficial in testing to see whether they have actually got that?

Luke Nolan

Yeah, that's really important to remember and the idea that sometimes we might make assumptions about a student's proficiency based on what we hear them producing in one context but we really have to think to ourselves: Do they have a deep understanding of these words that allows them to use them in different ways? And do they really understand what the meaning is that they're producing or engaging with?

Kate Harris

That's a really great point. So we might move on now to the last of the big ideas, which was teach word learning strategies. So can you explain what you mean by this?

Luke Nolan

So this is all about teaching skills so that students can learn about new words independently. Now, one common word learning strategy that, uh, you'll see around a lot is using context clues to infer word meanings. Something to remember here is that this strategy really relies on a lot of factors to be successful including the text complexity, the familiarity of the content and the student's English language proficiency. So because the strategy of using context clues to infer word meanings really relies on students already having enough vocabulary to infer the meanings and understand the context, it's best taught to EAL/D students who are not beginners. It's an important strategy but it needs modelling and guidance and a good awareness of the students level of English language proficiency. We can also think about teaching dictionary skills, including the use of bilingual and learner dictionaries to check inferences. Dictionaries contain a lot of useful information about words, including pronunciation, different forms and examples of use, and teaching learners to use dictionaries can help them to independently develop the depth of their word knowledge.

The important thing here to remember is that dictionary skills really need to be taught explicitly. Another word learning strategy that can be very effective is morphological analysis. Morphology is the study of words and their parts and the smallest parts of the words which are called morphemes. These morphemes include root words or base words and prefixes, which go at the beginning of the word and suffixes which go at the end. So, for example, the adjective happy is a root word. We can make the word unhappy by adding the prefix un, and we can make them noun unhappiness by adding that suffix and s to the end. The idea of teaching morphology is to equip students to analyse unfamiliar words. It's a good idea to start by looking at base words and the most frequent prefixes and suffixes. In a similar way to whole words morphemes are best selected for teaching based on their frequency and usefulness. And in English, for example, the 20 most frequent prefixes makeup, 97% of all prefixes. So if we target these, we can really boost student's effectiveness in their ability to learn unfamiliar words. As with every strategy for EAL/D learners, we, of course remember that morphological analysis will be most effective when taught with words in meaningful context and using the model to guide an independent framework and providing students with plenty of opportunities for using oral language and group work to support their learning. Some simple games that can be played in groups include sorting morphemes into categories and building words and using cards with base words and affixes. A good starting point if you're looking for resources to teach morphology, is the New South Wales Department of Education, Literacy and Numeracy Vocabulary in Context resources.

You can also check out the DoE digital learning resources hub for some ideas. And there's the Victorian Department of Education Literacy Teaching Toolkit, which also has some excellent resources for morphology. So to finish up, there's a lot to vocabulary teaching for EAL/D which can maybe seem a bit overwhelming sometimes. But you can't really go wrong if you remember to make sure that you provide students with those four things rich language experiences, word consciousness cultivation, explicit teaching and word learning strategies. Now all the way along we need to remember that for effective vocab learning, students need repeated quality encounters with words. Most importantly, learning about words like all learning should be fun.

Kate Harris

As always Luke you've given us lots of things to think about, and you've given us lots of great teaching ideas and strategies to be able to support students to develop their vocabulary. I like that you ended with the point that like all learning, learning vocabulary and developing vocabulary should be fun. And those examples that you gave of using communicative tasks, using games, learning through songs and rich text can support that and can support teachers to ensure that students are enjoying the process along the way. So thank you once again for joining me today.

Luke Nolan

Thanks. It's been a pleasure.

Kate Harris

And thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the conversations podcast.

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