Greetings to everyone
Are you teaching TOEFL preparation and feel that your students get discouraged when they try to expand vocabulary? In today’s newsletter, you will find some useful tips and resources that will help your students improve their vocabulary and reach their academic and professional dreams using English.
Teaching TOEFL vocabulary: tips and resources
A good knowledge of general academic vocabulary is essential for all four sections of such test as TOEFL. The reading and listening sections both have specific vocabulary questions that check understanding of vocabulary in context. Rubrics for the speaking section include "effective use of vocabulary" and rubrics for the writing section include "appropriate word choice and idiomaticity" The speaking and writing sections of TOEFL also require candidates to read academic texts and paraphrase or summarize them in their own words. As well as knowledge of academic vocabulary, one will need to be able to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words by using context and applying knowledge of word roots, suffixes, and prefixes.
HOW TO SELECT?
Firstly, TOEFL comprises vocabulary from main academic subject areas:
- arts
- life science
- social science
- physical science.
Although candidates are not expected to have specialized content knowledge, they are expected to have a good understanding of the content-specific words that are commonly used in all of these academic areas. These are not all the words they will need, but will give your students a starting point for expanding their vocabulary in each area.
The Academic Word List (AWL) is another criterion for choosing which vocabulary to teach for TOEFL. This is a list of 570 words that are most commonly used in academic contexts. The selection is based on samples of academic texts from a wide range of subject areas and includes general academic words that are commonly used in all subject areas; it does not include subject specific words.
If the student knows the General Service List, or GSL, which is considered to contain the 2,000 most important words in basic English, and then learns the AWL, his/her understanding of the vocabulary found in academic texts will increase by 10%. This is important, because research shows that “If, instead of learning the Academic Word List, the learner had moved on to the third 1,000 most frequent words, instead of an additional 10% coverage there would only have been 4.3% extra coverage.” (Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
HOW TO TEACH?
A good TOEFL class starts with a basis of a general English classroom, and is then spiced with TOEFL-specific exercises and training. Practicing English in use is a key to a good TOEFL classroom, because the TOEFL is all about using the language, not knowing the rules or memorizing vocabulary.
Students should be speaking, writing, reading, and listening constantly. There is a time and a place for fill-in-the-blank exercises, but they are less helpful for a TOEFL class than they are for most other classes.
And keep focus on academic material wherever possible. The majority of the TOEFL is about university-lecture-type topics, so that is what your classroom should use, too.
There are 5 easy steps to follow:
1. Create categories
| Make a list of specific categories with your students that are relevant to their lives and the TOEFL test. Categories may include (but are not limited to): Education, Career, Business, Relationships, Family, Sports, Religion, Politics, Environment, Health, Food, Culture, Travel, Leisure etc. After you have your categories, create sections under each category, e.g people, actions, places etc. Fill out the categories with the existing vocabulary. Now it is time to add new words and to learn them. |
|---|---|
| 2. Select words | Choose a category. You can select new words from reading and listening practice material. Organize vocabulary into sections. |
| 3. Define new words |
Begin by telling the students to try and guess the meaning of each word. Then turn to the dictionary. Use a monolingual English (English-English) dictionary to get used to thinking in English. Only use a bilingual dictionary (to check the meaning in L1) if it is absolutely necessary.
Once they have found the dictionary definition, tell the students to create their own definitions. Don’t forget to check for synonyms and antonyms.
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| 4. Use in context | Words don’t stand alone. They are used in the context of sentences, texts, audio, videos and conversations. |
| 5. Review |
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*You can learn how to play “Jeopardy” here.
USEFUL RESOURCES
Words in Context The website provides a comprehensive collection of words used in published literature. Some subject areas include the life sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law. You can use it to create your own materials for practicing use of English.
Professional Word Web The website is divided into different sections featuring words that occur frequently in business and financial texts, engineering reports, legal documents and social work papers. One section deals with idiomatic expressions used in newspaper articles and informal texts. Each of the sections presents a series of passages with the target words with focus on Meaning-Form-Pronunciation and their use in different contexts. There are short exercises that will help reinforce the meaning and usage, and a recycling game to test word meanings.
Visual Thesaurus The program creates semantic maps of words and provides audio support, color-coded meanings that indicate parts of speech, and multiple definitions included for each vocabulary item. You can use it in your classroom or with individual students for both homework and class-work.
Vocabulary in EAP The website by Andy Gillet offers a selection of vocabulary to learn: from GSL to Specific Subjects and less frequent wordlists with headwords, word families, and definitions. There is a section on Vocabulary Building with common rules and examples, and a Learning Section where you can find out more about vocabulary learning techniques. You can also find some exercises there.
English Vocabulary Exercises The Academic Word List (AWL) is divided into 10 sublists of word families. Each of these sublists contains 60 words, except for sublist 10, which contains thirty words. When studying the sublists, one should attempt to learn the various derivations (the verb, noun, adjective and adverb forms + variants) for the word families given. For the exercises given in this website, the word families for each sublist have been further divided into six groups for ease of study, with three separate gap-fill exercises for each group. Ideally, students should work through the three exercises for each group, and should complete all the exercises for the six groups of a given sublist before going on to the next sublist. Some of the exercises will include different derivations for the words given.
From Grade Education
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