Teaching Vocabulary

This was a topic I was a bit worried about since I didn't think I taught any vocab in class.  I never do any activities like those shown in Harmer.  Usually I simply point out the words that students need to know for the class and leave it to them to memorize the meaning.  The book gives the meaning to all of the words through teach test mark type exercises.  Generally the meaning in found in the context of a reading exercise and the students use that to connect the word to the definition in some sort of word and meaning matching exercise or through sentence completion via fill in the blanks.   Even with these exercises I usually tell my students not to worry about infrequent and confusing idioms that have small applicability.   I always makes sure they all have the correct answer, but that is about as far as the lesson goes.

At least I thought so.  Nation points out how much more involved teaching vocabulary is.  After going over some of my lessons from today I noticed that although I don't spend much time on giving meaning, I do spend a lot of time on use and form.  I had never considered this to be a part of vocab. 

One lesson I have been working on this week was count vs noncount nouns.  A major part of the lesson was the use of some and any.  I had the students produce their own questions and statements about count and noncount nouns stressing the need for correct usage of some and any.  I tried to get in as many of the ways to remember previously learned words so I added an extra writing component to the activities today.  The task was that they had to come up with 5 sentences about things they had and 5 about things they did not have.  Once that was done they had to ask others if they had any of the items they needed.  This is something that I feel is practical and useful, and both some and any are common in English speech.  It made the students make a lot of connections and I think it largely avoided interference. 

In my other level I worked on  the pronunciation of can and can't.  A lot of them say them in a way that makes the two words indistinguishable.  I went over how can sounds more like the con in bacon and taught them the importance of stress on the word can't.  This was only spoken . 

Previously I would not have thought of these lessons and exercises as vocab, but now I know better.