The Importance Of Teaching Vocabulary

Ebbinghaus (1885) discovered that when we learn new information, we forget exponentially. And he tested his memory and showed that the more time passes, the more memory decays unless it is repeated. The forgetting curve above represents that how memory retention decays over time. When we really learn something, we need time interval and repetitions. This is called spaced repetition. We can learn and memorize something to repeat it several times in the best timing before you forget it.

Teaching vocabulary
Direct vs indirect/should vocabulary be taught? Nation (2005) stated that “deliberately teaching vocabulary is one of the least efficient ways of developing learners’ vocabulary knowledge but nonetheless it is an important part of

Don’t bring in other unknown or poorly known related words like near synonyms, opposites, or members of the same lexical set. What aspect should be taught?
However, sometimes teachers may want to spend time on a word. Nation (2005) suggested that “time should be spent on high frequency words or words that fill a language need that learners have”.
Then, how to know what aspect should be taught? Nation suggests that it is useful to consider the learning burden. When finding out the learning burden, you would consider mainly three aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; meaning, form, and use. One of the most common learning burdens for English learners in Japan is pronunciation. Especially ‘r’ and ‘l’ are difficult for them since Japanese does not have these sounds. Here are some examples from my experience. When I stayed with a host family in America, they could not understand my pronunciation of ‘curry’ and ‘oil’. Elementary school kids have this problem as well. I have observed an English class for elementary school students for three months, and I have realized that most of the students cannot pronounce ‘twelve’ correctly. Therefore, teachers need to find learners’ learning burden and give useful