3 ways to improve retention of vocabulary
Teachers work hard to make the meaning of new vocabulary clear to students during a lesson, but what happens after the lesson when the students go home? Have they retained the new words and are they able to recall them when needed?
I've often wondered what percentage of vocabulary a student is exposed to during a course that they are actually able to retain in the long term and recall when producing the language or when exposed to the word in a text or when listening. Let's say a student takes classes in an intensive English program five days a week, and on each of those days they are exposed to 20 to 30 new vocabulary items. By the end of the week, they will have been exposed to over 100 new words. Over an eight-week period, they may have been exposed to upwards of 1,000 new words.
This could be an overestimation since many of the words that a student is exposed to they may already know. The course or course book may also be designed in a way to limit the number of words a student is introduced to in a unit. There is probably some days where nothing new is introduced and students are given the chance to review and recycle words taught earlier in the week.
The question remains the same: how do we ensure that a student retains most or all of what is introduced in a course? Fortunately, there are a few easy strategies that teachers and students can use to improve the retention and recall of new vocabulary.
#1 use pictures
This is the easiest and most common sense of the strategies, and it’s based on good science.
Concepts, words, and images are all stored in separate places in the mind. Let’s use the example of a chair. The concept of a chair is a thing we sit on that usually has 4 legs and a backrest. This concept is stored in a separate place in the mind as the English word “chair”, or any of its alternate language equivalents, e.g. silla, stuhl, chaise, etc. Finally, the image or images of chairs are also stored in separate places in the mind.
In order for us to better remember the words for concepts, it helps to have as many conceptual links to these words as possible. An easy link to establish is the link to an image. This is called dual coding. When study the word with an image, you are creating links to the concept, to the L1, AND to an image. That extra link to the image will help you retain the word that much better.
This is true of concrete concepts, like a chair, and abstract concepts that you cannot see or touch, such as ‘love’ or ‘freedom’. It is good to use images when studying abstract concepts too. For love, you can show two people at a wedding or a parent hugging their child. As a fun exercise, get students to draw representations of abstract concepts and see how similar or dissimilar they are.
#2 use concrete examples
We should be striving to teach vocabulary that are relevant to the students and their lives. Connecting these words to concrete examples from their lives is another great strategy to help them retain these words. Concrete examples and experiences from a student’s life will not only provide a visual connection, similar to an image, but it will also help to establish an emotional connection.
Let’s look at the word ‘chair’ again. Get students to reflect on different chairs they’ve come across. Get them to think about the classroom chairs and how uncomfortable they are. Then get them to think about the most comfortable chair in their home, where they like to relax. Get them to think about the chairs around their dining room table, provided they use them. Perhaps they could think about the antique armchair they used to sit on with their grandfather. Although a chair is a somewhat silly example, all of these concrete experiences create an emotional connection to the word which will in turn help them to retain it.
#3 elaboration
After we’ve establish a connection to images and emotions, we can now begin to connect this concept to other concepts. This process is called elaboration. Let’s try to stick to the word ‘chair’ here.
When elaborating on the word ‘chair’, we begin to ask critical questions about chairs. Why do chairs have 4 legs? What is the physics behind that? What makes a chair more comfortable than another? Is it the materials or the design? What kind of chairs would you put in your dream house? And on and on.
Let’s elaborate on ‘love’. Why do two people fall in love? Can you love more than one person at a time or in a lifetime? What differentiates love from other types of bonds? What are various classifications of love, e.g. familial, romantic, friendly, etc.
Elaboration is a strategy that takes time to get better at. It won’t come easy to students or teachers right away. However, once students begin to make strong connections between concepts, they will be better able to retain the target vocabulary from the lessons and course.