The Building Blocks of Vocabulary in Context

By Jack Boden

This article will explore an activity to teach vocabulary in context as a process with concrete subgoals. Breaking skills down into chunks increases student confidence and motivation by making the skills feel achievable. This concept stems from the ideas of Zoltán Dörnyei, specifically his theory of Directed Motivational Currents (DMCs).

A DMC is a motivational condition in which an individual has a solid goal paired with a plausible, structured path to achieving that goal. An individual who experiences a DMC will ideally view steps to reaching their goal as entertaining and effortless. DMCs promote feelings of accomplishment due to the nature of achieving a target goal. To incorporate this framework, I propose identification, context evaluation, confirmation, and context reevaluation as subgoals for teaching vocabulary in context. This structure can be organized into easily adaptable reading activities, one of which I will discuss below.

Before starting the activity, the instructor must first decide which reading material to use. The activity works with almost any material, so the exact type of material is not of great importance; but to make a recommendation, I suggest instructors select materials they are already using for other purposes in class. Doing so demonstrates to students the applicable nature of vocabulary context skills. Additionally, it allows for them to practice with a wide range of sources they are already familiar with. To begin the activity, students should identify a handful of unfamiliar words while they are reading the given text. They should be told to simply make note of the words and not consult resources to find the words’ meanings. Then, students should evaluate the context, analyzing the surrounding words and sentences to express an informed guess about the chosen words’ meanings and parts of speech. For students to express an informed guess, they should already understand structures like compare/contrast, figurative language, connotation, common affixes, etc., from previous lessons. For the context evaluation step, the students should have the option to work with their classmates. Peers can point out clues that a student had perhaps not noticed or may provide a new perspective that a student had not considered. Only after making their guess should students confirm the words’ attributes by using vocabulary resources such as corpora and learner dictionaries to find definitions and parts of speech. Finally, the students should reevaluate the context by going back to the text itself. If the student was correct in their initial guess, they should confirm the context clues that revealed the meaning. If the student was incorrect in their initial guess, they should reanalyze the context to find more suitable clues. The following is an example of what instructors could expect students to complete.

Example:

“Through my window there wasn’t much to see—dirt and dead snow and wheels rolling by in the street. It was warm but the grass was brown, except in lush patches over the underground steam pipes on the campus” (Erdrich, 10).

“As time went by she broke, little by little, into someone whose shoulders sagged when she thought no one was looking, a woman with long ragged nails and hair always growing from its beauty-parlor cut” (Erdrich, 7).
 

Word	Guessed Definition	Actual Definition	Clues
lush	empty, adjective	growing well, adjective	‘except’ is a comparison word Steam is water and water makes plants grow
sagged	relaxed, verb	sink from lack of strength, verb	A person getting “broke” is a bad feeling Her hair and nails are not taken care of, so her shoulders show she’s sad

 
The activity is easily adaptable, so repeating it multiple times in a semester using different materials like short stories, news articles, or novels is not only easy for the instructor but can show students the versatility of the skill. Making vocabulary in context manageable in small chunks allows for students to feel like they are well equipped to define vocabulary on their own. Therefore, students will be more likely to use this strategy outside of class and become successful readers in their future endeavors.

 
References

Dörnyei, Z. (2019). Task motivation: What makes an L2 task engaging? In Z. Wen & M. J.

Ahmadian (Eds.), Researching L2 task performance and pedagogy: In honour of Peter

Skehan (pp. 53-66). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Erdrich, L. (1984). Love Medicine. New York: Harper Perennial (pp. 7, 10).


Jack Doden is a master’s student in Linguistics with a TESL emphasis at the University of Iowa and is an ESL Reading TA instructor.