>> So Bea, can you tell me in your studies
as a graduate student, were you ever explicitly taught how
to teach vocabulary to your students?
>> No. The focus was on teaching grammar and on how to make
up specific kinds of grammar activities, structured input,
structured output, but never vocabulary.
That was never, ever, ever brought up.
We just kind of have to figure it out as we went.
>> Well I wouldn't say we were necessarily trained specifically
how to teach vocabulary.
We didn't have a chapter that was how to teach vocabulary.
Instead, what we had were different methodologies,
like ideas for teaching a variety of the language tasks,
a variety of the language functions.
So we would for example talk about input, structured input
or structured output and so a lot
of times those chapters would as examples talk
about how vocabulary acquisition works with structured input,
how vocabulary acquisition works in structured output
and instead what these chapters would do would be to talk
about methods people use and techniques that instructors use
to teach vocabulary ranging from lists of vocabulary
where the second language is on one side
and the first language is on another
and you're basically just looking at the equivalents
between both languages and it also talked
about for example using diagrams and pictures.
For example, drawing a Pinocchio to talk
about body parts and things like that.
But essentially the most important thing for us to learn,
to remember from all of these things was
that in fact what helps students with vocabulary acquisition is
that the ways in which you learn vocabulary are grounded
in meaning, something meaningful for them and there's a context
in which they can look at those things.
>> Not that I remember in my methodology course, no.
>> What instead was the focus?
>> We did a lot of communicative activities.
We did some grammar instruction activities.
We talked a lot about negotiation of meanings,
circumlocution, but it was at a more advanced level.
We didn't really work on like simple acquisition.