Universidad de Guadalajara

Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera

Module III: Principles and Practices of Foreign Language Teaching

Final Paper Replication of a Case Study:

My Ideal Vocabulary Course by Paul
Nation

Tutor’s Name: Dra. Liliana Villalobos González PhD Ed.

Name: Humberto Marino Ramírez

E-mail: humber_marino@hotmail.com

December 4th, 2014

The study I replicated in my context is Paul Nation’s: “My ideal vocabulary teaching course”, which is based on
Nation’s (2007) four strands: meaning focused input, meaning focused output, language focused learning and
fluency development. I have put into practice:

The first strand, meaning focused input, consists of a “Substantial extensive Reading Program”, as Nation calls it.
In this study I have put into practice the graded readers program with my 3rd secondary group. In my institution
there isn’t this kind of reading material and so I decided to look it up in the web. At first I had a hard time looking
for free graded readers and all titles were books with a price that would take days or even weeks to get to my
school. For this first stage of my reading program I have started using a free graded reader but in the future I plan
to buy new titles: I have already spoken to my principal and she told that I only need to tell her where to buy them
and she will give me full support.

The title I found on the Internet is: “Fire on the mountain” (700 words) by Paul Nation and talks about a young boy
in Indonesia who, after losing his family in a volcano eruption, undergoes many adventures until finding them
again. I think most of my teenagers will identify themselves with the main character because of his age and
because, through many trials, he finally has a happy ending. A possible disadvantage could be that there are few
illustrations on this book in black and white, without other colors, but I have solved this problem with other
resources that I have in the classroom: the projector, with which I can show images, videos and sounds about the
culture of Indonesia, volcanoes erupting etc…

The book level is beginner. I chose this level because, even though the group has many levels of English, I tried to
look for a level that would be appropriate for the most students in the group and I think this was the correct one
because nearly all of them understood the text. There were only a few of them who didn’t understand much or that
already knew all the words. The first time I started reading the book they didn’t seem very interested but I believe
that in the coming sessions, as they get to master the number of words for this level, they will be more motivated
and start reading for themselves.

Before the first session of the reading I asked them to look up the words they didn’t understand and try figuring out
their meaning in any way they could, including the dictionary. Some of them were humble and did many words but
others were lazy and proud and said they already knew most of the words. During the reading session I had them
read one sentence each, in English and Spanish, which most of them did very well. To prepare for the second
session I went over the verbs in the past tense of the 2nd page of the book, I gave them the meanings in Spanish and
told them to make memory cards with the present and past form of the verb. I have also had my 3rd and 4th
elementary students do word cards to remember vocabulary.

In the first strand Nation says that students should also receive a large quantity of input at the right level for them
through listening and that there are 3 major ways to do this: a) classroom management through spoken English b)
listening to interesting stories at the right level and c)extensive listening through the CD’s of graded readers. I have
given instructions and controlled the class in English, I have also made posters with class rules, my students made
banners that displayed the 5 rules of class (1.-Obey, 2.- Pay attention, 3.- Raise your hand to participate, 4.-
Respect others, 5.- Be quiet) with cutouts from magazines that relate to each one of the rules. After this, I have
practiced giving these instructions, that they already know, in English. Students really enjoy doing this kind of
project work: cutting, pasting, decorating, doing artwork; even the students who usually misbehave had fun doing
this activity.

I have read interesting stories for my students with the characteristics that Nation talks about: reading the story,
repeating sentences where necessary, writing up words on the board (to help the learners recognize them) and
speaking at a slow enough speed for the learners to comprehend easily, sometimes I even acted out and used facial
expressions to illustrate meanings from the story; I have paused and continued reading later to make them feel
engaged and excited about the next time that they will have the reading. Sometimes, when the level was too
difficult for the children to understand, I had to translate into Spanish and choose another book with an easier level.
I was amazed to see how the students understood most of the stories in English alone, especially when I used the
projector to get them see the images of the book for the lower levels. Some of the students were very interested,
even when I used only English, these students were the ones that have a high level of English but on the contrary
the ones with lower language level had a hard time understanding the story and some got distracted and bored.

In the 2nd strand Learning Through Meaning-Focused Output, Nation points out that content based language
involves learning a subject like history, math or science while learning the language. He mentions the many
benefits of this kind of learning: vocabulary is learned thematically rather than semantically and this makes it much
easier, it provides many opportunities for understanding, applying, criticizing and relating ideas to various other
kinds of knowledge; the learners develop background knowledge that increase the opportunity for guessing new
words from the context. According to Navas (2010), it’s important to choose a topic that it’s interesting to students
so that they can be more interested in the class.

Shulman1 (1986) identified three components of pedagogical content knowledge: 1.- knowledge of a subject;
2.knowledge of children’s existing knowledge and beliefs about the subject; and 3.-knowledge of effective ways to
teach this subject to children. In other words the first thing a teacher needs is a: broad knowledge about various
subjects and content: science, social studies, literature, math, music, geography if he doesn’t have this information
about the world how will he be able to transmit it to his students? Also a teacher must be aware of what his
students know about the topic he’s going to teach and their beliefs regarding the subject matter. A teacher who
doesn’t ask his students about what they already know about a subject will have a hard time teaching content that
requires previous knowledge, also, a teacher who knows about his students beliefs and attitudes toward various
topics will be careful to avoid boring themes and will encourage content that is exciting for students. Finally the
teacher must be able to engage his students thorough pedagogical and didactic skills.

1
In Hedges/Cullen (2005)
In the replication of this study I decided to put into practice the content based learning and I used the 3 components
that Shulman mentioned. I decided to teach my students about Thanksgiving Day this last November 27 th. I
already knew about this celebration because I experienced it in a foreign country so this was Shulman’s first
component: knowledge about a subject. I also put into practice the second component: children’s knowledge and
beliefs about a subject. I asked them what they already knew about this party and some of them told me that they
had heard it’s a celebration in the USA. They had a good attitude about this topic.

And the last component, (using effective techniques to teach) was put into practice by teaching in an engaging and
fun way: I gave them worksheet for them to color, cut and make a small storybook about the story about the
pilgrims and Indians in the new land giving thanks to God in the first harvest. I also showed them a video about the
story in animated cartoons so they could have an idea of how they should color the worksheet. While we watched
the video I read in English and Spanish and taught them words in English. I did this because they were 3rd and 4th
year elementary kids with very basic English and they wouldn’t have been able to understand everything in
English. When I have advanced students I can say everything in English but the same CBI (Content Based
Instruction) theory says that using only English shouldn’t be done with elementary students. Finally in some
classrooms the students brought food and made a party similar to this American Festival.

The 3rd strand Language-focused learning promotes the use of strategies like memorizing word-cards to learn
vocabulary, guessing from context, using word parts to help remember words, using dictionaries to help vocabulary
learning, learning multi-word units and doing intensive reading. As I mentioned earlier, I asked my students to
make and memorize word cards and I am sure that this has helped them a lot, especially on the graded reading
we’re doing. I also told my students to review them in their free time. My goal is to learn 25 words per week.

I have also put into practice the strategy of ‘guessing from context’, I gave some students a worksheet where they
had to read various sentences and determine the meaning of an unknown word using context clues or their prior
knowledge. After that, they had to explain what clues in the sentence helped them determine the meaning. People
typically acquire much of their L1 vocabulary by guessing the meaning of new words from the comprehensible
contexts in which they are set. However, recent studies, Folse (2004), have found that this method is less effective
for L2 vocabulary acquisition because L2 beginner learners may not know many surrounding words of a certain
context. They consequently do not have enough clues to make accurate guesses about new word meaning, and
therefore cannot develop their vocabulary in the way L1 learners do.

I gave the worksheet only to those students who had an intermediate level but a girl in the 3rd secondary group
wanted me to give her the worksheet because she wanted to have the same work as her friend. She didn’t realize
she was a student with beginners’ level and when she looked at the worksheet she was confused and couldn’t
understand much. That’s where I realized I had made a good choice: beginner students should not be given this
kind of exercises yet, teachers should wait until they have an acceptable level of English in order to look for the
meanings of words in context. Beginner students can be given more basic exercises in order for them to figure out
meanings from contexts.

Steele (2005) mentions different ways to approach the multi-word item difficulty in learning English. One of those
approaches is to group the multi word items through lexical verbs also known as phrasal verbs. In order to
understand more words in the graded reader I did an activity to learn multiword items: my students looked for
phrasal verbs that had the words: “up”, “down” and “look” within in the text. They had to underline all the
occurrences in the text and write in their notebooks the phrasal verbs in English with their meanings in Spanish.
Some students did the exercise very easily but others needed more help. I think this kind of exercise is very
important to make my students aware of the verbs used in the English language.

Finally the 4th strand in Paul Nation’s Proposal of a course: Fluency Development, which should be done with
texts and topics largely familiar to the students (soccer, homework). It is better to have separate fluency
development for each of the 4 basics skills in English learning: reading, listening, writing and speaking. The
characteristics of fluency development activities are: message focused, involving very easy material, involving
pressure to perform at a faster pace than usual and involving reasonably large quantities of language use.

Once my students had managed to understand a graded reading of 700 words, I did a fluency practice on listening
with a graded reader of 200 words and I thought they would do just fine but when I started the activity I realized
that most of the students didn’t understand much by only listening, in fact only 2 kids were interested. These
results showed me I need to give my students more listening comprehension activities because I usually give them
more tasks that involve writing. I think I will have to study the graded reader that we’ll be listening and once we
have done so I will try again fluency on listening. In subsequent occasions I will definitely use more easier input
for them. In the following activities I gave them easier input and got better results.

To foster speaking fluency I prepared a board game for my students called “Gone in 30 seconds”; when the
students landed on a certain square they had to talk about a topic like: “the last time you played a game or sport”,
“the presents you got last Christmas” or “a place you went to last year” for 30 seconds and if they couldn’t think of
anything to say or if they stopped talking before the 30 seconds, they had to move back to a previous square. I did
this activity as a group game and it only involved the more confident students who go to extra English classes in
the afternoons. I really liked this activity because I realized that some of the students who usually behave badly
have very good speaking skills and instead of interrupting the class, they had a great moment talking and talking
about themselves and at the same time providing valuable input for the rest of the class. This activity was
successful because it had the characteristics that Nation mentions and that every fluency activity should have:
message focused, involving very easy material, involving pressure to perform at a faster pace than usual and
involving reasonably large quantities of language use.
To increase reading speed I had my elementary students read very easy texts, 40 words in total, I recorded their
time and asked them questions about the readings. On this occasion I used easier materials to read at the right level
of English for my students. This helped a lot because they were able to read and understand more. I recorded their
speed and accuracy and these are the results I got: Carmen did the reading in 23 seconds and was able to answer 2
and a half questions correctly, Emilio did 20 seconds and got 3 answers right and finally Eduardo did 17 seconds
but answered 2 questions correctly.

The results are very interesting: Carmen is a very smart girl and learns everything I teach her quickly but she
doesn’t go to extra English classes in the afternoon. She was the one that took the longest time but she got almost
all the answers right. Emilio was in the middle of the kids with a time of 20 seconds and got all answers right. He is
the one that goes to extra classes in his time off. Finally Eduardo was the fastest of all three kids with the least time
but when I asked him the comprehension questions he got the lower right answers compared to the other children.

From these findings I reach to the conclusion that even though a longer reading time is not desired, it is sometimes
a good investment if the child can have a better understanding of the text. On the contrary, a faster reader, although
sometimes preferred by teachers, doesn’t always work since he usually sacrifices understanding to get a faster pace
of the reading. The most desired case by teachers is Emilio’s: using a moderate time to do the reading but
understanding almost all of the text. The results are not a coincidence since Emilio goes to extra English classes
every day. These results shed light on a long known fact about English teachers: the longer the exposure to the
language the better the fluency the students will have.

I also did “writing fluency” with my students with basically the same characteristics of the other fluency activities:
very easy topics and time controlled. I told them they should write as many sentences as possible without worrying
too much about accuracy but rather on communicating. Nation says these characteristics should be here since this
is an activity focused on fluency.

I gave them approximately 3 minutes to write as much as they could about a topic they had just read and
commented. For starters Emilio, the one who takes extra classes, did the job in half of the time the others needed
and was able to add a new sentence from scratch: “They are happy”. The other 2 wrote what they had just read in a
previous story. Emilio and Eduardo made grammatical mistakes when they didn’t add the “s” to the verb in the
present simple with the 3rd person singular: “He like play” they wrote. But my greatest surprise was that Carmen
scored better than the other ones on accuracy by writing correct sentences like “Angela lives in Brazil”. Of course I
was not evaluating accuracy but this reminds me of something I have learned at the meile: learners of English
grammar score better on accuracy abilities and acquirers of the language are better on fluency tests. In this way I
used linked skilled activities (as Nation calls them), starting with reading activity, then speaking and finally a
writing activity. When students do different activities in a row they have a better control of the language and
content involved in the 3 activities.

There are some very important principles that have permeated this Nation’s ideal vocabulary course. A balance of
the four strands: meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused, learning and fluency
development. While putting into practice this course I have had a balance of these 4 strands and I intend to keep on
doing it in the future. The next principle is comprehensible input: as far as it was possible I chose material fit for
my group’s heterogeneity and made decisions based on what was best for the majority of the group. The easiest
input should be used in fluency activities while forcing students to do things in a faster way (output principle).
Finally the principle of autonomy says that “learners should be encouraged to develop the skill and motivation to
take responsibility for their own learning.” I think this is the foundation of this course a teacher motivating his
students to learn English, when this happens they will spend lots of time in the four strands and have a successful
learning.
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