Vocabulary

Paul Nation and Laurie Bauer writing about the importance of teaching word parts

Paul Nation and Laurie Bauer

NEW 17.1.25

Paul Nation's 2024 article about principles of (vocabulary) learning

Paul Nation

NEW 21.2.25

Wong and Barcroft carried out two studies to find out if choral repetition assisted with vocabulary retention

Wong and Barcroft

NEW 26.2.25

Peta Baxter and colleagues (2021) delve into how we build our mental lexicon and what teaching practices this might suggest

Peta Baxter and colleagues (2021)

Norbert Schmitt has many of his journal articles available on his site

Norbert Schmitt

This 1997 chapter by Nick Ellis considers the importance of multi-word units (collocations, chunks, stock phrases etc)

Nick Ellis

A short 2022 article by Paul Nation about 'learning how to learn' vocabulary

Paul Nation

Nakata and Elgort (2020) explore the issue of spaced versus massed learning of vocabulary

Nakata and Elgort (2020)

Bower and Clark (1969) on the power of stories over traditional learning for vocabulary retention

Bower and Clark (1969)

A short research summary about instructed second language vocabulary instruction from the University of York OASIS database, based on Schmitt (2008)

A good overview of principles and practice by Norbert Schmitt

Norbert Schmitt

A short article by Paul Nation entitled Teaching Vocabulary. This contains practical ideas based on research.

Paul Nation

A summary of research into vocabulary learning from Language Teacher Toolkit

This 2020 metastudy, summarised by OASIS, found that learning words from lists or flashcards was more effective for later recall of those words than using gap-fill or writing exercises

This book chapter from Teaching Vocabulary to English Language Learners (Graves et al, 2012) covers a lot of ground, with reference to learning English, but relevant to other languages also

Graves et al (2012)

An article by Gonzalo Galián-López about automatising vocabulary knowledge, includes a few pedagogical techniques

Gonzalo Galián-López

A Paul Nation article about the principles for using extensive reading to help learners acquire vocabulary

Paul Nation

Gianfranco Conti explains how the "mental lexicon" is thought to function, with implications for teachers

Gianfranco Conti

A paper by Hilda van Zeeland and Norbert Schmitt about incidental vocabulary acquisition through listening (reading is also referred to)

Hilda van Zeeland and Norbert Schmitt

There are too many words in a second language to teach explicitly. Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter explain, with an example, the possible use of "narrow reading" to help learners acquire vocabulary incidentally

Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter

A 2020 study by Christian Andrä and colleagues supporting the use of gestures and pictures for word retention

Christian Andrä and colleagues

This paper by Elena Suberviola and Raquel Mendez examines the mental lexicon and strategies for teaching vocabulary

Elena Suberviola and Raquel Mendez

An example of a piece of research by Ehsan Rassaei (2015) into ways to best acquire vocabulary. Summarised in the OASIS database (University of York, England)

Ehsan Rassaei (2015)

This study by Marie-José Bisson et al suggests an advantage for vocabulary retention when pictures are presented with text during incidental learning

Marie-José Bisson et al

the abstract summarises the key points

This summarised study by Tatsuya Nakata and Yuichi Suzuki (2019) from the OASIS database examined whether it's better to do massed vocabulary or spaced vocabulary learning. They also considered if it's better to avoid presenting vocabulary in themed clusters

Tatsuya Nakata and Yuichi Suzuki (2019)

A 2022 paper by Mark Feng Teng about the value of multi-modal vocabulary learning (text/audio/video). Which combination is best?

Mark Feng Teng

A 2022 study by Zhang about explicit teaching of vocabulary through listening. The importance of multiple repetitions is highlighted, especially for students with lower comprehension skills

Zhang