Which of these words do you recognize:    borage, bugloss, ragwort, teasel, tutsan?  If the answer is none, you shouldn’t feel a failure.  Most British adults probably wouldn’t know them either.  Here’s a clue. They belong to one of these categories.

A early musical instruments  

B Shakespearean insults

C wild flowers of Britain and western Europe

D tools and materials used in hat making

E architectural features of  Saxon churches

Puzzles may be fun ….

For those of you who are intrigued enough  to carry on with the puzzle, here’s your second clue - the addition of a higher frequency word to the set. 

 borage, bugloss, daisy, ragwort, teasel, tutsan

And that probably ends the puzzle for you -  borage, bugloss,  daisy, ragwort , teasel  and tutsan are all wild flowers of Britain and western Europe.  And in case you are interested, the word bugloss means ox’s tongue, from the ancient Greek – βουϛ γλωσσα. Who knows why it got that name. It doesn’t look much like one but the leaves are rough and perhaps feel like an ox’s tongue.

… but are they always worth the effort?

Can you now incorporate this set of words in your vocabulary? Probably not.  Because you still can’t match the words to the plants. Until you have  seen a picture of a tutsan or an actual sprig of  tutsan,  you still won’t know what precisely the word tutsan stands for.  Furthermore, you may feel that  this is not a very useful set of words to know because you are not that interested in plants.  But for the purposes of argument, let’s assume you and your English-speaking friends or students are interested in plants. Even so, you still may not be able to use the words on the list in a conversation, because some of the plants do not grow in your area.   And there’s another  problem. When you have found out which words go with which plants, when you have discovered which of the plants do grow near you,  and when you have assembled a friendly circle of English-speaking plant-lovers, you still may not be able to memorise and learn the words.  But let’s say you do spend time repeating the words and mastering  the pronunciation, you still may not find it that easy to generate a lot of  conversation with just these words. Dialogues like “Is it a teasel?” “No it isn’t. It’s a tutsan ” and “Have you got teasels in your country?”  are fairly self-limiting.

Choose your words carefully

This points to an important rule for teaching vocabulary – first identify  the words that are going to be most useful to your students.  Many English dictionaries highlight the 3,000 most commonly used words.  And some exam boards provide handbooks listing high usage words that learners are expected to know at various stages.  It’s a good idea to use these when you decide which words to teach students, although you should be ready to supplement them with words of lower frequency but which are important to your students’ needs.  It would be more helpful to teach children who love stories the words dragon, monster, mermaid, giant and princess, for example, before you teach them the words frying pan, saucepan, sink and oven. 

A whole set, please, if it fits!

It’s easier to present and teach words in sets because teachers can more easily record the sets they’ve taught than the individual words. But for sets to be generative, they need to be taught in an appropriate and fitting combination of grammar and functions. Teaching animal words  alongside comparatives and superlatives, for example, would allow young students to produce sentences like Mice are faster than cats, Cats are nicer than dogs, For me spiders are the scariest animals and The whale is the heaviest animal. Similarly, teaching words related to the countryside:  fence, gate, flowers, hills, river, lake, for example, will combine well with modals can and must. Students will be able to read and understand an advertisement for an adventure camp – You can go riding in the hills. You can go fishing in the river and lake-  and rules for the countryside – You must shut gates after you. You mustn’t pick flowers or write on trees. You mustn’t break fences or climb walls.

What’s the theme? And are we ready for it?

Sometimes it’s useful to teach word groups that are thematically linked. If, for example, you want to talk about honesty with children, some of the issues might be telling lies, keeping secrets, cheating in tests, stealing. But if you are going to talk about stealing you may want to have first taught words related to money:  change, coins, pocket money. So it’s important to plan the order in which you introduce vocabulary themes.

 Less is more

How many new words should we teach at a time? We don’t want to overload our students so probably 15 to 20 per lesson. The important thing is to make sure our students encounter those words often enough to be able to recognize and/or use them, depending on whether we want them to be part of their passive or active vocabulary. And we don’t just want our students to see and read the new words, we also want them to hear them and write them. Repetition, revision and recycling of vocabulary is key to learning vocabulary. As  teachers we can help by keeping track of words our students have seen and heard,  and recycling them both in our materials and in our classroom vocabulary. 

No harm in showing off!

In general children like to be given an opportunity to show their knowledge. Many of them will know some of the words in a textbook, from previous schools, from TV and from their own reading.  Don’t explain or translate new words straight away. Give them the opportunity to show their knowledge by matching words to pictures.

And now we want our freedom

It’s important to give learners strategies for becoming independent in their acquisition of active and passive vocabulary through reading and listening. The single most important approach they need is a willingness to guess the meaning of words from context. Once they are in the habit of doing this, they will become increasingly independent and acquire a big passive vocabulary.  One way you can help students to guess the meaning of words from context is to provide several sentences with the same word in different contexts. So if a student reads “There are lots of teasels growing here”, they will know that teasels are plants. To add to their knowledge of a teasel’s characteristics, you could give them the sentence: “ I scratched my leg on a teasel in that field and now it’s bleeding.” But here’s an example more appropriate to the age group. Students read in a text, accompanied by a picture, about a hotel in Scandinavia built of ice: “It is only open from January to April and then it starts to melt.” The students know the meaning of ice from the picture. They may not associate April with being the time when icy weather ends because of their own climate, so may not immediately guess the meaning of melt. You can help them by offering another context for the word, for example: “If you leave chocolate or butter in the sun, it melts”.   

Sensible guesses …

We can give our students a number of tips on how to make sensible guesses. They need to be trained to check if words resemble or are derived from another word which they already know.  So, if, for example, they know the word fish and come across the phrase go fishing in a context that shows it’s a free time activity, they should manage to work out the meaning.  If they know the word hair, and they come across the word hairy describing a spider, they should be able to deduce the meaning. Similarly, they need to be encouraged to recognize Greek cognates in words like problem, drama, theatre, magic, dragon, microscope, energy, angel. Think bugloss and βουϛ  γλωσσα! Etymology can be helpful.

… and how to make them

Another way of promoting independence is to teach common prefixes and suffixes. Students need to know, for example, that the ending  –er is sometimes added to verbs to denote a person who does that activity (reader, writer, builder, worker). Similarly, if they are taught the prefix re- and its meaning of again, they will be able to form some useful words: rewrite, reuse, redo, for example. Of course Greek students, in particular, will be familiar with the concept of a prefix having a habitual meaning since this is such a feature of their native language. 

Finally we can encourage student independence by teaching students some useful vocabulary acquisition and learning techniques. We can help them with dictionary skills by explaining to them basic symbols like (n) for noun and (v) for verb. And we can show them that making a word web is a good way of acquiring a set of related words.  We can suggest mnemonics like remembering teasel because the word teases our memory, or because it sounds a bit like the Greek for what page τι σελιδα. To give an example more suitable to the age group, the noun swing sounds like the word Sphinx, so perhaps tell students to imagine a Sphinx sitting on a swing.

Now to test some of these ideas! Without going back to the beginning of the article, can you remember the names of any of the wild flowers? Which ones?

The non-botanical examples in this article are drawn from Cosmic Kids 1 and 2 by Olivia Johnston, published by Pearson.

About the Author

Olivia Johnston was born in Libya and grew up in the Middle East. She has a degree in Classics (Latin and ancient Greek) from Cambridge and a PGCE in TEFL and EDC (education in developing countries) from the Institute of Education. She has taught EFL in the UK, Italy, Algeria and Morocco.

She has been writing EFL materials full time since 1980. She has written for primary, secondary and adult students but most of her textbooks are for young teens. Olivia is the author of Pearson’s new course Cosmic Kids 1 and 2.

"I love creating reading puzzles and, although I am not at all musical, I enjoy writing song lyrics. I also like showing students new strategies that they can use inside or outside the classroom."

Olivia lives in London. Her hobbies are gardening, ceramics and learning languages.