Your concern is well-founded.  Vocabulary items need to be selected, contextualized during presentation, practiced repeatedly and recycled whenever possible.

SELECTION:  Your teachers need to have selection criteria for those vocabulary items they set for their students to learn.  To name some, we consider  ‘high frequency’ (How often is the word used?), ‘receptive or active vocabulary’ (Are vocabulary items to be comprehended only or both comprehended and used?), and ‘appropriateness’ for learners’ age and level.

PRESENTATION:  The use of visual elements is helpful to ‘define’ some vocabulary items.  Images provide a context but so does a storyline or, even, a mere collocate.  Providing context reinforces the meaning. 

We use the term ‘vocabulary items’ instead of ‘words’ to emphasize the point and practice of presenting vocabulary as ‘words with their collocates’ or as ‘word phrases’.  As research on how the mind works tells us that we learn language in chunks, rarely do we learn one word at a time, our teachers must present and require learners to practice an entire vocabulary item and not a lonely word.  For example, a junior class is learning a Fruit Lexical set:  orange, apple, banana… The teacher can show them a sweet orange, an apple for the teacher, a yellow banana At an intermediate level, adjectives to be learned could be:  successful, popular, excellent, famous and helpful.  They are coupled with familiar words:  successful businesswoman, popular singer, excellent meal, famous inventor and helpful salesperson.

PRACTICE:  “A word becomes your own, once you use it 10 times.”  This wise adage is told to native speaker students as a tip for increasing their vocabulary.  Of utmost importance is that students produce, with their new vocabulary items,  “personalized”, meaningful sentences about themselves and/or their interests.

RECYCLING:  Weeks after specific vocabulary items are presented and practiced, teachers can challenge the students to recall them    Also students need to keep records in their Vocabulary Notebooks, in as creative ways as possible.

Here we’d like to share with you an activity for recycling vocabulary:  “From letter to phrase to sentence”: 

Step 1:  Ask a student to pick a letter of the alphabet, for example, the letter “b”. 

Step 2:  Ask students to work in pairs, brainstorming nouns, adjectives and verbs which start with the letter “b” (e.g. book, baby; beautiful, bright; break, bounce).  Call on students to share the words they have remembered and ask them to say their word in a phrase or with a ‘friendly word’ (or collocate).  For example, ‘break’ becomes ‘break the window’ or ‘broke his leg’.  The teacher can draw  a chart on the board and record a number of examples to get the students started off. Then, the teacher can circulate among the pairs as they complete a similar chart written in their notebooks.

Step 3:  Individually or in pairs, students write some original sentences using   word phrases from their charts. The teacher sets a 2’ time limit.  The teacher calls on a number of students to share their sentences by reading them aloud to their classmates.

RATIONALE:  Through this pairwork revision, the teacher creates a situation with the potential for peer learning/teaching; words and phrases that Learner A remembers may be distinct from those Learner B remembers.

Learners enjoy working in pairs and exercising their imagination to produce original sentences.  They also find it entertaining to listen to their classmates’ creations.  When we ask learners to share what they have written with their peers, we give them a reason for writing and speaking—a pivotal point of communicative language teaching.