How to Teach Vocabulary

Thornbury has proven to be a very good author in the past, and this only served to up the expectations for "How To Teach Vocabulary". Simply put, for an area that I find personally difficult to deal with, this book proved to be a God-send. It combines a good deal of the theory with very practical ideas for utilisation in class.

The book provides a consistent grounding in the jargon used for the area, and gives you a good grounding in how information of this type is organised within people's memory. This view of the workings of memory, whether short-term, working or long term, underpins much of what Thornbury goes on to suggest for the class.

The book covers a large range of topics, all arranged in chapters, including testing, presenting, getting students to work with new lexis, using texts, dictionaries and copora, and a whole range more. Of particular value in my opinion is the chapter on training students to become good vocabulary learners. Training students to learn for themselves outside the class is of ongoing importance, even long after they have left our lessons long behind them.

Throughout the book are example activities, some of which teachers will be familiar with, and others new. These give the reader a good starting point on how to implement some of these ideas and promote a high level of retention among students. It was these that I found very useful, as well.

To put it simply, this book is a goldmine of information and ideas, with a large array of exercises and activities that one can immediately use, later adapting as needed. This is a great book, and I thoroughly recommend it to all.

This book is excellent! A resource for teachers who, like myself, teach quite a lot of vocabulary. The book echoes my own belief on the importance of teaching vocabulary by quoting the linguist, David Wilkins: "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed."

It's apparently out of print and that's a shame because it's the best resource I've found for teaching vocabulary.

I ordered a used copy and although the used book ordering process and the delay in receiving the book was annoying, the book itself was, as advertised, in excellent condition.

To make full use of this book and of the lexical approach to teaching one must have a thorough understanding of vocabulary formation and how learners assimilate vocabulary.

The book contains quite a bit of technical information that might overwhelm but it also contains a sizeable amount of basic information helpful to any teacher teaching vocabulary.