Which do you focus on more in class?
This is always an interesting question and one that we as teachers will
inevitably always debate. The truth is that they are both very important.
There really is no clear cut answer for one or the other, but most teachers
push one more than the other.
That together with depending on which country you live and teach, the school
system will push one over the other.
As native speakers, we don’t typically study grammar patterns of our native
tongue. At least I can’t ever remember studying them in school.
Instead we learn first from hearing and repeating. We try to copy our parents
or siblings.
Then pointing and repeating. We want something, we go for it.
Then being read to or reading, singing and playing.
Speaking and short conversations. Practice, practice and more practice.
And on and on.
So as a result of the above… we believe that vocabulary is key to learning a
language. We think that it’s the foundation for which we communicate.
Putting the words in the right order (structure) will come with listening
practice, reading, and speaking in a variety of situations. Practice, practice and
more practice.
It really isn’t just that simple though.
Why is it more than just words?
English isn’t just a bunch of words or words that are structured in a way that
are meaningful.
Collocations, idioms and chunks are equally important. The higher the level of
the speaker, the more of these we see.
Many words in sentences when taken out of context make no sense at all.
English really isn’t a piece of cake (this idiom would make no sense at all to an
EFL-ESL student)
It’s raining like cats and dogs (your students would be lost if they looked up
each of these and tried to make meaning of this idiom)
Words have multiple meanings. Depending on the intonation or rhythm we
use, they can mean something completely different.
Let me stop there before I completely go off on another tangent.
There’s a lot to learning a language. Students need to start somewhere, and I
think that somewhere is vocabulary.
