1. FIGHTING A LOSING
BATTLE?
LEARNING VOCABULARY IN
NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY
Arek Peryt – IH Bogotá

2. When students travel
they don’t carry grammar books,
they carry dictionaries
Stephen Krashen

3. Forgetting mostly occurs
immediately after we first
learn something, and that the
rate of forgetting slows down
afterward
Gu, P. Y. (2003). Vocabulary Learning in a
Second Language:
Person, Task, Context and Strategies.

4. Operational
center : C
C:English
languageVo
cabularyHo
useBathroo
mToiletries
Soap

5. • Receptive
• Productive
Vocabulary

6. Productive vocabulary is a set
of lexis that is recognised in
both oral and written form and
understood immediately as
well as a student can retrieve
and produce it at will in a
suitable context
“Working with words”- Gairns, Redman, CUP

7. What do we need to acquire
productive vocabulary?

8. Importance
meaningful presentation
meaningful repetition
Spaced intervals
first heard

9. Learners who know the most
frequent 2,000 words should be
able to understand almost 80
percent of the words in an average
text.(Francis and Kucera 1982).
For spoken language, the news is
even better since about 1,800
words make up over 80 percent of
the spoken corpus
(McCarthy 2004; Teaching Vocabulary
O’Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter 2007)-
“Teaching Vocabulary” J.McCarten, CUP

10. What level student would be
expected to understand and
produce 80% of English
language?

11. GE 7
GE1 to GE7 315
classes
1900:315=6
6 words per class

12. Different research suggest
that an average student needs
between 5 to 12 encounters
with an item of lexis to know it
in a productive way
The reality is that my students have contact
with English only in the classroom.

13. In “The brain book” Russel
claims that we forget 80%
within the first 24 hours. He
insists on the first repetition
within that period.
Then after 2, 4, 7, 12, 20 days
and a month 3 month etc

14. Typical course
Monday Wednesday Friday
First class with new 6 words and a
repetition at the end of the class.
Then a warm-up activity at the
beginning of the next class, a class of
interval (without recycling), then 2
classes of interval, 4 etc. From 7th
class 6 new words and 18 to revise.

15. In 2 hours is it possible to
meaningfully present 6 new words
and meaningfully recycle 18 old
ones?
And what about grammar, listening
and writing?

16. Materials,books and websites
available at the request:
aperyt@yahoo.co.uk