Most of us aren't able to learn some new words one moment and toss them into conversations the next moment.

This is because words don’t automatically move from our passive vocabulary (which allows us to recognize them) to our active vocabulary (which allows us to use them).

What makes this process so difficult? And how can we make it as easy as possible for our students?

Study Habits

Study habits are a big reason our students struggle with active vocabulary. In most classrooms around the world, students don’t have many opportunities to practice their English. They listen and read more than they speak and write.

This lack of practice then leads to a cycle: since students don’t have chances to use the language, they don’t bother studying it for active use.

This is especially true of students from countries where exams are very important. The more important tests are, the more English learners memorize long lists of vocabulary instead of learning them for the purpose of conversation.

As conversation tutors, our role is to start a new cycle: we give students opportunities to practice new vocabulary in conversation, and our fun conversations motivate them to learn more words to have even more fun conversations.

In addition to using fun conversations as motivation for our students, we also want to remind them to learn words for active use. For example, we can encourage students to:

Learn English from authentic sources (like movies, Youtube videos, or podcasts).
Write down words and phrases they can apply to real conversations.
Try to use these words with us during free conversation.

We can also quiz them on vocabulary throughout the lesson. For example, let’s say we noticed that a student struggled with the phrase “take medicine” while reading an article. Have them recall it later by asking “Do you remember the phrase for ‘eat medicine’?”

Practice recalling new words and phrases will make students more likely to use them in future conversations.

Pronunciation

Another important factor that makes active use more difficult than passive use is the fact that we need to know how to pronounce it. This sounds easy, but in reality, we often only have a vague idea of what a new word sounds like. And that’s not enough for us to successfully use the word when we speak.

To get an idea, listen to this Korean word here. Now, try to say it. Unless you know some Korean, you probably weren’t very successful at first. This is how English sounds for our students!

It’s also helpful to remember that native-speaking children face similar issues when they learn new words. For example, they’ll often confuse “alligator” and “elevator,” “chicken” and “kitchen,” and “pitcher” and “picture.” Like our students, they are trying to make sense of a new language with all its different sounds.

So when our students come across new vocabulary, they need to hear and repeat it many times for it to enter their “sound memory.”

In addition, we’ll want to use other ways to make words easier-to-remember and therefore easier-to-recall. We can do this by:

Encouraging them to make connections with words they already know (“The word ‘stable’ has the word ‘table’ in it. A table is stable.”)
Pointing out word parts (e.g. “the word ‘booklet’ has the word ‘book’ in it”), and
Using backchaining to help students learn long words.

Finally, we can encourage students to watch and listen to more audio (music, podcasts) and video (YouTube, movies, TV shows) in English. Listening to words this way (ideally with the help of subtitles or transcripts) will help them learn the pronunciation a lot more effectively.

👋 That’s it for now!

Learning vocabulary is hard, especially when we want to know it well enough to use it, and especially when students speak languages that are very different from English!

We hope this has given you an idea of what it’s like for our students to learn English vocabulary and how we can better help them do that. We’re sure your students will appreciate the understanding and any tips you can give them. Happy tutoring!