Practical Proficiency Podcast

#43 - "I struggle with how to teach vocab consistently" : Listener Q+A on Presenting New Vocab

• Devon Gunning | La Libre Language Learning • Season 3 • Episode 43

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I answer a listener’s question about teaching vocabulary consistently by reframing every class as a vocabulary class that moves words through a three-stage continuum: introduce, recognize, produce. I share the science of binding, why stories beat lists, and how to keep scope tight so students actually acquire language.

• binding as the foundation for sticky vocabulary
• stories and visuals as the most effective input
• the three-stage continuum: introduce, recognize, produce
• realistic repetition counts and pacing
• limiting sets to 10–15 terms to avoid overload
• a three-lesson flow from input to gentle output
• avoiding memorization traps and translation-heavy quizzes
• low-prep options with drawing, reusable sheets, and AI drafting
• spiraling old terms while adding new ones

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SPEAKER_00:

What's up? Salute world language teachers. Welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class. In a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, Devin Gunning, the teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant behind La Libre Language Limited. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of having to play with practical, authentic, and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel for more training. We'll work together towards the magic of a community-based, target language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go. Well, hello, and welcome back to the Practical Proficiency Podcast. I'm your host, Devin, and I'm very honored and excited to share with you today another listener question. This one comes from no name, but from Winchester and Virginia. So if you're in Virginia, then holler out to you. And here's what the question says. This was left on the podcast fan mail option, where by the way, you can text the podcast now and I can get your questions directly that way, which is mega cool. So check that out. There's info in the show notes. And the question from Virginia says, Hey Devin, I'm a French teacher and I've been listening to your podcast every day for the past week. Thank you. Well, thank you to you. I'm very honored that you have found info on this podcast that's helpful to you. I'm so glad. That's awesome. And it continues with, I have a question. I struggle with how to teach vocabulary consistently. I rotate between slides and images, stories, etc. But would like to be more consistent. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you again. I've learned so much. Well, thank you, friendly person from Winchester, Virginia. Let's get into it. If I had the chance to ask you a follow-up, it would be tell me more about teaching vocabulary consistently. Um, because what that brings to mind is that either you are running into the issue in lessons where you're working with vocabulary structures, new functional chunks, and you're thinking to yourself, like, ooh, we need to, I should have introduced this for longer, or I should have done more with this before I asked them to do anything with it, whether it be interaction or um presentation or interpretation, whatever. So that's my first thought is like, is that what you're coming up against? Or are you saying like you want a more consistent vocabulary routine? Because if that's it, because it could be that as well, because you say I rotate between slides and images and stories, but I want to be more consistent. So uh are you trying to balance the variety of how you present new structures while still having a routine so it's a little bit easier on you? Um, could go either way for me. So this is how I decided to answer this question is we actually have a full workshop on the topic of presenting new structures and vocabulary in my signature program called the Practical Proficiency Network. And the reason why is because if we're looking at the structure of world language classrooms, every language, sorry, every lesson is a vocab lesson, unless you are specifically working on skills with the new vocabulary that you have presented to students. So, and we're also trying to move away from presentation as much as possible and have the lessons be more of a facilitating acquisition of those structures. So, like with that, you know, all that cleared up, let's get into what this can look like. So I'm gonna answer your question with just some first, we're gonna step back a little bit and look at a little bit of this info from this workshop to get us all on the same page about vocabulary, introducing vocabulary. What does that actually mean? Because, you know, we're we are in a language classroom and the word vocabulary could mean a lot of different things. So let's get straight up about what this means before we get into how we can answer your question. So for me, vocabulary is really it's the name of the game. It's everything that you're doing with students where you are hoping that they will acquire new structures, aka a new word or a new group of words in the target language. And when we say vocabulary presentations, we're usually referring to perhaps the first time that students are interacting with this new vocabulary. And that usually looks like in a proficiency context, you have the words up on the board, you are signing them for the first time and explaining what they might mean, a couple translations here and there, what it's helpful so that students aren't drowning in newness, and you have some sort of structured activity that allows for you to repeat the words a few times in context. So, like a lot of the things that you mentioned, maybe it's a story, um, maybe it is a slideshow. Um, it, you know, it could be a lot of different things. So this whole idea of presenting new vocabulary is not necessarily like you presenting and just hitting next, next, next on the slide while you have, you know, a word and a picture. Like you're you're working through a very one-sided interaction where you're talking a lot or signing a lot, and your students are indicating whether they understand you or not with this new vocab presentation. So here are some guideposts from this workshop that might help you as you're designing the next time that you need that you're working with new vocabulary and new structures with your students. First off, we're all about binding in proficiency. Binding is the term that refers to when a learner interacts with a new word for the first time and then the process of it sticking in their language processor, in their brain. So that is called binding. There's a bunch of research on it, and what we've found with binding is that binding works better when a learner sees this word in a context where they actually need to understand what it means and they need to use it. Also, it's works a lot better with a visual or an image rather than a word underneath it. So that is why this whole concept of binding in second language acquisition is why we no longer recommend giving students a list of terms in English on one side and terms in French on the other. Because it simply is just, well, really, it's a list, like it's like a to-do list for your students, right? So that we have found is great for reference, but it has no teaching capacity in terms of acquisition. What does work well in acquisition, which you're seeing a lot of textbooks adopt nowadays, is I mean, if they're worth their salt at all, you'll notice that they'll usually have some sort of illustration. For example, if you're teaching sports, they'll have an illustration of a bunch of kids on a playground and next to a park where kids and adults are both playing sports, and then there's labels everywhere in the target language of these people. Like if they're playing tennis, it'll say jugar al tenis underneath it in Spanish. Um, and so it eliminates a lot of that need for the um for the L1 to be used, which allows for binding to happen faster, which is great. The only thing that can really get in your way with this, with uh new vocab presentations, is like how many of your students are actually gonna just like look at the new vocab presentation illustration page in your textbook and be like, oh, look at all these wonderful new words for me to learn. That is not how it works. Um, the brain is a social learner and needs social interaction for this to work. So even if you have that really nice reference material in your textbook, what students respond best to is, you guess it, just like you're already using Winchester, Virginia, stories. Stories are how humans have passed down information since the beginning of human interaction. It is how we have in the past taught our children about dangers in the environment around us when we were not young enough to understand, hey, there, bears are dangerous. Don't try to pet that dog, don't pet the bear. So instead of that, what we do when kids are really young is we gather them around our nice little warm primordial fires, and we would tell them stories and fables about the careless young child who wandered off into the forest and got eaten up by a bear. So that is how our primordial brains, our lizard brains and all that, they're that's how we're wired to learn information and for information to stick with us. Have you ever wondered why we find movies and TV just so addicting? Like it's not just the whole screen deal, it's actually the fact that like our brain really responds to storytelling. So, one of the most effective ways that you can help your students acquire language is exactly what you're doing, um, Virginia, which is to use stories to for this vocab to have this lovely natural context. For example, if you are teaching about sports, then you could have like when you have all three, it's better, right? Like if you have this, the lovely textbook illustration that doesn't have a lot of L1 in there, and you see all these people playing sports, and then you present them with a short story for them to read maybe on their own, and then with you as a class group, and then with uh maybe some sort of write and discuss afterwards, where the the story you are looking through and experiencing, um, hmm, what can I make up off the top of my head? Oh, yeah, like maybe a kid is going to tryouts for the first time and is nervous about like, I don't know if I know how to, if I brought the right ball to practice, or if I have the the right skills, or like if I know how to do all these things, like um, I don't know, shoot a basket. So then you have this kid who's trying out for basketball, he's nervous, he goes to the basketball tryouts, he meets key word here, all the other team members and all the team players. He gets his uniform, he gets the you know, the equipment he needs for the sport, and then he meets the coach. So that is a great way for all of those words to have a lot more meaning for your students because they need them to understand the story. Then at the end of the story, of course, you probably go over any terms that they weren't sure of and all that good stuff, but all of these are really valuable ways to bind vocabulary and new terms into a learner's language processor. All good stuff. Now, the more that we do this, the more that our new vocabulary is cemented and sandwiched in between really important structures in the target language. Because surprise, like stories can be the easiest way for new language to get acquired. Also, because when you're telling a story or you have a short little paragraph that's, you know, a story kind of, but might just be a description of something, you naturally have to use the most high frequency and most important and often the most irregular structures in a language, they're naturally woven into the paragraphs that you hear. That's why a lot of adult language learners, the programs that they're making for adult language learners, and as world language teachers, we should be paying attention to these trends too, thinking about what's working in the commercial world where people are learning how to acquire a language as well, and they're actually like throwing down money for it. So, what are people doing in that realm? Is that there's lots and lots of um short stories for adults and podcasts where it's just simple little conversations between people about, you know, a problem, uh, a little story, a moment in their lives, that kind of deal, where the narrator is uh diving into a short story and then explaining it to the listener with any relevant info that they need in the L1 later on. So this is something that we can replicate and do a lot in our classrooms as well. So that I hope sets up the scene for what is the most effective way really to do any kind of new vocabulary with your students. The other important thing to keep in mind with this is that this doesn't really stop, right? Like we're we're always working with language with our students. That's the whole purpose of what we do, right? So that's the majority of our time. Which means that the type of vocabulary lesson that you're doing is either like, is it new vocabulary, is it vocabulary you're trying to solidify, or vocabulary you want your students to work with? Like those are really the only differences. And of course, vocabulary that you want to work with is gonna be those moments in class when you're working on interpretive skills, presentational skills, um, interpersonal communication, that good stuff that we all know and love. So I'm sure that this question that you have, Winchester, Virginia, is more focused on like, what about when I'm working with new terms? So we know now what working with new terms can look like. And I have a couple suggestions for you based on your question. First of all, you should be looking at your week and your curriculum and thinking about like the majority of your days really are vocabulary days, vocab lessons. And you'll occasionally have those pop-up grammar lessons. I mean, you don't really need them at all in some instances. But if you're doing some vocab, I mean, sorry, not vocab, some grammar stuff, then it might be just here or there when your students need it, when you're doing that third form of vocabulary lesson, which is when you want students to work with it, to produce it. And to answer your question of like, how do you do this more consistently? My answer to you is, well, honestly, every lesson is a vocab lesson. It just depends on what stage of the vocabulary your students are ready to work with. Like there's a time to introduce, and there's also a time to solidify. And the solidify process I find is actually in the language continuum of that. If you're thinking about that, the life stage of a new vocabulary term for a learner. It's we need to remember that there is an amount of time that a learner needs for that vocab to bind and be really, really sticky in their brain. For example, let's let's keep going with sports. If you have like five to 10 sports you want them to be really familiar with, that takes some time. Um, the average repetition amount that we have found, like it's the answers really vary a lot depending on where you look. But um, we've seen as low as 25 and as high as 100. So if you're going for the average, like 50 is a pretty safe bet for how many repetitions you need, unless, unless, unless it's a super simple cognate, like, you know, baseball, then you're probably fine. So you could probably say that like, you know, five or ten times, and a student would be reasonably bound well with that vocabulary. But something new, like balancesto, I'm thinking in Spanish, since we're talking about basketball, like that's that could take up to 50, maybe even 100, depending on your learner's processing speed. So we want to remember that like the first 10 to 20 repetitions, the first time they're seeing this, it's gonna be a lot of interpretation, your initial vocab lesson. That's phase one. And then you're gonna move from the in the language learner continuum, the life stage of this new vocabulary term, balancesto, um, or obesquette in French. Then you're gonna move into stage two, which is where they're solidifying it. They can't produce it yet, and maybe they're not sure how to spell it yet, but they're working with it, and it's um starting to become a new, a new structure in their language processor. It's almost like the word is blurry, it's there, but it's blurry. So you just need to like keep wiping down that window of clarity and wiping away that fog of um as time goes by so that the the word just becomes shinier and clearer every time in their language processor. And that stage will probably be anywhere between like 20 to 50 repetitions. And then, so that means in a in the time frame of a classroom, you're probably looking at like, hmm, if you see your kids more than three times a week, it's like two, three lessons, right? Like if you are working in a really focused unit and you come into class the next day and students have already done a nice little vocab presentation with you, all that stuff we talked about earlier. Let's revisit that sample lesson of um you showed the kids the illustration in the textbook that's very well laid out for binding. Now they're reading a story with you. So that was part two. And now you're really in like lesson three. This would be a great day to play games with the vocabulary, maybe like bingo and um four corners. I like this sport, I don't like this sport, I hate this sport, I like to watch the sport, but I don't like to play it. Like when you're having conversations and um interactions and stuff about these, about these new sports terms, that now you're starting to get to the end life cycle of this word. You don't have to like wipe off the fog as much anymore on a student's language processor. It's becoming sharper and clearer every day as you continue to wipe away the, you know, the fog of memory from the past day or two. And like now that word is pretty well etched into a student's brain. Um, it of course will like start to get blurrier and blurrier if they don't see it for a long time. But right now, after three focused days of interaction with sports vocab, and if let's assume they're totally with you, then like it's nice and sharp now. So how you can get more consistent with this, I would say really it depends on just making sure that you have a well-thought out structure for introducing, gradually releasing into interpretation of sports vocabulary in that stage two. And then when you hit that stage three, where you can tell that students are they're they're starting to spell it almost, you know, like pretty close most of the time. And of course, like spelling's not that important in the early stages of language, but like just for the example here, let's say that you're um they're they're spelling the word close most of the time, enough that it's telling you, like, okay, these guys, they remember this word. It's not blurry in their brains anymore. It's starting to get a little sharper, even though the E is where the I should be, that kind of deal. And in that stage three, it's time for you to start moving more into more demanding forms of communication. There should be more interaction, there should be more presentation, more writing, and more um speaking or signing so that that word gets really, really etched into their brains in the subconscious part of their language processors. So the with getting more consistent about vocabulary here, I'm hoping that this continuum shows you that it's not so much about like being consistent with presenting vocabulary, it's more about does your language follow, not your language, sorry, your lesson plan follow a sequence that makes sense for the different stages of binding that a new term will go through in a learner's language processor. So if you've got something that you know, like this might take like three or four lessons for them to really get down and for it to be real sharp in their language processors, then that's what your structure really should follow. So um a trap that we can fall into is sometimes, psh, sometimes, a lot of the times, for language teachers, myself included, we fall into this trap where it's a lot harder to follow this nice, neat language continuum of, oh, we move from stage one on Monday, and then on Tuesday we're in stage three, uh, stage two, and then on Wednesday, we're in stage three where we're starting to work with it. Um, first of all, kids don't move that fast. Um, and nothing in the school environment is quite that certain where you know you can go from one to two to three. That never happens with the amount of variables you have in a classroom environment. So you're gonna have some fits and starts, false starts along the way, but also a huge thing that gets in your way is actually trying to introduce too much vocabulary at once. And this might be uh Winchester, Virginia question asker, this might be where your question is coming from of like, how can I be more consistent with vocabulary? Is what might actually be happening is if you try to introduce too many terms at once, the continuum totally falls apart. Let's go back to this in-depth example here. I know you never thought that like a vocabulary presentation could have these many pieces to it, but it's actually quite simple. It's sometimes we as teachers make it too complicated. If you are looking at your unit and the Spanish two unit demands in the textbook that you're going over like, you know, 10 sports and then 10 terms related to sports, like team, equipment, player, coach, field, practice, all that, um, that's actually too much language, especially if you want your students to move smoothly from stage one to stage two to stage three, from you know, from introducing to recognizing to producing. So that that is gonna get that whole continuum is gonna get real muddled up if you have more than 15 new terms. So if you have, and that's just for the average, like the average learner, the average processing speed is very comfortable moving from stage one to stage two to stage three with 10 new terms at a time. And that means the continuum, not like in one day of instruction or one setting of instruction because everybody's days are so different. I mean if you have more than 10 to 15 terms that you are working with in this continuum, like your lesson on day one is about introducing all the sports on the textbook page. Your lesson on day two is about the story that's related to the sports terms on that page. And then day three's lesson where you're talking about likes and dislikes with sports, is more than 15 terms. Like your continuum's gonna get all over the place because you're gonna be trying to work on sharpening too many words at once. You cannot de-blurrify and sharpen and focus in on more than 15 terms at once. It's like it's too much for a language processor, and all that stuff gets clogged up, and some things get left behind in there, there will be words that move along in the continuum and a bunch of words that your brain is like, nope, not at all. And it doesn't even allow those to get processed. So they just get stuck in stage one for a really long time, which is why you have sometimes at the end of these very overstuffed vocabulary units. This is what happens when you get to, you know, the day before the quiz and your kids have like 10 words that they don't really know that well, and you're thinking back to yourself, oh right, like we didn't really have time for those. And let's just assign some vocabulary flashcards or something like that. Which flashcards are like a quick fix that puts those words into not a language processor, but it actually puts them into a different part of your brain, which is your declarative. It's like your memory zone, you know, that like short-term memory zone of memorized facts. So that is um that is helpful when your students are matching vocabulary on a test, but your students do not have access to that declarative zone when it comes time to use that language. So, what's the point of putting stuff in the memory zone of the brain? You want all those words to go into the subconscious language processor part of the brain. And to do that, you really do have to follow that continuum of introduce, recognize, produce. So the this is where we often get into that trap in world language teaching of if kids have some memorized words and phrases that they like that have been hanging out in their memory zone for a little bit, yeah, they'll have access to it in certain settings, like if you do um a straight-up translation quiz where it's like, tell me the word for basketball in Spanish. Yeah, you're like, yeah, they'll probably do fine on that. But then don't be baffled when you ask them a question like, te gusta jugar al baloncesto, and they have no idea what you're saying, because that's a totally different part of your brain that you need to access to answer a question like, Do you like to play basketball? They're they're not gonna have access to that. So to make your vocabulary presentations more consistent, I hope that this is helping you to see that your whole language teacher practice is moving students from working with a new set of terms, 10 to 15 at a time, and moving them from stage one recognizing to stage two. Sorry, um, stage one is introduce, stage two is recognize, and then stage three is production. And that, of course, that continuum will take a different amount of time depending on what types of words you're working with. If they're simple content words, simple nouns and things like a list of sports, then they can move along those continue that continuum pretty fast. But if you're working with something like describing how they feel and likes and dislikes and other things that require a lot more verbs and a lot more conjunctions and are a bit more complex in structure, then that continuum will take longer, naturally, because the language has far more meanings than just one. The more meanings a word has, the longer it takes for it to go from stage one to stage two to stage three. And again, so I'm not messing you up. Stage one is introduce, stage two, recognize, and then stage three is produce. So let's go back to your question and make sure that I have answered this for you here. It says, I struggle with how to teach vocabulary consistently. Honestly, if you approach your practice from this continuum of I'm always working with new vocabulary, it just depends on what stage of the continuum the students are on with this new set. And you just keep going on that wheel on repeat and rotating through new words and phrases that will add to the language processor while also, of course, revisiting them whenever you can to keep those things nice and fresh and sharp. Um and then you say, too, I rotate between slides and images and stories. Those are all great things, but I would like to be more consistent. I would say that if you approach your class more like every day is a vocabulary day, it just depends on what stage of the continuum you're working on, that this will help with making sure that the vocabulary really is the focus of everything that you're doing each day. If your question too is more about like, I want a more consistent system to make this uh make sure that I'm getting to all of the vocabulary I need to every day, then I would say um for stories, like don't write those yourself. You can 100% pop those into any kind of AI word processor. I like Gemini, um, Chat GPT is totally free, all that good stuff. And just tell them because they actually will do this pretty well. I've tried it a couple times. Make sure that your prompt is something along the line. Of, hey, I am a level blank French teacher or Spanish teacher or Russian teacher, and my students are, you know, ages 12 to 14. I need a seven-sentence short story with these 10 vocabulary terms. Please make sure it's simple and make sure it is interesting for their age group and make sure it's based off of, don't forget this part's really important, based off the principles of comprehensible input and acquisition-focused instruction. And guess what? They do it pretty well. Like they keep their vocab really simple. It's very repetitive. The stories are boring, but you can fix that part. That's easy for you to go in later. If you also are like, I, it's hard for me to get all the images and get all the slides together, is you don't actually need slides and images for vocab if you're really, really pressed for time. In the year that I was teaching with zero time after school for extra prep, and I had to work within the 90 minutes that I was given every day, then I would, instead of having like vocab prep presentations, I would give the students um reusable vocab lesson sheets where it would have a picture, a little blank, uh, sorry, not a picture, it would have a little square and a blank underneath where they were supposed to write in the word, and I would just draw pictures on the board because I didn't have time to make the visuals. And often I found that sometimes it was a little tedious, but at least I didn't have to plan for it. But other times the students were actually paying attention more because they were following along with the drawing and like writing the word with me. And then as we were drawing, we would talk about it and it would give me more opportunities to actually use a lot more context with the target language. So that's really helpful too. Um, but it's also easier than ever to just uh pull up a blank Canva presentation and you know search for the images as you need them, especially if you're doing sports, and like you can just pop the image right in there. So I'm not a person who believes that you need to have lots of ready-to-use slideshows for vocabulary presentations. You can actually do a lot of this with just working with your own brain and drawing things. Um yeah, those are those are my suggestions for you when it comes to vocabulary. There's a lot to process with vocabulary and great ways to do this. And I hope that this helps with just understanding that your classroom can be a system that is always moving students in super fun and varied ways, just like you're already doing, but you're always moving students from this guiding structure of introduce to recognize to produce. And it's just you're going from stages one through three, and then a new set of vocabulary, one through three, new set of vocabulary while recycling old important structures one through three. And just as ACFL recommends, you start at this one specific point, and then you continue in an upward staircase spiral of adding more new terms while revisiting and recycling older ones until the spiral becomes as wide as possible. And you know, at that point they're like Actful superior, and who even isn't actful superior? We don't know. But that's the top of the ladder that they get to at the top of that upward spiral. So yeah, that's vocabulary. There's it's actually it's simple, but when it comes to how it's presented, like getting into the nitty-gritty of how that happens every day, that is really where the magic happens. And I can tell that you have a lot of thoughtful ways that you're already doing this with your students. So thank you so much for submitting this question. And I hope that it helps you to have more of a systematic and simpler approach to what new words can look like for binding in your classroom. And of course, if there's any follow-up questions that you have, or if I missed the mark for what you're looking for, dude, let me let me know. Hit me up. Um, you can find my email is in the show notes, and I'm also at Devon at Lalibre Language Learning.com. Or you can find me on Instagram. Either myself or my assistant Rachel will catch you there in the messages. And we would love to chat more about this. As you can tell, I love talking about new terms and vocabulary. I think this is like one of the most interesting aspects of how language works and how SLA works. So thank you so much for this question. It's been so fun to dive into this. And if you are listening to this and saying, ooh, I have a question for Devin, you can submit questions on the podcast now and have yourself a special little episode all for you and your question. We love to hear it because when you ask questions, a lot of other people learn from it too. Just the same thing as you tell your students is that if you have a question, there's probably five other people in the room who just didn't ask it but also had it. So submit those questions. There's a link in the show notes where you can just click a button or you can text the podcast with your question. I love to answer it. And let's sign off. Thank you so much, y'all, for this and for being here and for listening. I really appreciate your time and being a part of this community. And I'll see you on the next episode where we're going to be answering another listener question. It's really juicy, so get excited. If you're an elementary teacher, this next one will be for you. All right, signing off. I'm rooting for you. Bye for now.