Writing a Vocabulary Lesson in an In-house EFL University Coursebook: My Considerations and Reflections
Part 1: Selecting Vocabulary to Teach
In this article, I will reflect on my hands-on experience in selecting vocabulary to teach when designing a lesson in an in-house university coursebook concerning English language skills.
In many universities in Thailand, commercial EFL coursebooks from international publishers have generally been used in fundamental English courses. The “one-size-fits-all” materials undeniably help teachers in saving time to plan lessons and designing the course content. However, some universities are encouraging teachers to write their own coursebooks to suit the course descriptions, the teaching/learning context, and the students’ level of proficiency. With these advantages, my team and I decided to compile an in-house coursebook specifically for a new fundamental English course.
Titled “English Communication in Digital Age,” this course deals with communicative English skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing, along with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. It also promotes communication skills in the digital era with intercultural understanding. The target students are the entire first-year students with expected CEFR-B1 upon completion of the course. As one of the co-authors, I was responsible for writing the first unit which is about language use for buying clothes in a shop or online. The unit structure is presented as follows.
In this article, I will reflect on my hands-on experience in selecting vocabulary to teach when designing a vocabulary lesson Clothes and Accessories in Unit 1. You can see one of my two-page drafts below.
Selecting Words to Teach in a Vocabulary Lesson
Vocabulary presented in the lesson should be (1) suitable for expected students’ proficiency level (CEFR A2-B1) and (2) useful since it can be often used in everyday situations.
With these considerations, I obtained the list of words through the following steps.
1) Study vocabulary lessons about clothes from other commercial coursebooks. I found around 7–8 coursebooks with the CEFR level A2 or B1 that contain the vocabulary pages on clothing. I identified which words are included in each of them and how they are taught through activities and exercises. I wrote down and tallied the words to see their frequency among the coursebooks. Finally, I got a group of words, some of which had a higher frequency than others.
2) Check word frequency in a corpora. Words that are frequently found are considered more useful or have more relative values than others. Therefore, high-frequency words should be likely to be learned first as they could be a strong fundamental of learning other mid- or low-frequency words further. Usefulness of words can be quantitatively evaluated by using corpus. Due to this consideration, some words were eliminated although they were frequent in those coursebooks. For example, the word “blouse” was often presented in the selected books, but I decided to remove the word from the list after checking its frequency in the corpus. Based on The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), “blouse” is the 7927th word, thus being regarded as a mid- or low-frequency word. Seemingly, some words taught in coursebooks might not represent what is frequently used in real life.
3) Words should represent the theme of the lesson and should be suitable for students’ level of proficiency. All words that I selected should represent both clothes and accessories, and clothing words should represent what we wear above and below the waist. Based on expected level of students, I decided to keep some basic words despite their high frequency (e.g., shirt, shoes) due to representativeness of the theme. Also, I considered the benefits of linking such words to the other few ones. For example, teachers can teach the difference between “shirt” and “T-shirt”, or “shoes” is a superordinate of “sneakers” and “trainers”.
4) See if the selected words reflect words used in daily lives. Apart from consulting with the coursebooks and the corpus as well as considering the students’ level, the last criterion is visiting e-commerce websites to see how clothing companies categorize their clothing items to ensure that the words I selected were actually useful in daily life. And this is my final step to list all 17 clothes words to present in the tailor-made EFL coursebook.
Hence, the words in my vocabulary lesson include:
The next article will focus on how to present or teach the vocabulary in the coursebook.
Thanks for reading, and I appreciate your further discussions and suggestions.
You can also reach me at:
Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University, Thailand (BSRU): https://www.facebook.com/bsrunews or https://www.bsru.ac.th/
The English Program, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, BSRU: https://www.facebook.com/EngHumanBSRU or https://bsru.net/profile/nuttapong-ru/
