Teaching Vocabulary through Collaboration: Students as Independent Readers

Abstract

Vocabulary teaching is part of University curriculum at where I teach. The vocabulary teaching practice there has become a persisting problem because of lack of progress in awareness on students’ part on the one hand, and failure on teachers’ part to facilitate learning through novel tactics on the other.  Since learning vocabularies is deemed as a complete experience, teaching vocabularies necessitates encouraging students to learn new words which requires comprehension ability, motivation, learning strategies on students’ part. Therefore, a teacher, who is keen on finding new tactics of teaching vocabularies to students, must accommodate students’ needs and familiarize with how each individual student is. Moreover, this teacher should ensure students’ participation and an increase in the growth of awareness in self learning among students. The purpose of this paper is to probe into failure of the strategies and techniques that have been used repetitively at the institute where I teach in a futile attempt to generate any fruitful output from students at all. This paper seeks to prove how a student centered approach overcomes the setback. For instance, working with students by encouraging discovery technique may boost up students’ interest and stimulate their metacognitive awareness. This paper also aims at showing how students could be made to become an independent learner and how that could assist them in vocabulary learning as Kyleen Beers puts rightly “independent readers” are those who are good at inferring meaning of words from the context. A good teacher’s first priority is, before anything else, to make students become self learners. Hence this paper, inspired by what goes on in the language classroom of the University where I teach, will try to show how a teacher, who is able to collaborate with his or her students, accomplishes the tough task of teaching vocabulary.

Key words: Metacognitive awareness; Independent readers; Discovery