Teaching vocabulary: making word families work

Word lists are a widely-practised teaching tool for vocabulary study, but any student who has worked with them will tell you that memorising lists of words is a very time-consuming method that does not really help students to learn words deeply, or to use them appropriately. The main problem with lists of words is that they are decontextualized, often grouped by abstract criteria designed by the teacher rather than in a meaningful way for the students themselves.

A step towards meaning-based vocabulary study is the use of word families rather than word lists. A word family relates words by their meaning, word class and structure.

The four columns in this image arrange words which contain the stem photo-/photograph, which are categorised by their word class (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). A simple concept, and one which can be found in many coursebooks, but do we use these tables to their fullest, to help students retain the range of forms that they contain?

Simply going through the words one by one and dealing with the meaning of each in turn is pretty repetitive, and just treats the words like items on a list, so let’s rethink some ways of grouping / tasking the words differently.

Get students to work out the rule (inductive classification)

Choose several words from the same word class and present the students with the target words in the context of sentences which give clues to meaning:

1. I looked at a photograph of my family
2. I want to be a photographer when I grow up
3. Sam studied photography at university

Instruct students to substitute the bolded words with other words into the sentences which keep the same overall meaning (perhaps giving them some words to choose from in each case). What kinds of words have the students used? They will be the same word class as the word first given, and will give clues to meaning.

Ask students to generate patterns of morphology

Give the students some other words which follow similar patterns (geography / biography / calligraphy are all nouns too); ask the students whether they follow the same verb / adjective / adverb pattern. This will generate a larger group of words which can be processed together as following the same pattern.

Blanking out one column for each word can help students to make educated guesses about how similar word families are structured.  Notice that there is also a pattern of pronunciation at work here, with the stress falling on the same syllable in each set of word classes.

 

Exploiting vocabulary by adding collocations

Adding a column of words which commonly appear together with the members of a word family can aid retention by providing context, as below:

Once students have worked with these words from a structural and meaningful point of view (as in the activities above), they will have a much deeper understanding of how they work, and how they can be used in different situations.

As a final note, not all words can be expanded into families in this way. Typically words which come from Greek or Latin, meaning words which often use prefixes and suffixes, can be played with in families. Look for this kind of word and do some word family work every week, to keep your students’ word bank ever increasing both in breadth and depth.

If you're looking for more ways to engage with your students, join one of our upcoming teacher training sessions.