How do we teach vocabulary in the French-speaking province of Québec, Canada?
Submitted by:
Dominic Anctil
Abstract:
Vocabulary highly correlates with reading comprehension and need for a robust vocabulary instruction in primary school (Beck, McKeown & Kucan, 2013) has been clearly established by research (Biemiller, 2004). Studies in France have shown that primary school teachers spend little time on vocabulary instruction and that words are mainly discussed orally through incidental conversations (Dreyfus, 2004), which does not foster words retention. For the French-speaking province of Québec, though, we didn’t have any information about how vocabulary instruction takes place and how teachers respond to official educational programs. This question is particularly important in the multicultural region of Montréal, where a large proportion of students don’t speak French as a first language.
We conducted a research on vocabulary teaching practices with 30 primary school teachers from 1st to 6th grade. Our methodology included interviews with participants about their conceptions on lexical acquisition and vocabulary teaching, their teaching and evaluation practices and their students’ lexical difficulties. Declared practices related to vocabulary were collected during two periods of two weeks at different moments of the school year. The data collected is now being analyzed with QDA Miner to establish teaching profiles.
Preliminary results show an unplanned and unsystematic vocabulary teaching, not in line with the recommendations put forward by vocabulary researchers (Beck et al., 2013; Stahl & Nagy, 2006). Lexical discussions occur most of the time during shared-reading sessions and are seldom subjected to any kind of follow-up that would encourage kids to reuse the words in different contexts and help them to memorize new words. Teachers often explain explicitly meaning of unknown words and little attention is put on lexical strategies such as context use, morphological analysis of use of dictionaries. In writing, lexical work usually consists in making themed word lists prior to writing, but little effort is put in improving lexical richness in revision. Evaluation focuses on repetition as an indicator of lexical quality. Most teachers feel that their training didn’t prepare them to effectively teach vocabulary and that pedagogical material doesn’t support them in that matter.