It is obvious that most Korean students learn English to get a high score in an English Test: School English Tests, English tests for admission for college and TOEIC and TOEFL tests.
Of course they cannot use any dictionaries in any English tests in Korea. If a student found a few unknown vocabulary words in the text or from the cassettes players, they have to try to find the right answer to the test question without knowing the exact meaning of the words. That is their fate.
THE PROCESS
When students find strange words in the text, they tend to ignore them at first. If they are very lucky, it wouldn't need the definition of the words. Usually students should know the meanings of the words. Usually the students will have to know the meaning of the words, and will have to guess. At the same time, there is a selective process by which they try to determine the importance of the word within the text.
If students think the word is important, then they will try to guess the meaning by understanding the context (considering previous sentences and following sentences), by using their background knowledge of the subject, or from their imagination. These methods can be very successful in finding the meaning of an unknown word. The process also has puzzle-like qualities which the students may enjoy as a challenge. If the student is unsuccessful, the text may be too difficult to understand.
Korean students and their parents know this process well and are quite familiar with these situations, while some of our teachers have forgotten it. That is a problem. In some cases, teachers may feel more uncomfortable with this situation than their students. Our teachers should not feel so uncomfortable, if there are hard words which students don't know in the text. You may think of this process as similar to a baby learning to speak. We did not recognize all words from the beginning, nor were they explained to us. Over time, we became more familiar with them.
TEACHING
1.) After reading the text, It is better to first ask what the student understood about the text, or what is interesting about it. Teachers and students can speak about the topic which will give the student more information about the word. Teachers can either wait until asked, or they can present the word to the student. It can often be a good idea to begin by asking the student to guess about what they think the word could mean. If the student is hesitant, the teacher can ask them to think about the context of the sentence or paragraph. Teachers must give their students the tools to figure out unknown words on their own. This is a game which students and teachers should enjoy!
2.) Another option is to ignore the word completely, even if you suspect it is unknown to the student. We must get used to the idea that when learning a new language they will come across unknown words often, and this should not deter or handicap them in their reading.
- Please remember that learning many new words can be both boring and frustrating to students. Students do not enjoy classes that are filled with definitions and these regular explanations can distract from the text or theme of the class.
3.) The best direction is to use a combination of these two methods: firstly (and more commonly) simply ignoring unknown words, and secondly to give brief and clear explanations only after the game/exercise of having the student guess or speculate about the meaning of the word.
4.) Teachers should encourage their student to make a running vocabulary list, which can be checked together during class.
