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The importance of pre-teaching vocabulary is one of the first things many teachers learn. Pre-teaching vocabulary has been shown by research to improve text comprehension by ensuring students know all of the words in a text before they attempt to read it.
If pre-teaching vocabulary improves comprehension, surely teachers should always pre-teach vocabulary then, right? Perhaps not. While pre-teaching vocabulary may improve text comprehension, this is not always the only goal teachers have for their students.
Teaching vocabulary is not only for language teachers where learning new words and understanding texts is the number 1 priority. Every subject has specific terminology that, if not understood, will prevent students from being able to participate in class.
Research has a lot to say on the benefits and drawbacks of pre-teaching vocabulary. While certainly a beneficial tool for a teacher’s arsenal, tools must always be applied for the right job and not indiscriminately.
What is Pre-teaching vocabulary?
Pre-teaching vocabulary refers to a teacher pulling difficult terms from a text they plan to read that they think their students might not know. Before they read the text together or silently at their desks as homework, the teacher goes over the definitions of the terms and teaches them in context.
After the students are familiar with the vocabulary, they can be given the text to read or listen to. Sometimes teachers may ask comprehension questions that include the targeted vocabulary to check understanding.
Benefits of Pre-Teaching Vocabulary
Pre-teaching vocabulary has several very clear and demonstrable benefits for students. There is a very large body of research backing up the benefits of pre-teaching vocabulary, and so it is a tool that every teacher should use, at least sometimes.
The first major benefit of pre-teaching vocabulary is that research shows that vocabulary comprehension is the most important factor in whether a student understands a text or not. Even when students may understand an idea in a different context, if they don’t know the words they are reading, they will struggle to be able to visualize and understand what is being said.
On top of this the study found that adding in pre-teaching improved comprehension. (Lawrence) This may seem obvious, but it is important to note that understanding vocabulary is the most important part of understanding a text, but also that pre-teaching vocabulary is an effective way of teaching vocabulary.
Another major benefit that astute readers may have already found is that pre-teaching is fantastic for improving students vocabulary! Not only does pre-teaching help students to read better, but it mindfully teaches students important vocabulary and then gives them a practical context to test their understanding.
If the most important thing for the teacher is that students learn new words and understand more texts, then pre-teaching should be a very major part of their lesson plans. Because of this, pre-teaching vocabulary is very common in language learning classes.
However, learning new words and understanding texts is not always the main learning objective of other subjects’ teachers or even of all language teachers all the time. While pre-teaching vocabulary definitely has some benefits, there are absolutely some drawbacks and diminishing returns involved with overuse.
Drawbacks of Pre-Teaching Vocabulary
One of the drawbacks of pre-teaching vocabulary is that it can make students reliant on the teacher to learn new words. Researchers warn that “the principle of vocabulary pre-instruction is generally in conflict with that of learner autonomy.” (Chowdhury and Ara)
Sometimes, even when the teacher has attempted to pre-teach vocabulary, students may forget or not have listened well. In these cases, it can be better to teach students approaches to learning new words rather than always putting it on the teacher to ensure students understand everything.
A generation ago, looking up a word that you do not know was a bit of a cumbersome task. Dictionaries are large, take time to flip through, and are not always at hand when coming across an unknown word.
Students today do not have such an excuse! They have instant access to any word’s definition, pronunciation, and example sentences with a few clicks on Google on the phone in their pocket or even a quick question to a little AI friend like Alexa or Siri.
Pre-teaching vocabulary is better for ensuring that students know specific words, but fails to teach them independent strategies for learning new words without the teacher spoon feeding it to them. So while pre-teaching is like first aid that can make a short term situation much better, long term strategies need to be in place to promote long term literacy.
Additionally, research shows that even the fantastic benefits of pre-teaching quickly fade over time. A recent study implemented pre-teaching of vocabulary into half of their cohort of classes and compared their results over a four week period to the control class which did not receive pre-teaching of vocabulary. (Cowell)
According to the researchers “ The pre-teaching treatment groups’ scores were statistically significant for weeks one, two and three. The treatment group did not have statistically significant scores on the follow-up reading comprehension post-test.” So, while initially, the “treatment” group scored significantly higher on the first week, over the course of the lessons as all students get familiar with the words naturally, the difference between the scores fades and when test time came, the difference between their scores was no longer statistically significant.
Pre-Teaching vs Pre-Questioning
One method some teachers try to implement to find a sort of middle ground is what is called “pre-questioning”. In pre-questioning, teachers focus more on introducing the content that students will be reading about rather than the words that students will be reading.
With this approach, teachers are priming students to think about topics and understand fundamentals that will make understanding the text much easier. But which approach helps students understand a text more, some context on content or the vocabulary?
Research seems to indicate that pre-teaching vocabulary is more effective than pre-questioning in improving text comprehension. (Mousavian and Siahpoosh) This also backs up the previous research which suggested that vocabulary knowledge is the most important factor in understanding over other factors.
This does not mean that pre-questioning is simply an inferior approach, however. When what is being measured is textual comprehension, pre-teaching is superior, but what would happen if what was measured was content knowledge instead?
Pre-questioning focuses on understanding ideas over words, and so it may many times be a better approach for getting students to more deeply consider ideas. Depending on the complexity of the ideas, it may even be more helpful to give students some context when the vocabulary is not particularly difficult.
Which approach to use, if any, will really be up to the teacher’s professional judgment and analysis of the text. Different texts will have different levels of vocabulary and concept complexity.
The approach that the teacher uses should suit what aspect is difficult in the text. If the ideas are more complex, they may want to implement pre-questioning, but if they feel the vocabulary is difficult in a text they need to include, they may want to pre-teach vocabulary to ensure the time is not wasted with students not understanding what they have read.
Conclusion
Pre-teaching vocabulary has indisputable evidence that it is effective in helping students to understand texts and learn new words. However, pre-teaching should not be overused as it can prevent students from developing more independent strategies to overcome comprehension issues they come across later on in life.
This is the difference between content teaching and skills teaching. Teaching a specific piece of content is best when that piece of content is something students will need to constantly refer to or consider as they work.
This is why repetition is the best way to learn to do a repetitive task. There are many videos online of people who have mastered some professional skill like chopping vegetables or working on an assembly line extremely quickly and skillfully.
While this repetition may be best for doing that one thing over and over, those skills do not always transfer into solving other problems. While these masters may be experts at their craft, they may struggle to be flexible should they need other skills but not have the ability to develop them.
Similarly, students do not just need to know the same words that they will read over and over. They need to know a vast array of words in a variety of different specialities depending on their future career paths.
No teacher can cover all of these words with even the most effective of pre-teaching methods. Instead, they should pre-teach the most vital words for the most important texts but focus most of their time on helping students develop good habits of looking up words they do not know online.
This situation is much like the proverb “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime.” If you give a student a vocabulary word, they will pass a test, but if you teach students how to learn vocabulary, they will graduate.
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References
Chowdhury, Takad Ahmed, and Arjumand Ara. “Pre-Teaching Vocabulary in Teaching Reading Skill: A Hindrance to Learner Autonomy?” Indonesian TESOL Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 2021, pp. 123–132., https://doi.org/10.24256/itj.v3i2.1818.
Cowell, Leslie Scott. Pre-Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Comprehension of a Narrative Text. University of Auburn, https://etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/3423/Cowell%20Final.pdf;sequence=2.
Lawrence, Deb. “Pre-Teaching Vocabulary = Better Comprehension.” 2014. Educating Young Children: Learning and Teaching in the Early Childhood Years, vol. 20, no. 1, Early Childhood Teachers Association, 2014, pp. 31–33, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.280026108674095.
Mousavian, Somayyeh, and Hossein Siahpoosh. “The Effects of Vocabulary Pre-Teaching and Pre-Questioning on Intermediate Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Ability.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2018, p. 58., https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.2p.58.
