Teaching and Learning Vocabulary (Teaching Methods)

Rating:
Summary: Readable, well-researched, and useful
Review: Nation wrote this using only the word's from Michael West's General Service List. As a result, it is a great way for English teachers whose L1 isn't English to get improve their knowledge of vocabulary theory and teaching. As always, Nation give practical ideas and guidelines that can be applied in the classroom, but backs it up impecably with research findings. This book includes one form of Nation's vocabulary levels test that readers can use to diagnose their students' or their own English vocabulary (the test isn't really sensitive if the testee knows less than 3000 words).

He's currently working on either a new book, or a new edition of this one.

Rating:
Summary: the best book there is on how to teach vocabulary
Review: Paul Nation is probably the most authorative figure in vocabulary acquisition in the English-speaking community, and this is his book distilled from a large amount of research findings of teachers and researchers from around the world. Nation informs us as to what learning a word actually entails, which words need to be learned, how to teach them, which words do not need to be learned, and how to train one's students to cope whenever they encounter such low-frequency words. "Teaching & Learning Vocabulary" breaks up vocabulary learning into the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and there are answers in each section to most of the questions that teachers typically ask, such as what to do when students don't have enough vocabulary to understand. Finally, Nation presents his personally developed and efficient test format for assessing vocabulary, which I find very useful. (I still think it's back to front, though. What do you think?). I was also a little bit baffled about his penchant for using the keyword technique to remember words, but then again he's a funny guy and must enjoy learning words himself that way. All in all, it's an excellent book. If you are a language teacher or a researcher, then this book is well worth reading.