There is no doubt that learning vocabulary is key to improving language skills, for both children and adults.
The holy grail of many language students has always been how to learn the most words with the minimum of time and effort. Not necessarily because of laziness, but because of a desire to achieve fluency and understanding as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In a school context and within language classrooms, items are often labelled in the foreign language but I know from my own teaching experience that it doesn’t mean the learners will even think to look at the item to find the word, let alone have committed it to memory. I was curious as to what effect having French and Spanish vocabulary posted around the house would have on my random selection of guinea pig learners (aka the Taylor family!)
Would they pick some words up without effort? Would anyone be inspired to actively learn the words? How quickly would the words just become “wallpaper”? Would it cause confusion having both French and Spanish words?
Everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea, except for my 9 year old son, which was disappointing as I had high hopes for him, with his current sponge-like memory for all sorts of facts. He said he wasn’t going to take part but we then noticed duplicate labels appearing around the house in his handwriting - e.g. multiple “lumières” were suddenly sporting their own sticky note.
My teenage daughters, who are learning French and Spanish in secondary school, have both picked up some words from simply from having them around. In fact, my Year 10 daughter came home from her Spanish reading exam and said there were two words she only knew because they’d been stuck on the wall. We’ll take that as a win!
My husband was probably the most engaged and active learner. He enthusiastically uses his GCSE French when we are abroad and would love to learn more given the time, so he spent some time wandering around repeating the words and trying to remember them. This worked but we will need to do regular retrieval practice to make sure the new words don’t disappear.
When we took the words down, I checked with my son how many he could remember - not a huge number! What was striking, however, was his newly developed appreciation of cognates (words which are the same or similar in other languages) which will hopefully make him more likely to recognise them in the future and also be a useful tool for him in his future language learning.
The conclusion of my very non-scientific experiment is that yes, it was worth it. Particularly for inspiring language learning: it provoked several conversations and everyone remembered a few new words. If you are serious about learning and retaining vocabulary though, a more active approach is needed. Also, it wouldn’t be for everyone, you do have to be prepared to have sticky notes all over your living space! Furthermore, if you don’t own the walls or the furniture, ask permission first before decorating everything with your language of choice!
Here’s another useful article with some more tips and ideas for learning new vocabulary:
If you enjoyed this, you may like to read: https://www.tutortaylor.com/post/do-adults-make-good-language-students
Cate is a qualified teacher with more than 20 years of experience teaching in schools and she has most recently dedicated her time to tutoring both online and face to face. Current and past students come from the New Forest, across the UK, Spain, Switzerland, France, Spain and Hong Kong. Cate has a waiting list for all hours outside of the UK school day but can often find space for those in other time zones (such as Hong Kong and Singapore, UAE, Malaysia) or adults who are able to have a lesson during the day.
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