More surefire ways to increase the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge A response to Shoba Bandi-Rao’s “nontraditional students’ insight into vocabulary learning in the ESL classroom” (Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2018)

Abstract

Many students in the English for academic purposes (EAP) courses I teach, regardless of their language proficiency level, find it difficult to use some academic vocabulary words in their writing and speech for reasons similar to those of Bandi-Rao’s participants; overall, however, they tend to use college-level words in their writing more than in their speech. Many of my students have stated that compared with writing activities, time allocated for speaking activities is not sufficient—in other words, when students write, they have more time to process language and to check their work, or think about appropriate vocabulary. However, when speaking, one needs to produce continuous speech and thus cannot retrieve the needed words so fast.