Flipped lexis: changing the order in which we teach vocabulary

For over a decade now, my professional area of interest has been lexis and, most importantly, strategies to remember it, actively rehearse it in class and then, finally, use it outside the classroom. As a big fan of the lexical approach, I have paid a lot of attention in my classes to honing the skill of noticing language chunks, and I have encouraged my students to perceive English texts not as strings of single words, but as language chunks (collocations, phrases, idioms, etc) which go together as sets, both in written language and in connected speech in oral utterances.

In recent years, I have added to my fascination with the lexical approach a new area: brain-friendly learning (sometimes called neurodidactics), which looks at the ways our brains work and, most importantly, learn new things and, on that basis, tries to adapt classroom strategies in accordance with the findings of research. Some time ago, whilst studying memory and memorisation processes, investigating the tenets behind retrieval practice (a study strategy where systematic active recall of information is used to strengthen memorisation) and spaced repetition (the technique of asking students to recall information at graduated intervals over time), I came up with the idea of flipped lexis: flipping the lexical workload my students are required to know and use at the end of a unit of work to the very beginning of the unit instead. In my experience, this technique has a positive impact on the development of the students’ communicative skills and their use of learning strategies. In this article, I would like to share with you the why, how and what of the flipped lexis technique.

Why?

In order to persevere with learning English, students need to have a sense of progress. In my experience, the thing that helps them to achieve this is a conscious realisation that their level is improving and progressing along with the progression of the coursework. They want to understand more, communicate more, and to have a greater belief in the possibility of their success as English speakers. Usually, especially at lower levels, they achieve this sense of improvement quite naturally. In each lesson, they become more familiar with language items which, in turn, shed more and more light on previously unknown items. In other cases, their final exams provide the stimulus to persevere.

However, at times I feel a vital component of my job as a language instructor is to take some responsibility for the students’ motivation and help to give them this sense of Wow, I can do it! To achieve this effect I largely use vocabulary, as it is more tangible than skills, more straightforward than grammar or pronunciation, and easily manageable both for me and my students. Using a carefully chosen coursebook or other classroom materials, I find that good vocabulary preparation guarantees smoother skills development (as the pre-taught vocabulary is both included in the course texts and is relevant to everyday life beyond the classroom) and also offers a tangible sense of language improvement. The flipped lexis technique, accompanied by a set of carefully chosen speaking activities which push the students to use the target language, provides a strong sense that their knowledge and understanding are much better at the end of the unit of work than they were before it.

As a result of following the flipped lexis technique, the majority of my students have improved their performance in their final tests. All those who have experienced it admit that they enjoy this approach a lot, have a better sense of their progress and want to continue in this way next term.

How?

The idea of flipped lexis is actually quite simple. It works really well if you use a coursebook in your classes, but it can equally well be applied to your own authentic materials. The key point in this procedure is knowing right at the start of a unit of work what the target results should be in terms of lexis – in other words, what language items the students will need to know in order to perform the tasks given in the listening, reading, video viewing or speaking sections.

The aim of flipping the lexis is to make sure the quality of the students’ language production after a given unit or module is demonstrably better than it was before they started it. To put it another way, the flipped lexis technique works best if we are eager to ‘drag’ our students out of their vocabulary comfort zones to the new unexplored territories of ‘lexical jungle’.

Here are the stages I use to implement the technique.

Stage 1: Create a vocabulary list

First, I make a list, or use/edit a ready-made list, of the vocabulary required for understanding and producing the language from the activities in a given unit of my coursebook. I use this list to create a flashcard set and share the link to it with my students. A number of tools are available to do this for you but, to my mind, Quizlet (https://quizlet.com) is the best and most widely used. This free website/app provides interactive learning tools for students and teachers, including flashcards, ‘learn’ and ‘game’ modes, spelling practice, etc. Before we actually start the unit, I ask the students to begin working with the set as a self-study activity. I suggest looking first at the flashcards in order to check whether there are any words they already know. At this point, I tell them that all the words will be used in the coming unit – and will also feature in the final unit test. I recommend they keep the set of words as a reference point for our classwork. Some students decide to print it out, others work solely with the online version.

Stage 2: Start with ‘study’

In the next lesson, I recommend to the students that they use the ‘Learn’ mode in their exploration of the Quizlet list. The ‘Learn’ mode creates a personalised study plan based on the user’s familiarity with the content of a vocabulary set. It starts with multiple-choice questions and, once these are answered correctly, progresses to harder questions requiring a written answer. I do my best to make it clear to my students that, at this point, it is completely normal for them to be guessing the meaning of the new words or getting wrong answers. If I work with younger students, I use the analogy of a computer game: once you start a new game or level you can be confused and unsure about how to deal with new instructions or activities. Yet that does not prevent you from playing. The same is true with their unit vocabulary sets. While doing their Quizlet work, they can take handwritten notes, prepare little ‘cheat sheets’ with the most tricky examples or consult the printed word list. The point is to stay with the material and check it regularly, regardless of the level of difficulty.

After venturing more and more into the unit during our classes and covering the course materials, the students realise that this seemingly confusing and meaningless selection of lexical items actually takes a clearer shape, once they see it in the context of vocabulary activities, listening and video tasks or readings. The fact that most of them have already familiarised themselves with the words by the time we actually come across this vocabulary in class means that we save great amounts of time on explaining the core meaning of these items. This, in turn, gives us more opportunities to focus on the nature of these items, their common collocations, context of usage, associations, etc.

Stage 3: Focus more on form

Subsequently, I encourage the students to explore the ‘Spell’ mode (spelling practice prompted by audio recordings of the wordlist items) and the ‘Test’ mode (exercises testing understanding and knowledge of the wordlist) or to have a go at one of the vocabulary games (‘Match’ or ‘Gravity’). These focus much more on the forms of the words and require more precision. In the meantime, in class, I make sure each and every session starts with a revision of the previously-taught material. I also make use of Quizlet Live (a game set by the teacher for individual or groups to complete, using their own devices), Wordwall (https://wordwall.net), Baamboozle (www.baamboozle.com) and all the other apps that allow me to revise language chunks in an enjoyable and non-threatening way. I try to make sure that each key lexical item is revised at least seven times in the course of a given unit. As a result, by the end of the unit, thanks to multiple exposures to the target language, the students seem more confident about incorporating these new words in their own language production.

What?

What are the results of flipping the unit vocabulary? First, the students feel more confident when performing the listening and reading activities from the unit. Also, they acquire new ‘building blocks’, ie new words, phrases and collocations which allow them to express themselves more precisely, and thus are more willing to take advantage of them while engaging in either written or spoken production.

Furthermore, the students soon realise that the only way to learn language chunks effectively is to recycle them. When they notice how much time they have spent on the new words following the flipped lexis approach, they realise that one of the key factors contributing to the effectiveness of their learning is the time they have spent on revising these words (in the form of self-study with the help of Quizlet, for example, or during the teacher-led classroom revision stage). On numerous occasions, I have noticed that my students start using the same systematic and frequent revision strategy for material for their other classes.

Finally, the students have a sense of achievement – they know exactly how many items they had to learn for a given unit and how much of the new language they had to memorise. As the items I put on Quizlet go through my own personal selection process before they are included in the set (according to their level of difficulty, frequency, relevance for my students, usefulness for the tasks planned, etc), the students end up having more natural and useful language at their disposal and thus can more easily express their intended meanings. They can also edit the core lists that I give them and create tailor-made lists, based on their individual needs.

To sum up, flipping the lexical workload by revealing it to the students at the beginning of a unit of work, rather than drip-feeding it throughout, has many benefits. It boosts the students’ sense of achievement and progress, enhances language retrieval when performing skills-focused activities and promotes awareness that acquiring new language entails being exposed to it as much as possible.