Teaching vocabulary for A2 level learners with Communicative Approach

Translation
Translation is another technique that has pros and cons. Many teachers and teacher trainers see translation as a bad thing. They seem to feel that translation will in some way prevent the student from ever becoming proficient in the target language. This is quite obviously not true. There are many cases of learners becoming quite good in a language despite relying heavily on translation. In some instances translation is clearly advantageous. Where a group of students share the same mother tongue (and in particular where the teacher does too) it makes sense to make use of this facility from time to time. In fact, translation can often save time and help with comprehension. Many students use translation when they are recording the new vocabulary, whether the teacher likes it or not.
However, it is important to make students aware of some of the shortcomings of translation. It is often the case that there aren’t any direct translations (word for word equivalents), or that one language might have more than one way of saying something, depending on the context. Making students aware of these problems, rather than completely avoiding translation, may well help their learning. Students can easily become over-reliant on the teacher to translate everything so translation should only be used as one of many techniques employed in teaching vocabulary.
Dictionaries
Giving your students strategies for learning is an important part of teaching. When you consider the amount of time your students will spend outside the classroom, it is obviously essential that you help them to become independent learners. One of the best, and probably easiest, ways of learning about new words is by using a dictionary (especially a good monolingual dictionary such as the Macmillan Dictionary. Encouraging your students to use a dictionary in the classroom when reading a text, for example, will be extremely useful for them. A nice dictionary activity to develop vocabulary is to get your students to find a word they have recently learnt and read the definition, then to choose a word from the definition they either don’t really understand, or that they think is key, and then to look this word up and read the definition. Working in pairs and noting down the ‘route’ and the definitions they take can lead to an extremely productive period of learning new vocabulary and thinking about meanings.

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