It’s not the amount of words we teach them – far from it. It’s about allowing our students’ deeper minds to grasp the structure of the language, which is its real grammar, by hearing it spoken correctly over and over. Less is more in this work.
It’s also about establishing patterns of language in our students’ minds – webs of words made up of rich and interesting context. Then when it comes to individual vocabulary words, those are easily absorbed and grafted into the system as the web of language becomes more firmly established with each passing class.
Learning individual words in the target language without setting them, like jewels into a crown, is an exercise in futility. Jewels can get lost if they are not set in a piece of jewelry. Drops in an ocean evaporate, but the ocean itself never does.
We create in our students’ minds webs of language. Words get caught in it, snared if you will, in a rich contextual bed, and they are not forgotten because they are not memorized. Without the web, they drop to the ground, since there is nothing to support them, and a chance to make a student happy and confident as a language learner is lost.