An IATEFL Webinar with Kerstin Okubo. EAP students have often remarked that their speaking vocabularies remain undeveloped regardless of other progress they made. Time constraints and tight curricula often prohibit the instructors from paying much attention to vocabulary development beyond preparatory vocabulary for listening or reading, or strategy building such as guessing vocabulary from context. Much of this preparatory vocabulary exists just beyond students’ level of comprehension; however, it usually remains inaccessible to the students for their own spoken production. In order to assist students with building their spoken productive vocabularies without relying on extra source materials, textbook or AWL lists, existing source texts can be exploited by examining a different set of vocabulary than that for reading or listening: a set that exists just within students’ level of comprehension, but not yet utilisable in their speaking. This webinar will explore ways to move beyond studying only the unknown vocabulary in source material, and exploit authentic sources for vocabulary our students can more readily use. In particular, we will move through the following objectives: an analysis of the problem, engagement with a sample text, introduction of 4 levels of vocabulary, exploiting salient vocabulary for production, activities for building productive vocabulary, and finally, learner outcomes.

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