Researching and teaching vocabulary in the AMEP

Over a number of years, action research projects have contributed to practitionerbased research and professional development in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP). In this article, we describe a recent national project focusing on the teaching of vocabulary. We worked, as a researcher from the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR) and a researcher from the NSW Adult Migrant English Service (NSW AMES), with 25 AMEP teachers from different States to investigate different aspects of teaching and learning vocabulary. These aspects were selected by the teachers according to their interests, their learners’ needs and the focus of their classes. Summarised accounts of four studies from the project are presented as examples. Background to the project Vocabulary is an area of interest for many teachers and learners. It makes intuitive sense that acquiring vocabulary and lexical units is a central aspect of learning any language. Yet, the role of vocabulary in the history of language teaching has had an uncertain status. Richards (2000: xi) argues that at times vocabulary has almost disappeared from view ‘as scholars and applied linguists turned their attention to other dimensions of language knowledge’. A renewed interest in vocabulary research in the 1990s has returned vocabulary to the language learning and teaching agenda. In this article we provide a description of a recent action research project where we worked as researcher-coordinators with 25 AMEP teachers who investigated the teaching and learning of vocabulary in their classrooms. Our role was to manage the project, organise workshop discussions on teaching vocabulary and conducting action research, and provide advice and support to the teachers as they carried out their studies. Research on vocabulary and vocabulary learning covers a large terrain, and it is not our intention to address aspects of the research that other contributors to this volume have laid out in more detail. Teachers in the project were asked to read and discuss some of the recent literature on vocabulary (Nattinger 1988, Ellis 1997, Laufer 1997, Nation and Waring 1997). Additional sources used in the project were Carter and McCarthy (1988), McCarthy (1990) and