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Vocabulary pre-teaching: should you do it?

There is some controversy surrounding the effectiveness of vocabulary pre-teaching before listening and reading tasks. Should you do it or not? Let’s examine the findings of studies on this topic and try to answer that question.

Contents:
What is vocabulary pre-teaching? Why do we do it?

Pre-teaching vocabulary essentially means teaching a few lexical items before listening or reading activities in order to help students understand the passages better and complete the activities successfully. The rationale behind it is the concept of ‘scaffolding,’ in which teachers support learners by giving them tools to deal with tasks of increasing complexity.

What is the rationale against the pre-teaching of lexis?

When you go through teacher training, such as the CELTA, you learn how to pre-teach vocabulary and you are, in fact, expected to do so in your teaching practices for listening and reading skills lessons. However, I have also participated in other trainings where tutors tell us not to pre-teach.

The main rationale against it is that by pre-teaching vocabulary, we would actually be hindering rather than helping our students. We would be spoon-feeding them information instead of supporting the development of essential skills in listening and reading, such as inferring meaning from context. I have also heard some people point out that there is no vocabulary pre-teaching in real life, so it would make no sense to pre-teach in class.

Other reasons against it are that it is time-consuming and teacher-centred and that it takes time from a lesson where we should be working on skills and strategies for listening and reading rather than on vocabulary. 

Another argument against the practice of pre-teaching lexis is that at that stage, before the students have actually listened to or read a passage for the first time to get the gist, the words are decontextualised and may seem random to students, but that’s not the case if you establish the context first and pre-teach words within that context. 

Another setback of pre-teaching that is raised by some critics is that it does not really lead to vocabulary retention after all, although one could argue that vocabulary retention isn’t the point of pre-teaching words. Pre-teaching of key vocabulary is intended to help with listening and reading skills.

Nonetheless, the arguments against pre-teaching seem to make sense and deserve a deeper analysis. Do we have any actual data to make a case for or against the pre-teaching of lexis? What do studies say?

Some caveats before we look at the studies

Several studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of vocabulary pre-teaching in comparison with other pre-listening or pre-reading activities, and results are said to be mixed. I’d argue that’s not the case. From what I’ve seen, it seems there are more studies with results favourable to the practice of some form of vocabulary pre-teaching than the opposite. I say ‘some form’ because in most of these studies, the vocabulary activity carried out before listening or reading tasks is not exactly what I would call pre-teaching. What do I mean by that? There is a set of steps for pre-teaching vocabulary, which are normally taught at the CELTA and similar teaching qualification courses. If you are unfamiliar with a listening lesson framework, check my article on how to teach listening. 

I’m basing my evaluation of these studies on that framework and on my own classroom experience. Therefore, take my analysis of these studies with a grain of salt too. Maybe you do things differently and these studies apply to your context.

A few studies seem to suggest that working with key vocabulary before listening activities is not beneficial or may even hinder students’ performance in the following tasks, including Chang and Read, 2006; Kilickaya, 2024; and Rameshianfar et al., 2015, while others found that vocabulary work was indeed helpful for listening activities including Aldukhayel, 2023; Babaei and Izadpanah, 2019; and Farrokhi and Modarres, 2012, and also for reading activities, such as File and Adams, 2010, and Mousavian and Siahpoosh, 2018. 

The studies mentioned above are by no means an exhaustive list. I’m citing only the ones I could read; not all articles are easily available in open-access journals. I couldn’t find any meta-analysis on this topic, but I’ve read as many studies as possible, given time constraints and the aforementioned difficulty of access. Why? I’d like to use this not only to try and help answer the question of whether we should pre-teach vocabulary or not, but also to use this opportunity to illustrate the importance of taking some time to read a few studies and form a better understanding of a topic. Reading just the abstracts is akin to reading just the headlines in the news.

You can click on the hyperlinks throughout this post or in the list of references at the end of the text to read the articles for yourself. Some articles are more easily accessible through a Google Scholar search, though. For those who have never used Google Scholar before, just copy and paste the reference in the Google Scholar search bar, and you will be able to find the PDF versions of those studies when available.

Reading just the abstracts of academic papers is akin to reading just the headlines in the news.

Studies that answer some of the arguments against pre-teaching

If you have classroom experience, you know that any form of pre-reading or pre-listening activity is helpful and improves your students’ performance in subsequent tasks. And, in fact, that is what studies confirm. What would be interesting to know, based on the criticisms levelled at pre-teaching, is whether it really helps or hinders students in the development of their reading and listening skills and also if pre-teaching leads to long-term retention of vocabulary rather than just helping with the task at hand. 

I couldn’t find any studies that actually tried to answer specifically whether pre-teaching of vocabulary would help or hinder the long-term development of those skills. As for long-term retention of vocabulary, only two of the studies I found had delayed post-tests to measure long-term vocabulary retention (File and Adams, 2010 and Yekta et al. 2025), and they suggest that pre-teaching does indeed lead to vocabulary retention.

I was able to access and read File, K.A. and Adams, R. (2010). The researchers analysed the rate of vocabulary learning and retention after two different types of treatments: isolated vocabulary instruction prior to reading (pre-teaching), and vocabulary instruction integrated with the reading. The retention of words acquired incidentally was also examined. Learners were adults with an intermediate level of English proficiency and were native speakers of a variety of Asian languages (Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Malaysian, and Thai). Retention rates were measured by a post-test conducted 16 days after the lesson. Both forms of instruction were better than incidental learning. In fact, several studies suggest that explicit instruction leads to more vocabulary learning than incidental exposure. I’ll be looking into those studies in the future.

However, as I previously pointed out, an important issue is that the vocabulary instruction in this study was not exactly vocabulary pre-teaching in my view, and that’s a problem with several studies. 

Some issues found in the studies

Another issue is that these studies don’t all test the same procedures, nor are they carried out under the same conditions, which makes any comparison among them more difficult. Besides that, all sorts of factors can influence results, including the learners’ cultures, native languages and level of proficiency, as well as the conditions on the day of the lesson or test (What time of day was it? Were the students tired? Were there any noises? Etc.). We should always take these results with a grain of salt and try different approaches to see what works best for our students in our specific context.

Bearing all that in mind, below is a quick overview and analysis of some of these studies. Researchers have looked into other pre-listening/reading activities in these papers, but I am focusing my analysis and critique mainly on the topic at hand, the vocabulary activities, otherwise this would become a 15,000-word essay rather than a blog article.

Let’s start with the ones that are normally cited as having negative results for vocabulary pre-teaching.

We should always take these results with a grain of salt and try different approaches to see what works best for our students in our specific context.

Studies with negative results for vocabulary pre-teaching

One of the most cited studies against the pre-teaching of vocabulary is Chang, A. C. S., & Read, J. (2006). Interestingly though, this study does not actually evaluate the efficacy of pre-listening activities for teaching purposes, but as support before a listening test with 30 multiple-choice items! The authors themselves say:

If the effectiveness of support is to be evaluated for teaching purposes, though, it is necessary to recognize one crucial difference between testing and teaching. In our study, the forms of listening support were judged according to how well they contributed to the short-term goal of comprehending the test input, whereas the aim of teaching activities should be to promote the long-term development of listening proficiency. (p. 395)

As one of the goals of vocabulary pre-teaching is the short-term goal of helping learners comprehend the input better, we might still try to yield some useful information from this study. The authors essentially compared three types of pre-listening support: repetition of the input (learners listened to the audio track three times before doing the test), providing background knowledge about the topic of the listening (reading about the topic and then discussing it), and vocabulary instruction. There was also question previewing, but as all groups had the opportunity to preview the questions before listening, the group that only did that as a pre-listening activity functioned as a control group against which the usefulness of the other activities was evaluated. The subjects of this study were adult Taiwanese students.

The researchers found that providing information about the topic was the most effective type of pre-listening support, followed by repetition of the input – unsurprisingly, of course, repeating the input is very helpful, which is why we ask people to repeat something when we don’t understand what they said. The study found that vocabulary instruction was the least useful of the pre-listening support activities. The problem is that ‘vocabulary instruction’ in this study was not at all what I would call pre-teaching of vocabulary. What they did in this study was provide a glossary with 48 words, which students studied for 25 minutes. Then a teacher worked on the pronunciation of each and every single word, and then, as if the students weren’t probably already tired and bored to death:

During the last 10 minutes, the students listened to eight short prerecorded dialogues, which gave them some practice at hearing what a number of the target words sounded like in connected speech. (p.385)

Of all the pre-listening support activities tested, the vocabulary one was the most tiring and cognitively demanding task. That’s an important point. Could it be that the students in the vocabulary instruction group were already tired by the time of the test? Could that have contributed to their underperformance? 

Another important detail is that both high and low-proficiency students performed equally poorly in the vocabulary instruction group. Isn’t that strange? How could vocabulary instruction cause high-proficiency students to perform as poorly as low-proficiency ones? Besides the possibility that students were more tired than in other groups, could the bad result be down to, not the vocabulary preview per se, but to how it was carried out?

After the main part of the study, the researchers interviewed the participants about their difficulties, and it transpired that the learners in the vocabulary group seemed to have focused too much on trying to listen for the pre-taught words during the test (unsurprisingly given the excessive focus on so many words) instead of listening for the general idea. That’s another important point, as it was a test, not a class, learners didn’t have a gist activity first (again, if you don’t know what this is about, check my previous post).

Furthermore, the authors also point out that learners didn’t have the time to memorise the new words. That’s another important detail because the purpose of pre-teaching is not memorisation. This suggests, in my view, that the problem was not the pre-teaching of vocabulary per se but rather how it was carried out in this particular instance, the intention behind it and how the whole activity was set up. 

As I said, we do not pre-teach vocabulary for students to memorise it. Vocabulary is pre-taught within the context of the passage to be listened to or read, and it is not advisable to pre-teach more than just a few words, usually three or four. There shouldn’t be any long work on pronunciation either. We don’t focus too much on the pre-teaching stage; it should take just a few minutes. Besides, learners will ideally listen first for the general idea of the passage and then listen again to focus on more specific information.

Kilickaya (2024) and Rameshianfar et al. (2015) have similar problems to the previous study. 

Kilickaya compared the effectiveness of pre-teaching vocabulary against a control group that was not exposed to any pre-listening activity. The participants were young adult students at a Turkish university. The pre-teaching group performed slightly better, but according to the author’s analysis, that wasn’t statistically significant. In this study, only four words were pre-taught, which is advisable for a class; however, it is unclear how the words were taught. The article is vague when it comes to procedures, and materials are not provided as appendices, but the author states that several questions were asked to check the learners’ understanding of the lexical items, which were written on the board and pronounced several times. Learners also had to use the newly learned words in a phrase or sentence. That may have been too much focus on the words, and again, as in the previous study, that might be behind the issues students had when doing the listening task:

[…] several participants stressed that they thought they needed to focus on these pre-taught words during listening, which might have negatively affected their performance during listening. As most participants indicate, during listening they felt the urge to listen out for the words that they practiced during the pre-listening session, which led to focus on these words rather than the comprehension. (p. 12)

It seems, again, that the problem may have been how the pre-listening vocabulary activity was carried out and/or with its instructions. If learners think that they must focus on the newly learned words, that might be due to unclear instructions. Later, the author goes on to say that:

Rather than isolating vocabulary as a pre-listening activity, learners can be exposed to the overall context and purpose of the listening test. This might encourage learners to develop skills that will reflect real-life listening, such as inferring meaning from context and listening for general ideas. (p.12)

That is what trained teachers have already been doing for a long time. The author also provides other advice, such as activating learners’ background knowledge and engaging students in topic-related questions before the listening activity (both are already common practice), having post-listening vocabulary activities based on the listening passage (which is what you do if you are continuing afterwards with a vocabulary lesson, using the listening text as a springboard). Essentially, what we already know works.

Rameshianfar et al. (2015) analysed the effects of three different pre-listening treatments, namely vocabulary instruction, vocabulary instruction plus background knowledge, and input repetition plus background knowledge. The subjects were Iranian intermediate learners. There was a control group with no pre-listening treatment. Twenty words were pre-taught, and this study was also based on a test with 30 multiple-choice items rather than a regular class. Therefore, again, not something that can be directly compared to a listening lesson.

The result was that using only vocabulary instruction, without working with the background knowledge, was the least useful but still better than nothing (control group). The treatment with the best results was input repetition plus background knowledge – again, unsurprisingly, of course repetition helps. The second best was vocabulary work plus background knowledge – again, what we are already supposed to do in class, we don’t teach decontextualised vocabulary.

As with the previous study, the description of the procedures is vague, and the article does not provide any materials as appendices. The authors state that there was a presentation of key vocabulary where learners were familiarised with the definitions of the words and their use in different contexts, followed by a gap-fill exercise to review the words. However, it is not clear how the words were presented, and it is also unclear what is meant by ‘different contexts’. We would normally only present the use of a keyword in the context of the passage to be listened to or read, even if it can be used in other contexts and have other meanings; otherwise, students might be confused. Perhaps, again, there was too much focus on the words and too many words taught at once, leading to fatigue and/or confusion or an overpreoccupation with the words, which might have led to underperformance. Yet again, it doesn’t seem possible to use this study as support for stating that pre-teaching vocabulary isn’t effective.

Studies with positive results for vocabulary pre-teaching

Now, let’s look at some studies that are normally cited as evidence for the efficacy of vocabulary pre-teaching.

Aldukhayel (2023), Babaei and Izadpanah (2019), Farrokhi and Modarres (2012), and Mousavian and Siahpoosh (2018) all found pre-teaching of vocabulary to be beneficial, but again, as we analyse the studies, we find the same problem: the vocabulary pre-teaching was not what we ideally should do in class, but simply the provision of a considerably long glossary for learners to study on their own before the activities or sometimes the teacher provides translations before the activity. In those studies, with the exception of Mousavian and Siahpoosh (2018), which analyses a reading task, all groups of learners listened to the input twice, which always helps, therefore, we cannot make a direct comparison with those studies that didn’t use repetition and we need to factor in that the effect of repetition may have helped learners’ performances. Aldukhayel (2023) and Farrokhi and Modarres (2012) were tests rather than regular classes.

In these studies, could it be that the way that other pre-teaching activities were carried out affected them negatively? For example, in Aldukhayel (2023), vocabulary pre-teaching was better than content previewing, and it was particularly beneficial for advanced learners. However, the author points out that maybe content previewing didn’t help much because students may not have been very engaged with the topic. The topic of the listening passage was a critique of three British newspapers, whereas the class was made up of young Arabic-speaking students.

Another example is Farrokhi and Modarres (2012). This study also analysed the impact of providing a glossary compared to providing background context. Vocabulary work was found to be more useful for low-proficiency learners (contradicting the result of the aforementioned study), whereas content was better for high-proficiency learners. However, the vocabulary activity was conducted one session before the listening test, whereas content-related support was given only 10 minutes before the test. Therefore, perhaps, learners may have had more time to study the vocabulary, which would impact not only this study but also make it difficult to compare it with others.

Is there a difference in the efficacy of pre-teaching in different proficiency levels?

As you may have noticed, few studies have considered how different proficiency levels factor into the discussion of pre-teaching vs. no pre-teaching of vocabulary. Based on my experience, the previously mentioned result that vocabulary pre-teaching is more helpful for low-proficiency learners makes more sense. 

After all, we expect more advanced learners to not only possess a greater vocabulary range but also to be better able to cope with unknown words, as they have already developed strategies that might render pre-teaching redundant.

The very ability to infer meaning comes from vocabulary knowledge; the more words you know, and the more aware you are about words (e.g., knowing about word-formation processes, knowing that Latin-based words are more formal than Germanic words in English, etc.), the more you can infer about other words and about contexts. Therefore, advanced learners are better positioned to do well without the pre-teaching of lexis.

Summary

As I said earlier, if you have any classroom experience, you know that any activity carried out prior to reading and listening to support learners in those tasks will be helpful. That is largely confirmed by the studies analysed here. 

In summary, all those studies have shown that even when vocabulary activities were the least useful, they were still better than having no pre-listening/reading activity at all. What studies seem to suggest is that any vocabulary activity carried out before listening or reading to make students aware of some of the lexical items they will encounter will help improve learners’ performance in the subsequent tasks, even when those activities are poorly designed and not what would normally be considered vocabulary pre-teaching.

My view and advice

The biggest hurdle for learners when it comes to understanding what they listen to or read is lack of vocabulary, especially in lower levels of proficiency. If you know that the material you will be working with has a couple of words that might cause students to not understand or misunderstand a passage or be unable to do a task, you have two choices: either circumvent those words by creating tasks that do not require understanding those words or pre-teach them to avoid frustration.

Affective issues are known to impact students’ performance and motivation; if, especially beginners, are not given the necessary tools to carry out a task in class, they will leave frustrated, which will impact their development negatively.

If you go with the other option, avoiding the words, by all means, do follow up with a vocabulary activity dealing with those lexical items; there is no reason why you shouldn’t use that opportunity to help learners expand their vocabulary, especially if those are high-frequency words that learners will encounter again and again.

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References:

Aldukhayel, D. (2023). The Impact of Vocabulary Preteaching and Content Previewing on the Listening Comprehension of Arabic-Speaking EFL Learners. Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 26(26), pp.023–038. doi: https://doi.org/10.28945/5076. 

Babaei, S. and Izadpanah, S. (2019) ‘Comparing the effects of different advance organizers on EFL learners’ listening comprehension: Key vocabularies, previewing comprehension questions, and multimedia annotations’,Cogent Education, 6(1). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2019.1705666

Chang, A. C. S., & Read, J. (2006). The effects of listening support on the listening performance of EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 375–397. https://doi.org/10.2307/40264527

Farrokhi, F. and Modarres, V. (2012). The Effects of Two Pre-task Activities on Improvement of Iranian EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.2.1.144-150. 

File, K.A. and Adams, R. (2010). Should Vocabulary Instruction Be Integrated or Isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 44(2), pp.222–249. doi: https://doi.org/10.5054/tq.2010.219943. 

Kilickaya, Ferit, The Effectiveness of Pre-teaching Vocabulary Before Listening and Learner Views (October 15, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5021504 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5021504 

Mousavian, S. and Siahpoosh, H. (2018). The Effects of Vocabulary Pre-teaching and Pre-questioning on Intermediate Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Ability. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 7(2), p.58. doi: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.2p.58. 

Rameshianfar, A., Shahnazari, M. T., & Tavakoli, M. (2015). The effects of two pre-listening vocabulary and enhanced content-related supports on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ listening comprehension sub-skills. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2(8), 284–302. https://www.jallr.com/index.php/JALLR/article/view/221/pdf22

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