Session
2 objectives: Lexical awareness. Just chunk it.
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By the end of this
session you will be able to:
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Download handouts to help you take notes and complete the session.
What do learners need to know?
Task 1: Read this advice to learners. Do you agree or disagree that this is a
helpful way to learn?
Learner Advice:
A very good way to improve your
English is to learn whole phrases and expressions. Learning what a word means
is not too difficult, but learning how to use
the word can be. How do words join together? What contexts can they be used
in? Learning whole phrases, or chunks of words that go together, can help you
with this.
By learning words that occur together
(collocations), you can learn how words are used. Individual words can change
their meaning depending on the words around them, so it helps to learn
chunks. Think about how the meaning of these three words change to ‘incidentally’ when they’re used as a
chunk together: ‘by’, ‘the’, and ‘way’.
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Task 2:
Now listen to these learners. What helps them learn new words?
Mohammed & Abdul
Mohammed & Abdul
(Nb: If you have trouble listening to the recording, please reload this page with a different browser, such as Google Chrome. Microsoft's Explorer sometimes has trouble with the embedded recordings and formatting)
What does knowing a word mean?
The learners in the listening exercise both said it
was helpful when the teacher both wrote and
explained words. But what does explaining a word actually mean? If we think
about the advice above, it’s more than just explaining what the word is, it’s
showing how it’s used. One way we can do this is to show collocations.
Task 3a:
Look at this picture of a
construction teacher’s flip chart. Notice how they have:
· put a key word (‘tolerance’) in a chunk to show what
words go together
· used three different colours to
help build language and literacy skills;
· showed how to say certain
symbols.
What difference does this make to only writing ‘vertical joint – tolerance: 3mm’ when it comes to developing literacy skills?
Task 3b: Choose a key word from your
subject area and prepare a board plan or write it down. Then build it up so that it includes key
collocations and is in a full sentence (also helping literacy skills). Compare
it with the picture in 3a or give it to a peer or someone in your institution’s support team for
feedback.
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As well as developing your board work so that key words are
put in sentences and colours are used judiciously to show how words are used,
you can also have a vocabulary column on your board or flip chart to show
learners how new language / subject specific terminology is used. Thinking
about what the learners said in Task 2, which of these vocabulary columns would
help learners more? Make notes and then download the commentary
Task 4: Thinking about what the learners said
in Task 2, which of these vocabulary columns would help learners more? Make
notes and then download the commentary.
Top tips for working for helping
learners with lexis (words)
Task 5: Look at the top tips for helping learners
with lexis (words). Which do you routinely do?
Session 1: Top tips!
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1
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Use
pictures and examples as well as words in glossaries.
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2
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Write
new words on the board in a vocabulary column for continual reference
throughout your session.
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3
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Mark
word stress for complicated words to help learners pronounce them.
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4
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Show common collocations for words
(subject specific or otherwise) to help learners use them.
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5
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Get learners to
write down new words and an example of how they’re written for later reference.
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Now over to you:
Task 6: Considering what we’ve covered in
this session, draw a board plan that shows a vocabulary column you could use to
help develop your learners’ use of words and collocations. It should include
word stress, where you think necessary, and any relevant collocations. You
could give the board plan to a peer or someone in your institution’s support
team for feedback on what you’ve done.
Further
reading:
- Onestopenglish has lots of teaching ideas that help develop language and literacy skills with downloadable resources as well. This link gives further suggestions about teaching lexis.
- Implementing the Lexical Approach (Lewis, M. 1997. Language Teaching Publications) goes into lots of detail about the way in which learners might learn collocations. At the back there are lots of easily adaptable suggestions about how to help learners with collocations.
