Session 2: Lexical awarenss. Just chunk it!

Session 2 objectives: Lexical awareness. Just chunk it.

By the end of this session you will be able to:       Give reasons why teachers need to focus on collocation in order to help learners’ language and literacy skills;  Identify language chunks in their won subject area;    Evaluate different approaches to board work when helping learners with subject specific lexis; Name sites for further reading to help develop this area further.

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’.

Task 2: Now listen to these learners. What helps them learn new words? 

Mohammed & Abdul

Yasmin

(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!
1	Use pictures and examples as well as words in glossaries.
2	Write new words on the board in a vocabulary column for continual reference throughout your session.
3	Mark word stress for complicated words to help learners pronounce them.
4	Show common collocations for words (subject specific or otherwise) to help learners use them.
5	Get learners to write down new words and an example of how they’re written for later reference.

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.

http://www.onestopenglish.com/support/methodology/grammar-vocabulary-and-skills/grammar-and-vocabulary-teaching-students-collocations/146468.article

• 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.