Stop, Breathe & Think Checking Understanding Analysis of the language consists of two sub-stages, often known as highlighting and concept checking. Highlighting is taking the model sentence and showing, telling or eliciting what the problems are in terms of form, function, and phonology. Concept checking is checking the understanding of difficult aspects of the target structure in terms of function and meaning. Concept checking is vital, since learners must fully understand the structure before any intensive practice of form and phonology is carried out. Ways of checking understandingConcept questionsSome examplesLearning to construct concept questionsConclusion Ways of checking understanding Concept checking is normally achieved by the use of a set of questions designed to ensure comprehension of the target language, raise awareness of its problems, and to indicate to the teacher that the learners have fully understood. The question 'Do you understand?' Time lines to establish tenses. Target sentence: Look! Yes/no questions.
Six low-preparation vocabulary activities for the English classroom Cristina Cabal, winner of the British Council's TeachingEnglish blog award, has new and improved games for revising English words. Turning passive vocabulary (the words you know) into active vocabulary (the words you use) is one of my main concerns when teaching. To do this, I keep three key words in mind – internalise, retain and retrieve. Learners need to first learn the new language, then feel confident using the new structure, expression or word. These are some games I use to revise and practise vocabulary with my learners. Everything you need before you begin these vocabulary activities Material For all of these activities, your learners will need cards or slips of paper equal in number to the terms you want to revise. Questions For some games, you will need to prepare questions on your topic. Words Revise target vocabulary before the game – this step is necessary for the next step to flow. 1. Learner A asks learner B the first question. 2. Ask the learners to work in pairs. 3. 4. 5.
Sentence Betting: a Vocabulary Revision Game I’m really happy to welcome again Angeles Jimenez as guest writer on the blog. Ángeles is a friend and fellow teacher from EOI Oviedo with over 25 years’ experience teaching adults and, in this blog post, she will be sharing with us a fun engaging game to revise vocabulary. The Sentence Betting game is a vocabulary revision game which requires students to recognize, correct and explain vocabulary related to the topic of work. It’s highly adaptable to any semantic field and it’s a great game to review vocabulary as end-of-unit activity and usually a lot more fun than the typical course book review. Level: This game in particular works best with C1 students since there are difficult expressions B2 students haven’t studied yet. Preparation: Prepare a worksheet for students to check for word-usage mistakes related to the topic of work. Time: about 45 minutes Materials: A sentence betting worksheet (see handout).Fake money or poker chips (optional). How to play: 1. 2. 3.
Seven steps to vocabulary learning You might expect that, after having been exposed to a word in ten, twenty, or maybe at the very most thirty, contexts, a learner will gradually piece together the word's meaning and start to use it correctly, appropriately and fluently. Classroom context Seven steps to vocabulary learning Conclusion Classroom context Of course we cannot expect a learner to acquire difficult words in the same way as a young child acquires their first language, but, perhaps as teacher we can somehow help learners to arouse their 'learning monitor' by, for example, providing rich contexts containing the target language and by giving our learners time to reflect on what the language item means. In this way teachers can use the EFL classroom to replicate the real world and nurture strategies to help students understand and produce difficult language items which often seem beyond their grasp. Seven steps to vocabulary learning Here are some practical steps that I have used to help my students. Paul Bress
“Grammaring”: The Fifth Skill In Language Teaching and Learning Fez – Language teaching and learning has always been a controversial area within applied linguistics. According to Corder (1973), “what to teach or learn can be described in linguistic terms as grammar […] or in psychological terms as language skills” (p. 137). Although grammar refers to what we know about a language such as phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, language skills are about what we do with language. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The teaching and learning of grammar has always been one of the most hotly debated topics in the field of language education. With the shift from structuralism to transformational generative grammar, the notion of grammar has been redefined as the system of rules that every native speaker of a language has acquired. A Tentative Definition of “Grammaring” Various authors have attempted to define the term “grammaring” differently. Practical Activities for “Grammaring” A – Focus on form: B – Focus on meaning:
20 Clever And Funny Illustrations Showing The Literal Meanings Of Idioms. | The Language Nerds When we use language we don’t often notice what some words mean if taken literally, but when you actually pause for a second and think about what some expressions literally mean, you’d be surprised how you didn’t notice that before. The words that we use every day are so full of joy and wonder and a lot of fun if taken out of context and played with. And that’s what Keren Rosen did. Karen is an Israel-based graphic designer who loves to play with words and put them in humorous illustrations to show their double meanings.
Vocabulary revision activities One of the things we do for professional development in the school where I work are so-called ‘experimentation cycles’, where the team chooses a topic, we pool resources (books, resource packs and blog posts with all sorts of activities on the topic), after which everyone who is interested in the topic picks a few activities and tries them out in class. Finally, we organize a workshop to share the activities we liked. This post is a summary of one of these workshops, which was focused on Vocabulary revision activities. As I mentioned above, the activities mostly came from books and the Internet, and I’m sure you’ll see here quite a few ideas that you’ve tried too – so if you have a variation that you love, could you share it? ‘Vocabulary revision’ is a very broad term and activities could be very different in terms of what the learners need to do with the words: am I given something or do I need to retrieve something from memory? Recalling the meaning of an item Test-teach-test Tip. Tip.
Koprowski - Ten Good Games for Recycling Vocabulary The Internet TESL Journal Mark Koprowskimarkkoprowski [at] yahoo.com Introduction Learning is remembering. If we respect this axiom, the review and recycling of new language items will be critical if they stand a chance of becoming readily accessible in long-term memory. In fact, students do the majority of their forgetting shortly after the lesson and then the rate of forgetting diminishes. To avoid this lexical vanishing act, one solution offered is to follow the 'principle of expanding rehearsal'. Experts these days concur that learners actually need as many as 5 to 16 'meetings' with a new language item in a variety of contexts before it can be truly learned and activated for genuine use. 1. Divide the class into Teams A and B. Variation: To ensure a slightly quieter and less chaotic game, the teams can take it in turns. 2. Put the students into pairs or small groups. Variation: To add a spelling accuracy component, teams can also earn an extra point for each correctly spelt item. 3.
My current understanding of how grammar is mastered – the ‘theory’ This is the first post in series of two posts in which I review my current understanding of how grammar is mastered. In this post I’ll overview some research on grammar acquisition and in the second one I’ll give a concrete example of how some of these ideas prompted me to tweak the way I teach a particular grammar topic (the patterns used with ‘I wish’). To summarize these changes, I have stepped away from the ‘pure’ PPP lesson shape with its initial ‘presentation’ stagemodified some of the practice activities in order to change the way the structure is retrieved from memory What do we mean when we say ‘mastering grammar’? Probably everyone who’s involved in language teaching knows the term ‘interlanguage‘. Grammatical processing belongs to the so-called implicit knowledge and operates automatically, mostly without recourse to attention, unless the person stops before formulating the utterance and rehearses it in their short-memory. References Sanz, C. and Leuw, R. Like this:
Eliciting vocabulary before writing narratives Play a game of word association. The teacher gives one word and the student on the left must say the first word they can think of which is associated with it.Then the student on their left says the first word which they can think of which is associated with the previous word.This can be repeated around the class a few times.The teacher writes all the words on the board as they appear. Eventually you should have a variety 20 or 30 words on the board, for example: tree, forest, countryside, city, buildings, offices, work, leisure, holidays, beach, sun, moon, night, dark, black, cats, dogs, friendship, etc. The teacher then gives the students the first line of the story using some of the vocabulary on the board, for example: I'll never forget the night I fell asleep on the beach while I was on holiday in a strange city. The students (individually or in pairs) continue the story, drawing on the vocabulary on the board for ideas.
The 5 Seconds Game to Revise Vocabulary I have realized something about myself today. Vocabulary revision games are my thing. All my good lessons begin with revision. I make a point of beginning my classes revising what we learned the previous lesson. It takes five minutes, but I honestly believe it makes a big difference. If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you probably know by now that one of my most nagging worries- shall I call it an obsession? I never get angry. So, again, I have designed a fun little activity to revise vocabulary, collocations…etc about any topic and I have called it “The 5 seconds game”. Before the class: Prepare a set of 7-10 small questions for each pair. In class: Ask students to choose a partner. VARIATION: In another group, I asked students to work in pairs, competing against each other and not against another pair. Thanks to Andrea and Paula for giving me permission to record them Team A questions What do you call the school where you study and sleep? Team B questions