Transcript Unit 1: What’s in a Word?

Unit 1: What’s in a Word?
The Importance of Collocations
Words Skills: Language and Activities
for Talking About Words
• Today’s class:
• (1)We will review concepts covered last class.
• (2) We will briefly discuss the importance of
collocations.
• (3) We will look at language used for posing
word riddles, giving hints and asking for
answers.
Review
• Last class we looked at three important
concepts:
(1) Negotiation of meaning.
(2) Skills-based curricula.
(3) Teacher as an important source input and
interaction for their students.
Task 1: Before we begin . . .
I’ve given you a piece of paper. Without
asking your partner or anybody else. How
would you say this in English?
• Bottle 은 여섯 글자로 되어 있다.
Write your answer on the piece of paper. And
hand it in.
Bottle has six letters.
Classroom English
The verb ‘have’ collocates with ‘word’.
Words have letters.
As an English teacher, you have to be very
careful and pay attention to which words form
collocations to avoid using awkward language.
Look at the following expressions below:
Bottle consists of six letters.
Bottle is composed of six letters.
These expressions are grammatically correct
yet very awkward.
Let’s try another example
• What verb goes in the blank:
____________ a snowball fight.
You have a snowball fight.
Here’s another example:
He’s lonely. He needs to ____________ a
girlfriend.
make a girlfriend?
You can
make friends,
but you usually
get a girlfriend
or
find a girlfriend.
• Students (and non-native ESL teachers)
produce awkward language at times because
they are not aware of which words form
collocations.
• Being aware of collocations will help you and
students avoid using language that is
grammatically correct but awkward.
• When we look at classroom interactions in
English, pay careful attention to the language
boxes for those interactions so that you can
avoid awkward language.
• In this class I want you to be very careful
about word choice.
• As future English teachers the standard for
you is much higher than for other students.
• Roughly speaking, we say that two words are
collocations if they occur together frequently.
And because they occur together frequently,
the combination seems natural. Whereas
other words that are nearly synonymous
would seem strange in the same combination.
• A classic example comes from Michael
Halliday:
• Strong tea versus powerful computers. Strong
is synonymous with powerful yet powerful
seems awkward when applied to tea and
strong seems awkward when applied to
computers.
Our first classroom interaction:
Discussing collocations
with our students.
When we spot awkward word use we can
explain it the following ways.
(a)You can use the present tense
putting emphasis on the word
that needs to be changed.
• You PAY a visit not DO a visit.
• You don't Do a mistake, you
MAKE a mistake.
(b) You can use the modal can
(but we really mean usually).
• Trees can be TALL but not
HIGH.(Unless you mean high
up on a mountain)
• A woman can be BEAUTIFUL
but not HANDSOME.
(c) You can point out what
we usually say:
• We usually say HEAVY rain
not STRONG rain.
• REACH an agreement is
more common/natural
than MAKE an agreement.