Transcript First language acquisition

Teaching vocabulary
Introduction
 the average native speaker uses around
only 5000 words in everyday speech
 your students won't need to produce
every word they learn, some they will
just need to recognize (active x passive
vocabulary)
What a student essentially needs to know about
a word (item):
 what it means
 spelling and form (e.g. part of speech,
irregular past/plural, followed by a
preposition?...)
 how it is pronounced
Additionally, the following aspects may be
explored:
 connotation (e.g. childish – negative, routine –
positive)
 how the word is related to others (e.g.synonyms,
antonyms, lexical sets)
 collocation or the way that words occur together
(e.g. dead tired but not *dead exhausted)
 word formation (e.g. prefixes, suffixes)
Presenting vocabulary
Vocabulary is best learned when the meaning of the words is
shown. To remember them, pupils must then meet and use
the words repeatedly in relevant contexts.
Techniques for presenting vocabulary :
 Illustration: picture, drawing on the board, concrete object
 Demonstration: mime, gesture
 Definition (as in a dictionary; synonyms, antonyms)
 Context (description, sentence examples)
 Translation
→ can be combined
→ should cater for the different learning styles
Remembering words
Words should be presented in a way that requires the
learner to do some mental work in constructing the
meaning of a word.
Teachers need to think of ways of making the experience
of learning vocabulary more memorable and of
recycling the information that we teach, e.g. by using
- personalised response
- discovery approach
- alternative ways to organise a vocabulary notebook using diagrams, word trees or networks
Practice (and testing) techniques
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Multiple choice
Matching
Odd one out
Gap-filling
Cloze
Writing sentences
Sentence completion
Translation