Professional Documents
Culture Documents
When we come to “what to teach”, it is all about types of words. These are
adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations, proverbs,
similes, context-bound utterances, slang and euphemism. When we teach a
word, we should state type of the word. For example, explain (v), flexible (adj),
practice (n) etc.
Thirdly, we discussed what it means when someone says I know this word.
First of all, when someone says I know this word, (s)he should know the meaning
of the word. Then (s)he should know its register; that’s to say, the word is formal
or informal, slang or not, polite or impolite. After that, its pronunciation and
spelling should be known. Finally, (s)he should know its part of speech and
appropriateness; that’s to say, where to put the word and how to use the word in
a sentence or context. Collocation (If it collocates with any other words) should
be also known.
Fourthly, we talked about how we teach. There are two ways of presenting
vocabulary. The first one is deductive (explicit) teaching and the second one is
inductive (implicit) teaching by using contextual clues. At this point, we say that
it is necessary to use a context when teaching vocabulary, because a context
specifies one of a word which has more than one meaning, the intended
connotation, and register. It also shows us collocations of the words, grammatical
roles of the words and morphological alterations of the words. To understand if
our students have understood or not the words they learnt, we should create a
context in which they can use them.
In the second week, firstly we did some exercises. Thinking that we will
present the words given in the book, we talked about the techniques we can use
for each word. As a result of this, we decided that students love matching
exercises. In the technique of synonyms, synonyms should be clear. If students
don’t know the meaning of synonym, it’s not possible for them to understand the
word. In addition, unless students understand, acting does not make any sense.
Then some of us tried to teach these words in the class.
Finally, we talked about the steps in vocabulary teaching. The first step is
“lead in”. While teaching vocabulary, the first thing we should do is to do a pre-
activity in order to let our learners have an idea what we will do. For example, we
can use a context that includes the words we will teach and highlight or underline
these words to get our students’ attention. In the second step-conveying
meaning-, we choose teaching techniques and use different techniques
depending on the word. We should try to use different techniques for each word.
The next step is to “repeat the words”. We should make sure that our students
have no difficulty in pronunciation of the words. In addition, since we are models,
firstly we should know the correct pronunciation of the words we will teach. The
fourth step is “double check” which means that we should make our learners
have understood the words we are teaching; so at this step, we should prepare
some concept questions. The other steps are “use” and “model sentence”.
Finally, we should do some practices and exercises.
Munise ÖZTÜRK