In this week's class, we started with Stephanie and Rachel's presentation on Teaching Vocabulary. I really like their idea of using a list of strange words and getting us guess their meaning based on the context they were used. In my opinion, this is a very good way to raise students' awareness of the important of contexts in teaching and learning vocabulary. Besides the contexts, learning word roots can also help students when they encounter new words, as in our group, Thea was able to guess the meaning of the word Mesonoxian correctly right away, since she knows in Latin -ox has to do with night. However, in my opinion, this vocabulary learning technique should be used for high-intermediate and advanced students only, since as teachers we wouldn't want to make vocabulary learning more complicated to our beginners' level students.
The next part of listening to Diana presenting her research on teaching vocabulary was practical, since it's always good to listen to a senior sharing experience. As i am observing the ENG 101 class in which Diana is trialling her vocab teaching technique, i have been able to see that the vocab cards work for the students in the class. Since this activity gets these students to spend a certain amount of time each week sitting down and investigating closely a certain number of words in several aspects (meaning, collocation, word-map, etc), it helps faciliate the learning of vocabulary and help students understand what it means to really know a word, and build up for themselves a good vocab learning strategy in the long run. Still, explicit vocab learning like this, from my point of view, works better for adults/ mature students who know clearly the importance of having a large vocab size in learning a foreign language, than for young learners whose learning style and goals are much more vivid and stimulus-based.
The last activity which took place in GLL focused on Grammar instruction. I was puzzled at first when Dr Smidt raised the question of "the difference between focusing on form and focusing on forms. This reminded me of how one small grammatical item could make a difference considering the meaning of words, and how important it is for learners to be thorough when learning new words. Back to grammar instruction, the activity of going back to our previous lesson plan and thinking of all grammatical items we think students need to know in order to understand the lesson was fun yet demanding. It turned out that we would have to provide students with a lot of grammatical background knowledge in each of the lesson, and what's more challeging is how to integrate such knowledge into the whole lesson so that students won't feel overwhelmed.
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2 comments:
I agree that Stephanie and Rachel's exercise should be used at the high-intermediate/advanced levels, but I think they chose difficult words to challenge our entire class. I think activities like this (although with meaningful texts at the appropriate level) could be used effectively and are used very often in language courses (i.e. reading a simple story and figuring out one or two words purely by context and then asking questions about them after the reading).
Aaron is right.
Also, with regards to your last question, we can use the same material with different tasks/activities on different days - this would decrease the challenge and prevent students from being overwhelmed.
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