ses as a homework so more time can be spent on the round-up. Love it–flipped learning. (suggestion by member of the audience)
One criticism from the audience was that the amount of vocabulary was possibly lexical overload. I suppose it would depend on level and how much the individual students could handle. Sometimes it might be good to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks because like Lewis said later you know what you are teaching but you can never know what they are learning. Also, as Kerr said, if students are going to advance to the next level, they need a lot of words (from A1 to A2 400 words, and from B1 to C1 more like 700 0r 800).
Luke’s Lexical Learning
Despite what the world sometimes expects of me, I cannot actually be in two places at once, but since I do have the good fortune of working with Luke Fletcher, I was able to attend a preview of his fabulous presentation. It was full of useful teaching ideas and excellent IWB use.
‘Students will only start to record things in chunks if we write things in chunks.’
So true, so true. I remember the frustration of checking my students’ notebooks only to find they had written single words after I’d told them time and time again to write expressions. And then I looked at our IWB slides. What had I written? That’s right–guilty.
Students have to be trained to notice things so the teacher should highlight chunks (in bold, with a highlighter pen, a different colour pen) when they prepare boards and worksheets.
Some ideas I would like to incorporate into my own teaching:
- Find someone who….. as a gap-fill with chunks highlighted and missing words given to the side
- Use the screen tool to cover and reveal the second half of a chunk for vocab reveiw
- Discussion questions involving chunks from a reading text, dictated to the class
- Teacher tells an anecdote followed by a chunk gap-fill and retelling of the story
- Lexical backs-to-the-board
- Lexical noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe)
- Using Macmillan free online dictionary http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
Translation and Learning Lexis–Philip Kerr
This was a really interesting talk for me since I did my dissertation on teachers’ attitudes to students’ own language use in the classroom. I’m looking forward to reading Kerr’s new book when it comes out next year. But in the meantime here’s his blog:
He also mentioned e-books for teachers who want to get into writing. http://www.eltteacher2writer.co.uk/
One interesting thing he said is that we need to teach less in class but facilitate learning more because the amount of vocabulary students need to progress is a lot more than what they learn in class. The average is 4 lexical items per hour of tuition. One useful activity–flashcards.
This is an old, yet effective, teaching technique where you translate a short text into another language and then back again. So for us:
English — Learners’ own languages —English
In our mixed language classes we can pair students of the same language together or have them work individually for the first translation stage but together to put it back into English. We can also use google translate. Students are going to anyways and this highlights some of the issues that could arise.
One idea I really liked, and not just because it has zero prep, is to take a text we did in class and have students translate it into their language. Then the teacher holds on to it for a few weeks/lessons and gives it back to them to translate back into English. It’s motivating, encourages noticing and is good review.
Another one is after you do a gap-fill exercise you could dictate the eight or so sentences back to the students but instead of them writing in English, they have to write in their own language very quickly. Then they have to translate them back to English with a partner.
(btw here’s the humorous job applicant letter he showed us)
To sum up his talk: translation is a motivating, effective way for learners to memorize chunks.
Creativity and Memorisation–Nick Bilbrough
We need to do something to make chunks stick in our minds. We shouldn’t b