ely to be repeated in a text or substituted with a pronoun?)
- textual colligation (Where does an expression occur in the text?)
One thing he said that really struck me was that reading primes us so it is important to read in order to learn vocabulary and subconsciously pick up all of those primings. Learning vocabulary in turn primes us to organize text in writing. Which leads me to remember the importance of context in teaching vocabulary. Without context students miss out on primings. This also makes me wonder about the ongoing debate over whether it’s better to use authentic material or graded. Lexical priming theory makes me think there’s an argument for authentic material because it primes students for how language is really used rather than an artificial, graded priming. This kind of priming may also contribute to the intermediate plateau.
Working Exercises Hard–Hugh Dellar
This followed nicely after Lexical Priming because it helped answer a question I had lingering in my head.
How in the world can our students pick up all the priming necessary to really know a word/expression in the short amount of time they have in class?
Hugh’s answer was that we need to give them this extra priming by drawing their attention to chunks of language from their coursebook and through our boardwork.
Some helpful lesson tips:
- Spend time prepping lessons, pulling out ‘ambient language’ from exercises and anticipating expressions that they may need and mapping it out beforehand. Think of more examples of collocations to extend what is in the coursebook.
- Don’t pre-teach vocabulary. Instead let students get on with the exercise and spend the time in the ’round-up’ after. The vocabulary exercise does teach the unknown words in context; otherwise it becomes just a test.
- Students need less context setting and more meaningful language analysis.
- Board up whole sentences, not just single words or even chunks. Remember the longer the phrase, the more that is primed.
- Write these sentences as a gap-fill.
- Do vocabulary exercises 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.macmillandictionar