Teaching Vocabulary
Розміщено 26-04-10 у розділі Освіта.
The Course paper “Teaching Vocabulary” – курсова робота про вивчення, методологію підбору та подання слів, поповнення активного словника. Робота подається частково. Вся робота у форматі .doc коштуватиме грошей :Р
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. SELECTING VOCABULARY
2. TEACHING VOCABULARY
3. EXAMPLES OF VOCABULARY TEACHING
4. TESTING VOCABULARY
CONCLUSIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX
INTRODUCTION
For many years vocabulary was seen as incidental to the main purpose of language teaching – namely the acquisition of grammatical knowledge about the language. Vocabulary was necessary to give students something to hang on to when learning structures, but was frequently not a main focus for learning itself.
Recently, however, methodologists and linguists have increasingly been turning their attention to vocabulary, stressing its importance in language teaching and reassessing some of the ways in which it is taught and learnt. It is now clear, for example, that the acquisition of vocabulary is just as important as the acquisition of grammar – though the two are obviously interdependent – and teachers should have the same kind of expertise in the teaching vocabulary as they do in the teaching of structure.
1. SELECTING VOCABULARY
Part of the problem in teaching vocabulary lies in the fact that whilst there is a consensus about what grammatical structures should be taught at what levels the same is hardly true of vocabulary. It is true , of course, that syllabuses include word lists, but there is no guarantee that the list for one beginner’s syllabus will be similar to the list for a different set of beginners. Whilst it is possible to say that students should learn the verb ‘ to be ‘ before they learn its use as an auxiliary in the present continuous tense ( for example ) there is no such consensus about which words slot into which future meanings.
One of the problem of vocabulary teaching is how to select what words to teach. Dictionaries for upper intermediate students frequently have 55,000 words or more – and there may be many meanings for a word – and they represent a small fraction of all the possible words in a language. Somehow we have to make sense of this huge list and reduce it to manageable proportions for our learners.
A general principle in the past has been to teach more concrete words at lower levels and gradually become more abstract. Words like ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘chalk’, etc. have figured in beginners’ syllabuses because the thing which the words represent are there in front of the students and thus easily explained. Words like ‘charity’, however, are not physically represented in the classroom and are far more difficult to explain.
Other criteria which are rather more scientific have been used, amongst which two of the more important are frequency and coverage.
Frequency, coverage and choice
A general principle of vocabulary selection has been that of frequency. We can decide which words we should teach on the basis of how frequently they are used by speakers of the language. The words which are most commonly used are the ones we should teach first.
Another principle that has been used in the selection of vocabulary is that of coverage. A word is more useful if it covers more things than if it only has one very specific meaning – so the argument goes.
These two principles would suggest that a word like ‘book’ would be an early vocabulary item. It is frequently used by native speakers and has greater coverage than ‘notebook’, ‘exercise book’, ‘textbook’, etc.
In order to know which are the most frequent words we can read or listen to a lot of English and list the words that are used, showing which ones are used most often and which are used least often. This was done notably by Michael West ( 1953 ) who scanned newspapers and books to list his frequency tables. More recently Hindmarsh produced a list which is still used by exam and material designers to show what words should be ‘known’ at what level.
Perhaps the greatest revolution in vocabulary investigation and design, however, has been the harnessing of the computer to the tasks of finding out which words are used and how they are used. The massive Cobuild computer-based corpus at Birmingham University has been used not only for the design of a learner’s dictionary but also as a resource for a vocabulary-driven coursebook. Many other universities and research projects have computer-based corpuses too and now it is even possible for teachers and students to buy relatively small computer programmes which will scan texts and tell the users which words are used most often and how they are used. That is the beauty of a computer , of course ; you can key in a word and it will immediately give you examples showing you the sentences and/or phrases the word occurs in and the frequency with which it is used.
It should be possible, then, to design vocabulary syllabuses on the basis of computerised information. If we feed in enough text – from newspapers, magazines, books, letters, conversations, etc. – we will be able to make accurate statements about what words to teach.
There is no doubt at all that the use of computers has given us insights into the use of words, and teachers and materials designers have gained enormously from the information they have been able to access. But even with such scientific power at our fingertips the problem of selection has not been solved.
The fact remains that the frequency count will still be heavily influenced by the type of text that is fed into the computer. If you key in scientific textbooks you will get a different frequency count from the results you would get if you keyed in 10,000 Superman comics. If you keyed in the newspapers of twenty years ago you might well get a different frequency order from what would happen if you used today’s newspapers. In other words, whilst computer-generated text study is considerably quicker, larger and more reliable than the word lists of an earlier age it does not necessarily give us the only information we need when selecting vocabulary. If you find that the word ‘way’ ( for example ) is the fifth commonest word in the English language according to one computer-based corpus does that necessarily mean that you will teach it fifth?
The decision about what vocabulary to teach and learn will be heavily influenced, then, by information we can get about frequency and use. But this information will be assessed in the light of other considerations such as topic, function, structure, teachability, needs and wants.
WHAT DO STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW?
Meaning.
The first thing to realize about vocabulary items is that they frequently have more than one meaning. The word ‘book’, for example, obviously refers to something you use to read from – ( a written work in the form of ) a set of printed pages fastened together inside a cover as a thing to be read, according to one learner’s dictionary.But the same dictionary then goes on to list eight more meanings of ‘book’ as a noun, two meanings of ‘book’ as a verb and three meanings where ‘book’ + preposition makes phrasal verbs. So we will have to say that the word ‘book’ sometimes means the kind of thing you read from, but it can also mean a number of other things.
When we come across a word, then, and try to decipher its meaning we will have to look at the context in which it is used. If we see a woman in a theatre arguing at the ticket office saying ‘But I booked my tickets three weeks ago’ we will obviously understand a meaning of the verb ‘book’ which is different from a policeman ( accompanied by an unhappy-looking man at a police station ) saying to his colleague ‘We booked him for speeding’. I n other words, students need to understand the importance of meaning in context.
There are other facts about meaning too. Sometimes words have meanings in relation to other words. Thus students need to know the meaning of ‘vegetable’ as a word to describe any one of a number of other things – e.g. carrots, cabbages, potatoes, etc. ‘Vegetable’ has a general meaning whereas ‘carrot’ is more specific.
We understand the meaning of a word like ‘good’ in the context of a word like ‘bad’. Words have opposites ( antonyms ) and they also have other words with similar meanings ( synonyms ) – e.g. ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. Even in that example, however, one thing is clear : words seldom have absolute synonyms, although context may make them synonymous on particular occasions. As far as meaning goes, then, students need to know about meaning in context and they need to know about sense relations.
Word use.
What a word means can be changed, stretched or limited by how it is used and this is something students need to know about.
Word meaning is frequently stretched through the use of metaphor and idiom. We know that the word ‘hiss’, for example, describes the noise that snakes make. But we stretch its meaning to describe the way people talk to each other (‘ “Don’t move or you’re dead,” she hissed.’). That is metaphorical use. At the same time we can talk about treacherous people as snakes (‘He’s a real snake in the grass.’). ‘Snake in the grass’ is a fixed phrase that has become an idiom like countless other phrases such as ‘raining cats and dogs’, ‘putting the cat among the pigeons’, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, etc.
Word meaning is also governed by collocation – that is which words go with each other. In order to know how to use the word ‘sprained’ we need to know that whreas we can say ‘sprained ankle’, ‘sprained wrist’, we cannot say ‘sprained thigh’ or ‘sprained rib’. We can have a headache , stomachache or earache, but we cannot have a ‘throatache’ or a ‘legache’.
We often use words only in certain social and topical contexts. What we say is governed by the style and register we are in. If you want to tell someone you are angry you will choose carefully between the neutral expression of this fact (‘I’m angry’) andthe informal version (‘I’m really pissed off’). The latter would certainly seem rude to listeners in certain contexts. At a different level we recognize that two doctors talking about an illness will talk in a different register than one of them who then talks to the patient in question – who has never studied medicine.
Students need to recognise metaphorical language use and they need to know words collocate. They also need to understand what stylistic and topical contexts words and expressions occur in.
Word formation.
Words can change their shape and their grammatical value, too. Students need to know facts about word formation and how to twist words to fit different grammatical contexts. Thus the verb ‘run’ has the participles ‘running’ and ‘ran’. The present participle ‘running’ can be used as an adjective and ‘run’ can also be a noun. There is a clear relationship between the words ‘death’, ‘dead’, ‘dying’ and ‘die’.
Students also need to know how suffixes and prefixes work. How can we make the words potent and expensive opposite in meaning? Why do we preface one with im- and the other with in- ?
Students need to know how words are spelt and how they sound. Indeed the way words are stressed ( and the way that stress can change when their grammatical function is different – as with nouns and verbs, for example ) is vital if students are to be able to understand and use words in speech. Part of learning a word is learning its written and spoken form.
Word formation , then, means knowing how words are written and spoken and knowing how they can change their form.
Word grammar.
Just as words change according to their grammatical meaning, so the use of certain words can trigger the use of certain grammatical patterns. Some examples will show what this means.
We make a distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. The former can be both singular and plural. We can say ‘one chair’ or ‘two chairs’. The latter can only be singular ; we cannot say ‘two furnitures’. This difference, then, has certain grammatical implications. ‘Chair’ can collocate with plural verbs ( provided that it is pluralized ) whereas ‘furniture’ never can ( unless it is the name of a pop group, for example ). There are also nouns that are neither countable nor uncountable but which have a fixed form and therefore collocate only with singular or plural verbs, e.g. ‘people’, ‘the news’, ‘methematics’, etc.
Verbs trigger certain grammar too. ‘Tell’ is followed by an object + to + infinitive, for example ( ‘He told her to wake him up at six’ ) and so is ‘ask’. But ‘say’ does notwork in the same way. Knowing modal verbs like ‘can’, ‘must’, etc. means also knowing that these verbs are followed by a bare infinitive without ‘to’. When students don’t have this kind of knowledge they come up with erroneous sentences which all teachers instantly recognize, e.g. ‘He said me to come’, ‘I must to go’, etc.
Теги: in English, курсові
