What's in a Word? -- Discourse and Vocabulary

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Date Posted: 16:05:40 10/07/09 Wed
Author: Danielle Bellezzia
Subject: What's in a Word?

"A word is a microcosm of human consciousness"(Vygotsky)According to the linguist David Wilkins summed up that " Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed". And I think that shows the importance of vocabulary learning. Every time I get confronted by a parent or a student on the subject of teaching more vocabulary than grammar I tell them that if you spend most of your time studying grammar ,you won't notice lot's of improvment on, but if you focus on learning more expressions and words you certanly will feel the improvment. We can say very little with grammar, however you can say almost everything with words.
the tradicional teaching such as a oral repetition eg. DRILLS, this notion of mechanical practice underlies the very popular belief that " pratice makes perfect" well we all know that doesn't really work . What to do then? well the teaching of a new word should be meaninful , it needs to be integrated into the student's network , of words associations. Well from that we can see that activities must be more well planned and that it needs to ensure long-term recall . The new words must be placed in " working memory" to do that the words on the activities must suggest being taken a part, being compared,combined, matched, visualised, re-shuffled, put toguether again. We need to think of INTEGRATION activities, working together with the PRACTICE activities.
Well here are some of the teaching ideias that I present to my students:

identifying eg: listing out for particular words on spoken or recorded text.

selecting eg: choose the odd one out.

matching eg:a visual representation, a translation and so on.

sorting eg:the students can be asked to sort the words into groups.

ranking and sequencing eg: the words need to be put in some kind of order. or the students need to rank itens according to preference.

Well the possibilities are endless.
Ok my friends I hope I could give you some ideias on the vocabulary teaching , I asked to do this topic because I agree with the authors I mentioned before, and to me vocabulary is an important tool on learning a second language.
If you need anything from me I'm here...
Take care
xxD

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Replies:

Re: What's in a Word? -- Danielle Bellezzia, 16:07:05 10/07/09 Wed