By María de la Lama
During English courses,
students want to incorporate new words into their "English" in order
to speak fluently. In fact, the construction of vocabulary is a skill that
students must develop in order to enrich their repertoire of vocabulary for
themselves.
Here are some tips you
can provide your students:
Avoid having your
students memorize vocabulary lists. Instead, it is more productive to learn
words in phrases. Therefore, learning “collocations” is more effective than learning an isolated word. For example, when they learn the word “steak”, students can at
the same time memorize words that usually go with “steak”: well done, medium or
rare. Another example is the noun "story" where a student can
immediately learn the collocation "tell a story".
Show students that
learning new words that belong to the same semantic category is not only
easier, but easier to remember. For example: when they learn the cooking verb "bake", students can learn
another two or three cooking verbs such as steam, fry, boil, etc.
Teach students to find
relationships between words and to represent that relationship. For example,
when teaching the adjectives "cold" and "freezing" instead
of giving students a wordy explanation, write this on the board:
Freezing ++
The use of the plus
symbol easily transmits the difference
in meaning between these two words.
But how do teachers
check their students’ comprehension of new words without translating them into
their native language?
To begin with, we must
avoid our tendency to ask "empty questions" such as: do you understand the meaning of this word? or
do you have any questions?
Instead of asking this kind of questions, guide your
students to process the meaning of a new word, BUT to do this, teachers need to
be good at asking effective questions. Consider the following example: our
students face the word "shy" for the first time and the teacher gives
them an explanation of its meaning in English. But how do we know that the
students understood the meaning?
a) By giving synonyms or antonyms of the word “shy”?
b) By eliciting examples of people who are “shy”
Even though the two
options can be helpful, they are not as effective as the appropriate “guiding
questions” formulated by the teacher. Look at the following examples of guiding
questions for the understanding of the word “shy”:
a) Do shy people enjoy meeting strangers?
b) Is it easy for shy people to make friends during a trip?
Let’s consider another
example: Mary wishes she were in Brazil.
Getting the meaning of
this sentence is more difficult because of the use of “wish + subjunctive”.
Thus the following guiding questions would come handy:
a) Is she in Brazil now?
b) Does she want to be in Brazil?
Always remember that our
memory works better when we are involved in the process of working out the
meaning of a new word.
BIODATA:
