I went through my CELTA and learned about providing a context that allows students to deduce the meanings of new words. There’s also the spiel about genuine communication: don’t ask students to fill five minutes talking about a picture to demonstrate their competence, ask Student A to describe the picture only she can see to Student B; Student B listens and draws what he hears.
Then I opened two major task-based, communicative coursebooks to see vocabulary exercises like: check the meanings of the words in the box. Use your dictionary if you’re not sure.
Now again, I have a CELTA, not the more advanced DELTA or MA, but still I get the sense that looking up a list of words in a dictionary is not communicative, even though it is in a book claiming to be so. And this is a problem most practically because native speaker EFL teachers with training in the communicative approach are encouraged and expected to get their students talking and communicating. And using the book that the school has sold to the students, of course. But speaking!
Frequently those words in the box precede a text they will appear in, so finding – and heaven forbid creating – a text to serve as a context for students to infer the meanings is not a very balanced or practical way to go. Creating some sort of written matching exercise may help make it more student-centered than going through all the words “together” or giving a sentence for each yourself, but a written exercise is unlikely to get students as engaged as you’d like.
One way I’ve dealt with such exercises is with this vocabulary activity.
The faster (or at least enforced) pace and competitive element compels people to do something – explain or listen – rather than just passively read a definition or translation in a dictionary. Is a game enough to learn and retain the words? My intuition tells me probably not, but sometimes the point is to introduce the words so students can understand a text, and then use that text to practice reading skills or as a context for something else. The practical reality I have come across in a language school environment is that you don’t always have the time you need to cover the material that’s there.
I will admit that from time to time I have pangs of guilt that I am presenting myself as far more knowledgeable than I actually am; a recent link at TEFLtastic to research about learning words in lexical sets did in fact make me think twice about making this post which I have had nearly finished for some time now (really!) - and making reference to mindmaps later on.
While I’m sure there are many who have an understanding of all this far superior to mine, though, they are not the ones setting the agenda in language schools, at least not yet. In the meantime, EFL teachers do still have to cope, and I found that adding this activity – and the ones below – to my stockpile made things better. How much is learning connected to a positive experience in class, or being engaged in class? I don’t know if there is research on this, or if there is, if it can be easily applied in the same way in every case.
If you manage to deal with a good chunk of the box of words with a mindmap [if you can still feel okay about mindmaps, that is!] or by slipping them into questions that help clarify their meaning, you may be able to engage students a little more by getting them to order or group the words somehow. The main challenge I feel when confronted with this boring box of words is how to deal with them in a way that meets students’ expectations for something more than directing them to their dictionaries and is still somewhat communicative and student-centered.
Do you come across the ubiquitous boxes of vocab words, and if so, how do you deal with them?
{ 6 comments }
I must admit that I almost never pre-teach. I7ve been unhappy with it since my CELTA, where I found it really upset the smooth movement from discussion to text, and being a CELTA trainer and DOS I saw the vast majority of teachers experiencing the same thing.
Here in Japan what students really need to learn how to do is to cope with a lack of knowledge and read and listen for overall understanding, so I almost always end up just designing a different first listening or reading for general understanding task from the one that is in the book. You can make sure that the students can do this task without the 5 random words by making it a single question that can be answered from several different clues in the text. When you then explain vocabulary or let them use their dictionaries at later detailed comprehension stages, the fact that they are involved in the text and want to understand means they are much more likely to remember that vocab in the longer term, in my (unscientific) experience.
If you are going to pre-teach, you can usually cut down on the list in the book by making sure that all those words are actually needed to answer the questions- especially in an exam class, where answering the questions is all that matters. If more than 5 pieces of vocab pre-teach are needed to answer the questions, it’s probably best to change the tasks, or even the text.
You can also tie the pre-teach more smoothly into the lesson plan by making it part of a more general brainstorming stage or as using it as a prediction task (using these 7 words, try to guess the story/ topic you are going to read/ hear and then read/ listen and check).
Think that’s covered it!
TEFLtastic blog- http://www.tefl.net/alexcase
“what students really need to learn how to do is to cope with a lack of knowledge and read and listen for overall understanding”
Agreed! True where I have taught as well.
“designing a different first listening or reading for general understanding task from the one that is in the book”
Good one.
“using it as a prediction task (using these 7 words, try to guess the story/ topic you are going to read/ hear and then read/ listen and check).”
I like that too.
And now that I have figured out how to really put TEFLtastic to work for this blog, more is on the way!
Great ideas - thanks Alex.
Nice post, Katie.
I agree wholeheartedly with Alex’s advice. I do have a couple of things that I think are worth adding.
The first concerns dealing with the text and the old “to pre-teach or not pre-teach” conundrum.
And for my second trick, I’d like to touch on the slight concern I think I detected in the article regarding “communicative language learning”.
Right, so…
Firstly, like anything that you do in the classroom, you have to determine the purpose of the listening component. For example…
* Is it to simply understand the overall gist of the text, followed by a couple of slightly more detailed questions in order to get one or two details… all for the purpose of leading into something else?
If so, then you may not need to pre-teach anything. And if you DO think you have to pre-teach anything in order for students to even get the gist and answer the most global of questions, then the text is probably too hard and probably warrants being used as the major component to a lesson all by itself. It can then, later, be “revisited” as the intro to another “main” lesson.
If, however, it’s a lead-in and you don’t feel that you need to pre-teach anything… don’t!
Sure, it may turn out that your judgement was wrong and you could get bogged down in the vocab just so that students understand the globals, but hey that happens every now and then!
* Is it the main text to be dealt with in the lesson?
If so, then I agree with Alex that should you find yourself needing to pre-teach more than a handful of words (which I’d be hesitant to put an actual number on), then you may have a problem with the text and/or the questions.
Sometimes, though, you don’t have a choice. If you follow a textbook and have limited (or no!) flexibility, then it’s a case of “Well, tomorrow’s lesson is this listening text! Better grin and bear it and see what I can do to mitigate the pain for both myself and the students!”
[Sidenote: all of my comments and Alex's apply equally to reading texts, by the way].
In cases such as this, the brainstorm method Alex suggested works a treat. I would like to flesh that idea out a little bit because I’ve used it to great effect.
First you take the “word-rose” concept (as I believe it’s called), where you put the main keywords up on the board in a “rose” (Why, I have no idea. It’s not supposed to be an artistic device, it’s simply referring to writing them in a circle rather than a list. Perhaps it has something to do with creating some sort of psychological break from lists, which maybe we respond to in a particular way–probably chronologically, top to bottom. I dunno!).
At THIS point you may, indeed, have to do a bit of the old pre-teaching. But the words or phrases that you select should walk the tightrope between:
(a) alluding to the main concepts
without
(b) giving them away!
This is harder than it seems. To give you an idea off the top of my head from a lesson I haven’t done in a long time (and therefore can’t remember the details of exactly!)…
…these words go up in the word-rose:
beautiful woman, drugs,
check in to a hotel/ check out of a hotel,
the Devil, no escape, desert,
We do a bit of the concept-check-o-rama to make sure that everyone’s up to speed here. We might, for example, have Tomohiro confusing “desert” with “dessert” and Andreas struggling with “no escape” (to toss some random examples out there!)
Once this is done, the groups have a time-limit to come up with a story / report / newspaper-style “in brief” article, etc (tie this in with the tone of the text to follow. In this case I ask for a story). During this time they are encouraged to work together and use their dictionaries, go back through their textbook, ask me, etcetera…
(What this will do is create a kind of lexical field for each group and you can exploit these before you hit the innards of the main text in a bit.)
They then have to present that text to the class in some way. (It needn’t be orally, incidentally.)
We then (in this case) listen to the text (exactly as Alex described) to determine which story is the closest to the “actual” story.
Have you worked out which hugely popular song is my text for this lesson yet?
We listen a couple of times, they discuss it in groups, we do some plenary feedback.
And THEN we get down to the nitty-gritty language focus activities which incorporate vocab and grammar and referencing and all sorts of tasty stuff. Basically you can do whatever you like with it, of course. You could just use it as an intro to a discussion activity–no detailed language analysis at all.
If you’re using a textbook with a ghastly structural syllabus you will probably have to use the text as a springboard for some kind of discrete grammar focus. That’s okay.
The point is that students have more or less unravelled the main layers of meaning without you having to do the pony show and hope that they’re paying attention.
They have also got that extra “communicative” kick.
So now let me turn to that.
As I said before, the output of whatever task they are set need not be oral. Nor need it be groupwork. “Communicative” doesn’t EQUAL talking.
But I think this is what “The Communicative Method” has come to mean. In fact, if you think about it, I’m not sure that any method other than say scholars translating written texts (and even that if you really push the semantics) is NOT communicative. But that’s a rave for another day.
Obviously people want to be able to primarily SPEAK the language they are learning. But I think there is an almost paranoid fever amongst some teachers that everything they do has to involve speaking. “If the students are not getting lots of speaking practice, then they’re not learning!” I mean, clearly, when you stop for the 3 seconds it took you to read that sentence you realise how silly this is.
It doesn’t stop it being pretty pervasive, though!
Yes, you want your students to test their theories by outputting language. But it doesn’t always have to be orally. There are a lot of reasons why this is, in fact, NOT the best thing to ALWAYS be doing. But again, another time.
Anyway, I fear that this comment may be getting toward article length rather than comment length! Sorry about that. Sometimes I get a bit carried away!
I like the blog. Keep up the good work!
Leslie
Wow - I write long posts and I am pleasantly awed that someone left such a detailed comment. Excellent!
I am kind of slated to write something on “the communicative method” - for better or worse! - but it would be great to get your input on that once it is up.
The examples you give are great ones, and to be honest I have to read it again when I have more time to focus. For now, I’d say - regarding being “communicative” - it’s a good point that it doesn’t just mean speaking. As you point out - most things can be construed to be communicative in the broadest sense, so I guess I am just thinking that what the book suggests here - looking up words so they will understand them in a text? - I think it just doesn’t fit what most people mean when they use the term “communicative”.
I do think it’s a matter of some kind of balance. I know that many language schools do “sell” the idea of a lot of speaking, and yet another frequent instruction is - don’t do things in the classroom that they can do at home. Which frequently translates into: speak. A lot. And while, as you say, just because students are speaking doesn’t mean they are learning, there is something to be said for practice. Schools also reap the financial rewards of selling “speak and do fun things and also learn”.
Looking back at the handful of books I’ve worked with - Headway and Cutting Edge mainly - it strikes me that the text is often exploited both for discussion/reading skills and as a context for grammar later. On top of that, sometimes classes are shared, so it often ends up that a particular text - even if it is not an ideal one - is very tied up with other things. So even if the vocabulary is strange or not that useful … students need to get it, especially if they are going to use that text as the context for a grammar point. And while part of a teacher’s job is to adapt the content to students…in my experience it is a big thing to just do away with what’s in the book, especially as you get to higher levels.
Maybe it’s just me, but these words in a box do pop up pretty frequently. Anyone?
Hi Katie
My thoughts are the learners needs ( in terms ) of
real ife experiences and clearly those rthat interest them should be developed.From my background a High level and very poorly taught Maths A level in the UK-I am now finding my feet in a high school in South Korea
I am currently working with co-teacher but need to gain more experience to gather words/mindmaps if you like to progress a low level class at Year 2
On a slight move away I have a Education Studies BA degree a HND in Science A level
TEFL in 2 weeks but an unsure of the “real” output
and quality of me doing the CELTA …
thanks
James
That’s a good point about real life experience. It can be hard to draw a line though and say these words are useful in real life and these words aren’t … and then there is the real life experience of passing the test
I’m not sure if you’re asking for advice about the CELTA? I’m not familiar with your qualifications, but my sense is that the CELTA (and for practical purposes I would say most on-site TEFL courses)does have some components that are different from a BA. I found it very useful and practical as a new teacher with a BA in sociology, so I didn’t have much real teaching practice at all.
Sometimes people who already have experience find it frustrating to do the CELTA because it is an introductory course and you do get constructive feedback on your teaching performance.
Practical things I learned were: adapting activities from the book to make them more student-centered, giving clear instructions, different ways of conveying meaning and checking indirectly that students understood, getting students to speak, different correction techniques. And probably more that doesn’t immediately spring to mind.
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