Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (15 page)

Aim to teach only about seven new words or phrases per lesson. Students find it extremely difficult to absorb any more than that.

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Presentations for vocabulary lesson on bodies of water to meet certain standards:

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Class profile:
Mixed nationality class of six students studying English for higher education.

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Level:
Pre-intermediate.

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Materials:
Photos of bodies of water.

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Problems:
Difficulty remembering which word is which.

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Lesson aims:
To teach ‘puddle’, ‘pond’, and ‘lake’ as bodies of water; to continue the theme of the week,‘Water’; to aid project work.

A Presentation procedure that takes 12 minutes follows these steps:

1. Hold up a bottle of water. Ask students to take out their notebooks
and brainstorm adjectives that can describe water, for one minute.

2. Give out pens and ask students to write their adjectives in the designated section on the board.

Allow students to ask each other about any words they’re unfamiliar with.

3. Draw a puddle shape on the board. Elicit from the students any ideas
about what to call water in this shape.

Make a tiny puddle of water on the desk to illustrate if possible.

4. Now indicate the size of the body of water by drawing a child jumping
in it, complete with splashes.

5. Elicit ‘puddle’ if possible and drill the word chorally and individually.

Write the word, its part of speech and phonetic spelling on the board.

6. Highlight syntax.

Have students fill in the blank: A puddle of . . .

7. Draw the same puddle shape again but this time draw a couple of fish
in it and a house nearby. Elicit and drill the word ‘pond’. Write the
word, its part of speech and phonetic spelling on the board.

8. Highlight collocates and compound nouns.

You can go through fish pond, freshwater pond, muddy pond (make the picture on the board brown if you can).

Follow the same pattern for ‘lake’ but with a large boat in the water. Include drilling and board work. Show how the name of the lake usually comes second – Lake Erie, for example.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

You can use concept check questions such as:

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Do fish live in puddles? Why not?

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Give me an example of a famous lake? (For example, Garda, Michigan, Windermere.) Is there one in your country? How big is it?

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Why are ponds, lakes and puddles similar?

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If you break a big bottle of wine what do see on the kitchen floor?

Show pertinent pictures and get descriptions from individual students.

Encourage them to use the adjectives already on the board.

Sharing function and connotation

When you explain vocabulary or grammar, you generally need to show how people use it. It’s easy with some words. For example,
tall
is a word for things or people of great height. However, some phrases and grammar are more open to interpretation. Take the word
cheers.
It has several uses – you say it while clinking glasses before you drink, you use it informally to express grati-tude and it’s associated with happiness too (cheer, cheerful).

Filling in students on functions

When you teach language according to the situation you need it for, this is called a
functional approach
. If you take a functional approach to teaching, you usually introduce the setting before you introduce the new piece of language. I talk about using a functional/notional syllabus in Chapter 19.

So, if you’re teaching
cheers,
you can design a lesson about going to the pub, and teach:

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What are you having?

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I’ll have a pint/glass of . . .

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Whose round is it?

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It’s my round

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Bottoms up!

You focus not on the grammatical structures but simply on what you say in this particular context.

Even if you take a structural approach to the lesson, meaning that you teach particular grammar, you still need to show very clearly how a word or phrase is actually used in realistic situations.

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Conveying connotations

Certain words imply emotions or attitudes – they have
connotations.

Think of one of those famous supermodels. Which of these words would you associate with her?

thin trim

slim wiry

skinny bony

svelte twig-like

The word(s) you choose reveal whether you view her as truly attractive or not and this is what you teach with connotation.

You need to point out whether a word is positive, negative or neutral, a compliment or an insult. Failure to do this can leave students embarrassed because they may come across as rude or over familiar.

Fish and . . . ? Teaching

vocabulary in chunks

In English some words are often grouped together and seem to have an especially close relationship. These are called
collocations.
For instance, even though the words ‘constructive’ and ‘criticism’ can be used perfectly well apart from each other, together they form a common phrase. ‘Positive criticism’ renders the same idea but just doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t collocate.

Equally, it’s fine to say ‘very serious’ but ‘deadly serious’ is so much better and mirrors what a native speaker is likely to say. It’s collocation.

Going for more than one

Look for opportunities to teach chunks of language. Instead of teaching just one word, try teaching two or three all at once. One way of doing this is by highlighting collocations in reading texts. For example, ask students to underline all the occurrences of a particular word in a text and see which other words come before or after it each time.

You can also reinforce collocations through multiple choice whereby you offer the students several logical possibilities to partner a word, but show that only one is the true match.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

Give readers choices to finish a sentence:

I’m going to a pop . . .

a) concert; b) recital; c) performance

The most common collocations are in the form of:

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Subject and verb:
The music blared, the engine roared.

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Verb and object:
Brush your teeth, scrub the floor.

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Adverb and past participle:
Ideally situated, highly strung.

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Adjective and noun:
Black tea, heavy make-up.

Teaching certain words together

When you teach a particular word, you need to give students all the tools they need to actually use it. With that in mind, take note of:

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Words that can’t be used without other words
: Some words are so uncommon that they become almost meaningless without their collocates. Take for example ‘beady’. Is anything else ‘beady’ except eyes?

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Expressions set in stone
: Even though it may be true literally you can’t say ‘black and green’ to mean bruised. It’s definitely ‘black and blue’.

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Compound nouns:
These are nouns made up of two words together. So you can teach similar compounds as one vocabulary group. For example, you can teach coffee table, dining table and kitchen table in the same lesson.

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Clichés:
Some expressions are tired but common phrases such as ‘no stone will be left unturned’. It’s worth teaching clichés as one chunk.

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English verbs that don’t translate:
Some verbs in English have particular collocations which students find tricky because when translated they don’t seem to follow a pattern. Foremost are:

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Do:
a deal, harm, the shopping, business

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Get:
the sack, home, lost, ready

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Make:
the bed, a mistake, trouble, amends

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Take:
a look, the lead, advantage, a bite

All right mate! Teaching posh

words and slang

Because people face such a wide range of situations in life, it makes sense to teach a wide range of language to meet them. So there’s good reason to
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teach formal and informal language as well different styles of communicating according to the students’ requirements.

Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers provide great examples of how style can differ even when the subject matter is the same, as the following sample headlines about the same story show:

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Desperate Danielle Beats Jail Rap!

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Tragic Mother Acquitted

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Sad Mum Escapes Prison Sentence

Presentations using such comparisons demonstrate cultural awareness, connotation and synonyms too. (I talk about connotation a few sections earlier and synonyms in the next section.)

Choose the words frequently used in situations the students may encounter, whether slang or posh. It’s realistic to expect students to expand their knowledge into new areas sooner or later, so the occasional exposure to new styles helps motivate them. In any case, everyone needs formal and informal language in order to reflect the different relationships in their lives.

In your presentation, you can indicate this kind of information in brackets after the word:

toilet (n)

loo (n) (UK slang)

clothes (n)

gear(n) (informal)

Make students aware of varieties of English from various parts of the globe, but focus on the ones to which students are most likely to be exposed.

Talking about words that mean the same

and opposites – synonyms and antonyms

Using the
antonym,
or opposite, of a word is a very useful way to explain its meaning. It’s as though half the job is already done for you. So you can teach that the opposite of ‘cheap’ is ‘expensive’ or that ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ go hand in hand.

Synonyms, words that have exactly the same or similar meaning, are especially useful as students learn to expand their vocabulary. Some examples are:

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huge/enormous

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messy/untidy

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happy/glad

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

Use a little caution when using synonyms and antonyms because they sometimes fit only in particular circumstances. For example, synonyms of ‘buy’ are

‘get’, ‘acquire’ and ‘purchase’. However you can’t really ‘purchase’ time. Only

‘buy’ fits in that expression.

Presenting Grammar

When you present grammar, usually one of the tenses in English, you include points such as:

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Form:
Show what the grammar actually looks like even when you manipulate it in different ways. For instance:

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Positive:
He had written it.

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Negative:
He had not written it.

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Question:
Had he written it?

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Contraction:
He’d written it.

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Pronunciation:
Consider any features that you need to highlight and drill.

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Function:
Demonstrate exactly when you use the grammar by putting it in context. Timelines help to represent this visually.

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Examples:
Use realia or pictures as well as sentences to explain.

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Concept check questions.

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Comparison with other grammar if necessary.

A Presentation for a grammar lesson on bodies of water to meet certain criteria might consist of:

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Class profile:
Mixed nationality class of six students studying English for higher education.

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Level:
Pre-intermediate.

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Materials:
Diagrams showing simple processes.

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Problems:
Remembering the difference between active and passive forms.

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Lesson aims:
To teach the present simple passive for describing a process; to continue the theme of the week ‘Water’; to aid project work.

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To teach this lesson, follow these steps:

1. Have a soft drink on the desk but complain that it’s too warm. Ask students what to do. Then find out who likes ice in their drinks.

2. Have the students tell you the procedure for making ice and write the
stages on the board:

1) Put water into container.

2) Place container into freezer.

3) Leave for 2 hours.

3. Lead the students to get to the past participle of each of the verbs –

put, placed and left.
I talk about past participles in Chapter 16. It’s one form of a verb that you sometimes use when you speak about the past.

4. Ask students to identify the object of the sentence in step one – water
.

5. Ask them to identify the verb – put – and highlight that there’s no
person doing the action.

6. Set out the equation for the present simple passive form (the equation
shows the necessary parts of the sentence in the right order):
Object +

the verb
to be
in the present simple tense (
am
,
is
or
are
) + past participle (+
by someone
if you want to say who did it). I talk about the present simple tense in Chapter 16.