Vocabulary

We then took it in turns to explain our starting interests, out of which developed our discussion.

Zorana explained how she requires her Basic Discussion Skills students to write down 5 English words with example definitions in English and then has her students test each other. She also uses cloze exercises and collocation crosswords to "enforce the link".

Michael reported how he trains students (Improving Discussion Skills and G(6)) to distinguish between active and passive vocabulary and to identify words they believe they will need to explain to each other. Students then need to decide what words they can expect their peers to understand; what words their peers won't know, but will know a more common synonym for; and what words their peers won't know, but will need to in order to understand the topic being explained. With the last group, students are expected to use English-English dictionaries and write down example sentences to teach each other. Students are then asked to track their expectations over two weeks of explaining their research to each other to see if their predictions and vocabulary preparation were sufficient.

Andy B. explained that he was interested in raising students' awareness of how they learn vocabulary and what problems they notice in what they already do. To do this, he is currently using near-peer extended reflections on explaining and exploring ways of learning and using vocabulary with a third-year G(6) class. At the end of the first cycle, he asked students to look back through their notes and extract what they thought were the important words and phrases for the issue that they had researched in the previous 5 weeks. He then asked students to explain their 'recovered networks' to each other, before they read four extended example near-peer reflections (available here). Students were then asked to make notes about their own approaches and write their own extended reflections on a worksheet (available here). Over the following three weeks, students would take about 15 minutes in each class to discuss (a) similarities and differences in what they do (week 2); (b) problems in what they do (week 3); and different steps and ways to try (week 4). In weeks 2-4, the students would discuss these areas of focus with different students each week, so that they could constantly review and re-develop their ideas collaboratively.

Some areas of discussion that followed from our initial reports were:

How can students be helped to be selective in the vocabulary they learn?
How can they (and do they) retain the vocabulary they have selected?
How much control should a teacher exert on vocabulary learning?
Should we talk about vocabulary learning or explaining ideas in English?
What to do about collocations?
What to do about phrase-based academic organizing vocabulary?

We had a very interesting, free-rolling discussion of these issues, with Andy Martin joining us at the end.

(Summarized by Andy Barfield)