Editorial
Monica Hoogstad has submitted a significant number of activities which will gradually be published in HLT. She hopes to publish these activities as one book. For more of her ideas also see her article in this issue in Lesson Outlines: Proverbs
A Leaf from a Book: Vocab Recycling
Monica Hoogstad
Monica is a freelance Business English and Legal English teacher, with eighteen years experience in ELT. She is particularly keen on teaching Advanced Learners. Her current interests are material design, intercultural communication, creative thinking, and teaching while having fun (and the other way around). E-mail: monicahoogstad@yahoo.co.uk
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Introduction
Background
Activities
References
Imagine you're a sort of 'can't cook-won't cook' person who is taking cookery lessons. During class, the chef exposes you to a gamut of ingredients and utensils, and expects you to make a mouth-watering soufflé for next time. I don't know about you, but I'd certainly ask for a refund (and spend the money to treat myself to a bottle of vintage champagne). If you agree with me so far, take a critical look at your teaching techniques and - hand on heart - check whether you tend to make the same mistake. I've often found myself sinning against one of the basic rules in pedagogy by giving the students the vocab they need and assuming they know what to do with it. And, believe me, even the most heartfelt, penitent, twice-a-day diligently recited 'Hail Mary's won't absolve you from it.
It's common knowledge that learners need to be exposed to the same information between five and sixteen times before storing it in their memory. On the other hand, the quality of the mental processing when dealing with that information is more important than mere quantity: depth and interaction make the encounter memorable. The direct and the indirect teaching approaches ought to be intertwined to optimise learning results. The teaching of lexical items has to be underpinned by a retain and retrieve vocab kit. Equipping learners with useful strategies and techniques of personalising and contextualising newly encountered lexis is paramount to enhancing their linguistic competence and performance. It's entirely the teacher's responsibility to develop students' word watching skills, to encourage them to build personalised word pools, and to consciously recycle relevant vocab. These can be achieved inside and outside the classroom by frequent exposure to the target language through (graded) reading and listening, consulting monolingual dictionaries, using corpora and concordances, keeping lexical diaries, and revisiting past information.
The following activities attempt to aid students' acquisition, providing them with associative techniques meant to support their cognitive effort. By helping them develop thinking skills in a co-operative but also competitive environment, we offer them a teamwork pattern that, in the long run, will boost their synergetic abilities and turn them into daring initiative takers.
Pass the Buck
This activity aims at checking recently encountered lexis through a fun, innovative, swift-pace game. It is highly stimulating for kinaesthetic learners and it involves both physical and mental skills. Actually, all types of learners are fond of it, as it guarantees bags of fun and it gets the adrenaline pumping.
- Ask the two teams to stand and face each other.
- Start the game by making clear what the rules are and providing a few examples. If the object is to recycle hyphenated adjective + noun collocations, mention: mid-term evaluation, high-definition TV, thigh-slapping funny joke, mind-boggling puzzles. If you'd like to review upward and downward trend collocations, mention sky-rocketing confidence, plummeting sales, soaring expenses, caffeine boost.
- Toss a tennis ball to one of the teams. The student who catches it comes up with a similar word partnership for the chosen category, then tosses it to a member of the opposing team, who repeats the process.
- Give 5 points for each correct partnership, take 10 points for each interruption of the chain.
- The team that tots up the highest number of points are the winners.
Lexis Complexes
This activity checks what the students remember from the previous session(s) through a creative writing game. The rules are:
- Divide the board into two parts.
- Each team list, in their own column, six word partnerships they came across in the previous session(s).
- Both teams have to write a coherent story using all the collocations given by the opposing team.
- Points will be awarded for accuracy, humour and speed.
- The fastest and the most creative team are the winners.
Blankety-blank
This activity reclaims previously encountered lexis through a light-hearted guessing game. The rules are:
- A member of Team A starts reading from one of the texts previously done in class. When the readers reach a relevant collocation, expression or word partnership, they replace it by 'blankety-blank' or any other catchphrase that takes their fancy. You might want to try 'George Bush' or 'God Save the Queen' or 'zip-a-dee-doo-dah-zip-a-dee-day' for more fun.
- When somebody from the opposing team replaces the missing words correctly, control is handed over to Team B, and the reading and guessing process continues.
- The team with the most correct guesses are the winners.
Freeze!
This activity reviews previously dealt with vocab through a creative and side-splittingly hilarious game. The rules are:
- Ask the students to recite the alphabet in unison. Interrupt them after a few seconds, identify the letter you stopped on, and invite them to share vocab they've encountered recently which begins with that letter.
- For example, if the letter is U, they might say ultra-light elements, user-friendly packaging, ultimate analysis, utterly wrong answer, unacceptable excuse.
- Each participant is supposed to add a new word partnership beginning with the same letter, until the chain is broken. Then, repeat the whole process with another letter.
- A correct word partnership is worth 5 points; each time a chain is broken, the team that interrupts it loses 10 points. The fun begins when they just add a word beginning with U in front of all words or collocations they can think of, to avoid breaking the chain. So don't be surprised to hear unbelievably quirky perks, unimaginably deep recess, unlimited discretionary income.
- The team that tot up the higher number of points are the winners.
Collocations Relay
This activity revisits previously encountered lexis in a race against the clock. The rules of the game are:
- Choose a few verbs and nouns from the texts you've done in class.
- Write them (one at a time) on the board and invite the two teams to come up with nouns or adjectives with which your word collocates. For instance, if your suggestion is the verb grant, you'd want to see the nouns allowances, funds, scholarships, loans, help, assistance, favours, wishes. If you go for the noun salary, you'd expect to see the adjectives high, low, modal, monthly, competitive, decent, discretionary, living.
- To speed up the pace, ask the teams to stand in two parallel queues. On your cue, the first students in line (one for each team) run to the board - it's better to work with two separate flipcharts - and write one word each. As soon as they have finished, they run at the end of the queue, and the two students who are next in line repeat the process.
- Allow a few minutes, than give the closing signal and count the collocations. Correct entries are rewarded with 5 points each. For the incorrect ones, the points are awarded to the opposing team. The team that tot up the highest number of points are the winners.
Guess the Words
This activity re-examines previously encountered lexis through a fun guessing game involving teamwork and adding a touch of drama and performance to the class.
Variant 1: individuals guess
- Ask the teams to think of six word partnerships or semi fixed expressions they've come across in the previous sessions.
- Team A write their first collocation on the board. A blindfolded member of Team B is supposed to find out what's written on the board, by posing closed questions to her team mates. If she manages to guess correctly within a limited amount of time, Team B gets 10 points. If she fails, the points are awarded to Team A.
- The guessing process continues, with Team A guessing and Team B suggesting the collocation/expression.
- The team that tot up the higher number of points are the winners.
Variant 2: teams guess
- Ask the teams to think of six word partnerships or semi fixed expressions they've come across in the previous sessions, and to write each of them on a card.
- Team A hand out the first card to a member of Team B, who is supposed to describe the expression to her team mates, without mentioning the words or their roots. Any other hints are allowed: synonyms, rhyming words, songs, miming.
- Once her team mates have managed to ascertain the expression correctly within a limited amount of time, they get 10 points. If they fail, the points are awarded to Team A.
- The guessing process continues, with Team A guessing and Team B handing out their card.
- The team that tot up the higher number of points are the winners.
Lewis, M., 1997, Implementing the Lexical Approach, Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
Thornbury, S., 2002, How to Teach Vocabulary, Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
