Anglistics Study Programme Learning words WEEK 04 Anglistics

Anglistics Study Programme Learning words WEEK 04 Anglistics Study Programme www. singidunum. ac. rs/admission

Anglistics Study Programme • The previous class was concerned with children using the foreign language as discourse in the classroom and how such use might work to promote learning • Today, we will deal with the development of vocabulary as language resource

Anglistics Study Programme

Anglistics Study Programme • Building up a useful vocabulary is central to the learning of a foreign language at primary level • Regardless of being taught grammar in the class children are capable of learning foreign language words through participating in the discourse of classroom activities

Anglistics Study Programme • The more we think about how words (vocabulary) are learnt, stored and used the more difficult it becomes to uphold the traditional split between vocabulary and grammar • Grammatical information is tied into words • If we give high priority to vocabulary development – do we abandon grammar?

Anglistics Study Programme The word as a unit • The role of words as language units begins with the early use of nouns for naming objects in first language acquisition – water, food • Later children use words to express their wants and needs - more, no…

Anglistics Study Programme • Think of words as flowers • Underneath the flowers of spoken words lie the roots, a connected web of meanings, understandings and links • All throughout childhood, words are used with only a partial understanding of the full meaning system that lies underneath them

Anglistics Study Programme • What about adults? • Think of technical word you use but are you do not fully understand carburetor, hard disk • We use word with good enough meaning • If we had to have complex knowledge of words before using them we would be restricted to very limited vocabulary

Anglistics Study Programme • Vocabulary development is about learning words • Learning words is a cyclical process of meeting new words and initial learning, followed by meeting those words again and extending you knowledge

Anglistics Study Programme • Each time a child meets familiar word again, the root system of word knowledge continues to grow

Anglistics Study Programme Vocabulary size • Vocabulary size test • In many tests only receptive knowledge is measured: a person is said to know the word if they can recognize its meaning when they see it

Anglistics Study Programme • Vocabulary size is measured to the nearest thousand, and counts word families • The word family has the base form WALK • Plus walking, walks, walked, a walk. • English language is said to contain around 54 K word families • Figures for native speaker adults range around 20 K

Anglistics Study Programme • Different aspects of word knowledge are summarised in this table:

Anglistics Study Programme • Child, native speaker of English, have about 4 -5 K word families by the age of five, and they ad 1 K each year • Foreign language learners are said to reach 1 -2 K word families after 5 years of regular lessons • Vocabulary size gap in first and foreign language is very large • Realistic target for a child to learn would be 500 words a year, depending on learning conditions

Anglistics Study Programme Developing meanings in childhood • Conceptual knowledge grows as children experience more and more of the world in their daily lives • Syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift • Occurs between 5 and 10 years of age • It refers to types of associations that children make between word and ideas

Anglistics Study Programme • When given a cue like dog or table young children tend to make syntagmatic associations, choosing a linking idea such as bark or eat • we can call these links thematic – ideas link together in a kind of theme

Anglistics Study Programme • Older children may respond to a cue by offering a word from a same word class: animal or chair • These are called paradigmatic responses • Children’s shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic responses reflects other developments.

Anglistics Study Programme • As children deepen their world knowledge, they increase both syntagmatic and paradigmatic knowledge, but also shift over the years of childhood towards more emphasis on the paradigmatic and the abstract • This development is applicable to foreign language learning too

Anglistics Study Programme

Anglistics Study Programme Vocabulary teaching • the importance of vocabulary teaching is generally recognized these days, and there’s been a lot of research on how best to teach it

Anglistics Study Programme • Teach a lot of vocabulary • Vocabulary is the most important thing to teach: you can’t even begin to express yourself without knowing the forms and meaning of words • Grammatical patters were priority in the past (grammar-translation method, audio-lingual method) • Vocabulary is the basis of listening comprehension, speaking and writing

Anglistics Study Programme • Teach multi-word chunks • A lot of vocabulary students need is not single words, but multi-word chunks like of course, by the way, take place… • The thing about chunks (also known as idioms, formulaic expressions, phrasal expressions) is that they are learnt as single units I don’t know - is learnt as a single unit • Pay special attention to phrasal verbs

Anglistics Study Programme • Sometimes teach out of context • In general, it’s a good principle to teach vocabulary in context. But there are situations where you can – and should – focus on an item in isolation • If a new item is written on the board and pronounced clearly it is more likely that students will pay more attention to it and learn it than if its meaning is just noted in context • A new item learning can be enhances by the use of a picture, or mime, and such an impact might make difference in remembering it

Anglistics Study Programme • Do plenty of review • It is impossible to learn a vocabulary item from a single encounter. Normally you need to review it several times to make sure it’s permanently remembered (10 -15 times) • Once the new item has been taught, an opportunity for focused review must be created

Anglistics Study Programme • Use mother tongue to explain • There are lots of ways we use to explain meaning of new words: mother tongue translation is probably the single most efficient one • It is much quicker than an explanation in English • It’s much more easily understood • It usually gives a pretty accurate idea of the meaning of the item

Anglistics Study Programme

Anglistics Study Programme