Introduction The class consisted of nine students male and female students preparing for academic study at an Anglophone university. The students were at low intermediate level. The course is run by a language centre at a UK university and there are four streams. The course does not use a published course book. The teachers on the programme have devised materials for the course over the years for which it has been running. These are revised each year with one of the teachers who teaches on the course taking responsibility for a sequence of lessons. The materials provide more activities than can be covered in the time available, so teachers make a selection from what is available and will also develop some materials for their class.
The students have separate classes for speaking/listening and reading/writing, but all the classes are organised around a theme. This was the first class on the theme of food packaging and the focus on this class was on speaking, but the video clip relates to vocabulary.
Vocabulary Learning English requires that learners know a lot of vocabulary. For many teachers, the main issue is to do with how you present new vocabulary to learners, but it is also important that learners recycle the vocabulary that they have been told about or have come across to ensure that the vocabulary becomes part of their long term memory. This is discussed in chapter ten of Teaching and Learning the English Language. The sections on Learning vocabulary has a subsection on proceduralising word knowledge which explains how learns recycle vocabulary and the section on Teaching vocabulary has a section called rehearsing which covers some of the things a teacher can do to encourage recycling. In the extract, Angela provides the students with some ideas for recording vocabulary knowledge.
In the section before the video clip, Angela had elicited some vocabulary related to food and packaging which she had written on the whiteboard (carrot stick, cigarettes, milk carton, versatile (adj).
Task Before you look at the clip, please read chapter ten of Teaching and Learning the English Language and answer these questions:
- What aspects of word knowledge you would want an upper intermediate learner to have about the word fragile (see Table 10.3 in the book for ideas about this)?
- How would you want your learners to record this information?
When you have looked at the clip, answer these questions:
- How did your ideas about what word knowledge you would want learners to know compare with Angela’s?
- How effective do you think the use of a mind map would be for recording vocabulary?
- When Angela asked for examples of things that were fragile, one learner said ‘sentence’. How did Angela deal with this response?
