Although the lesson I recorded wasn't specifically designed to show vocabulary teaching, I figured that, as I was planning to blog about it anyway, I might as well take the vocabulary teaching elements that happened to be included and blog about those. It's a shame that I won't be able to talk about the CI and MIC aspects of it, as I really tried to push it as far as I could with this lesson without too much planning - I want to see if these ideas are starting to seep into my subconscious! If you're reading this and have time I'd be interested to know how you think this lesson went. It gets a bit out of hand when the students are producing language at the end, though...
Anyhow, let's lay down the context. My lesson this week was about prepositions, specifically "There is a _______ on/in/under the ______." Most of my students have learnt these before, but quite a while ago. This lesson is designed to be partly review of what they know and more depth into the same subject. I believe last year they learned "Where is the cat? It's in the box." Pretty basic stuff.
This time around, then, we took the same simple prepositions and tried to expand their meaning beyond "on" meaning "on top of" and "in" meaning only "inside". My students have a very narrow view of these very widely used words. So what did I do to teach this vocabulary and how did it work? Have a look at the first ten minutes of this class if you have a moment:
I first began by eliciting the vocabulary by showing the students a situation - beginning with placing a rubber on my head. As well as getting some giggles and funny looks, my students correctly produced the word "on", and proceeded to complete the target sentence for the lesson (recycled from the previous lesson). While I didn't manage it in this video, in other classes I managed to expand the meaning of "on" to include anything that is "stuck" onto something - the clearest example being the location of the clock on our classroom wall, or a mark on someone's face.
In this way I managed to get students to construct and develop their own meaning for the word and show them how to produce it in a sentence. I did the same for "behind" by placing pencils behind my ears, and for "in" by holding the scissors in my hand. My students seem to find this kind of visual demonstration very clear, and in my observations of a similar production activity later I found that they had a thorough understanding of these prepositions in relation to the body.
There were also a couple of vocab items that came up during class which I hadn't predicted my students having a problem with. Each provided a chance to use a different kind of vocabulary explanation.
The first was how the word "scissors" is used in English, and how to place it into our target sentence correctly. My students weren't sure whether scissors are countable or not - thus whether they need to be used with "is" or "are". I tried to explain this quickly by showing them the two blades of the scissors and comparing them to a pair of glasses, a vocabulary item they are more familiar with. I then elicited the correct sentence form from the students, and even made sure they knew how to spell the word by eliciting it from them. It was clear that they weren't sure about the spelling, and I'm not sure if my teaching was effective - I merely wrote the word up as the correct letters were called out. Hopefully this provided the students with a chance to notice the spelling, though I think a chance to produce the spelling themselves would have been helpful.
The last vocabulary item also got the shortest attention, as it came up in the middle of my first presentation activity. As the students were reading the instructions off the interactive board and following them by decorating their human statues (you didn't watch the video? It's fun, go have a look :D) it became clear that not everyone knew the word "shoulders". To keep the activity flowing and to help those who were confused I quickly modeled the sound of the word, showed them the meaning by touching my shoulders and repeated the word in Korean when they had made the connection themselves.
I find these simple vocab items fairly easy to explain, and I feel that I do a good job of them along the lines that Nation suggested. However, if I were to teach harder vocabulary to an older, higher level group, I feel that I would have a lot more trouble. There is so much useful information about each word that I can't get across, and I feel I'd need a lot of preparation time to get it right. I think it would be valuable for me to try a lesson based purely on vocabulary and dictionary use, as at the moment I feel I would find myself flailing and unsure what to do. For now, though, I'll stick to adding in vocabulary items in opportune moments. This seems like the quickest and most useful way for my students' situation!
In this way I managed to get students to construct and develop their own meaning for the word and show them how to produce it in a sentence. I did the same for "behind" by placing pencils behind my ears, and for "in" by holding the scissors in my hand. My students seem to find this kind of visual demonstration very clear, and in my observations of a similar production activity later I found that they had a thorough understanding of these prepositions in relation to the body.
There were also a couple of vocab items that came up during class which I hadn't predicted my students having a problem with. Each provided a chance to use a different kind of vocabulary explanation.
The first was how the word "scissors" is used in English, and how to place it into our target sentence correctly. My students weren't sure whether scissors are countable or not - thus whether they need to be used with "is" or "are". I tried to explain this quickly by showing them the two blades of the scissors and comparing them to a pair of glasses, a vocabulary item they are more familiar with. I then elicited the correct sentence form from the students, and even made sure they knew how to spell the word by eliciting it from them. It was clear that they weren't sure about the spelling, and I'm not sure if my teaching was effective - I merely wrote the word up as the correct letters were called out. Hopefully this provided the students with a chance to notice the spelling, though I think a chance to produce the spelling themselves would have been helpful.
The last vocabulary item also got the shortest attention, as it came up in the middle of my first presentation activity. As the students were reading the instructions off the interactive board and following them by decorating their human statues (you didn't watch the video? It's fun, go have a look :D) it became clear that not everyone knew the word "shoulders". To keep the activity flowing and to help those who were confused I quickly modeled the sound of the word, showed them the meaning by touching my shoulders and repeated the word in Korean when they had made the connection themselves.
I find these simple vocab items fairly easy to explain, and I feel that I do a good job of them along the lines that Nation suggested. However, if I were to teach harder vocabulary to an older, higher level group, I feel that I would have a lot more trouble. There is so much useful information about each word that I can't get across, and I feel I'd need a lot of preparation time to get it right. I think it would be valuable for me to try a lesson based purely on vocabulary and dictionary use, as at the moment I feel I would find myself flailing and unsure what to do. For now, though, I'll stick to adding in vocabulary items in opportune moments. This seems like the quickest and most useful way for my students' situation!
Drama Techniques... Nice. Now 1. You DO realize your predominantly North American audience has a different visual from your intended when you write 'I put a rubber on my head'? :-) 2. Sounds like you nailed a variety of vocab. Presentations ops. Cool. I suggest getting them to practice those prepositions by telling each other to pass those objects on, under, behind, etc. themselves.
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