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DELTA Pre-Course Task - Lexis

1. The document provides a pre-course task focusing on lexis for students taking Module Two of the DELTA course. 2. It includes questions about active and passive vocabulary, identifying gaps in students' lexical knowledge, and considerations for teaching new lexical items for active use. 3. Students are asked to analyze lexical sets, look at how vocabulary is grouped in course books, discuss readings on teaching vocabulary, and suggest ways to image and make vocabulary more concrete.

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Claudia
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233 views

DELTA Pre-Course Task - Lexis

1. The document provides a pre-course task focusing on lexis for students taking Module Two of the DELTA course. 2. It includes questions about active and passive vocabulary, identifying gaps in students' lexical knowledge, and considerations for teaching new lexical items for active use. 3. Students are asked to analyze lexical sets, look at how vocabulary is grouped in course books, discuss readings on teaching vocabulary, and suggest ways to image and make vocabulary more concrete.

Uploaded by

Claudia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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DELTA pre-course task

Two of your assignments for Module Two will be about an aspect of language,
this task itself focuses on lexis.
This task will also help you understand the level of depth of knowledge
required for certain tasks in the Module One exam papers.
Consider the following questions and note down your answers.
You are not required to hand in this task, but it will help raise your awareness
for the necessary requirements when you do your LSAs. We’ll be using some
of these tasks in our input sessions, so some pre-thinking will certainly help –
especially when you start to write your BE.

1. Students have both active and passive vocabulary. What’s the difference?

2. Here are some sentences with errors in vocabulary items. What is the gap
in the student’s knowledge which is causing each error?

a) It depends of the weather:


b) (a letter) Dear Sir, I have referred your enquiry to my boss:
c) This factory products clothes:
d) He’s not knowing where the bank is:
e) I will pick up you at the airport:
f) He had two knifes and he cutted himself:
g) He made a photo in the strong rain:
h) Thank you for your informations:
i) He got on the bus and sat on a chair by the window:
j) (To teacher) I’m sorry, but I don’t like this d--n lesson:
k) Coffee makes me nervous:
l) I like the food. Because she cooks very good:
m) It’s ridiculous:

3. What does a teacher need to consider when teaching a new lexical item
for active use?

Do a detailed analysis of the lexical items below with reference to your list,
and add another lexical item that you’ve taught recently. This should be
from a different word class.

a) to run out of
b) to be amazing

4: a) What could be an efficient way of teaching of teaching the


meaning of the following words:
- to be desperate
- to trudge
- to mutter
- a dice
- to be emaciated
- to be gregarious
- a hubcap
2

b) What concept checking questions could you use to check the


meaning/use of each word? Try not to use any of the words in the
concept checking questions themselves (except to ask, for
example, When I’m desperate do I feel ..?)

5: These are lexical sets you might choose to teach. What’s the
relationship within each set?

a) Nurse, ward, look after, medicine, patient:


b) Bang, thump, thud, crash:
c) Attend, attentive, inattentive, attendance:
d) Vehicle – car, tram, bus, van:
e) Alive/dead. Drunk/sober. Big/small:
f) Fat, obese, plump, overweight, rotund:
g) Waste money, waste time, waste energy:
h) Get on with, fall for, fall out, look after:

6. Look at a current course-book. In what ways does it group vocabulary


for teaching?

7. Now read
“Current trends in teaching 2nd Language Vocabulary” – Anita Sokmen
from “Vocabulary. Description, Acquisition & Pedagogy” - Schmitt and
McCarthy CUP

And afterwards answer these questions using the text (they are in the
same order as the text).

8. Inferring from context


List 5 arguments against focusing exclusively on this, rather than explicit
vocabulary teaching, as a method of expanding student vocabulary.

9. Explicit vocabulary teaching:


Give one argument for focusing on frequent words:

Give an argument for focusing on difficult words:

What’s the problem with focusing on difficult words before they are met in
context?

What’s the advantage of letting the students select their own words?

10.Provide a number of encounters with a word.


According to Richards, what does “knowing a word” involve?
Compare this with your list in Q 3.

How many times might a student have to meet a word in order to know it?
3

List the advantages of repeated encounters with new vocabulary:

11. Promote a deep level of processing.


Write a definition for a word of your choice in the same way as “stirrup” is
defined on p 243.

Choose another word and write an “odd man out” exercise like the one with
“order” on p 243.

12. Facilitate imaging and concreteness.


List ways in which Sokmen suggests vocabulary can be “imaged” and made
concrete.

13. Variety of techniques


How does Sokmen define dictionary work?

How many of the 6 activities have you used in your classes. Which do you
use most often?

14. Word Unit Analysis


Sokmen writes that ‘L2 learners can depend on their background knowledge
of word parts to attack new vocabulary’. She also reports a study of how a list
of 14 prefixed master words and their variants unlocked 14, 000 words in a
well-known dictionary.
For each of these words, use the same root to come up with a different word
from the same root but with one or more of the 13 other prefixes listed. For
example:
Detain – obtain
Intermittent - transmit

15. Mnemonic devices


Imagine you spoke Italian as a first language (or Spanish, or another
language group whose language you are familiar with). What keyword
(acoustic + visual) words can you come up with to remember the following
words?
magazine car groggy

16. Semantic elaboration


List the 4 techniques which Sokmen discusses in this area.
Perhaps these best work as review activities.
Which ones have you used in your classroom?

17. Collocations and Lexical Phrases


Look at a transcript of a listening recording, or a reading text, in a course book
you are using at the moment. Underline all the ‘chunks’ (‘groups of words
which frequently occur together’) in the text.
Next, decide how many of your underlined chunks have variable slots

18. Oral Activities


4

What stage of a lesson can these activities be part of? What do they focus
on?

Find Someone Who (e.g. has got over a serious illness/put out a fire/taken up
a new hobby recently/looked up a word today etc)
Retelling a story from key words:
Personalization (e.g. my favourite room)
A-B Spot the Difference
Gap fill (using a stem/prompt) – not writing down
Imagine you are in a restaurant; order from this menu
Decide on the 5 most important characteristics in an ideal partner. Then agree
with a partner on a common list
Put the words in the correct order to form a logical sentence – numbering only

19. Encourage Independent Learning Strategies


According to Rubin et al., (1994) vocabulary acquisition is a task which
involves 3 factors. What are they?

How can learners be encouraged to develop independent learning strategies?


Name at least two ways.

20. Conclusion
Sokmen identifies 3 challenges for the future. What are they?

She wrote this article a good number of years ago. How far would you say the
ELT world has moved forward in each of these 3 areas?
Can you identify any other (sub-) area (s) of vocabulary learning and teaching
that need to be explored by researchers, technology and teachers?

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