1.2 Teaching culture
Students need a wide range of independent word-learning strategies. Vocabulary instruction should aim to engage students in actively thinking about word meanings, the relationships among words, and how we can use words in different situations. This type of rich, deep instruction is most likely to influence comprehension .Student-Friendly Definitions
The meaning of a new word should be explained to students rather than just providing a dictionary definition for the word—which may be difficult for students to understand. According to Isabel Beck, two basic principles should be followed in developing student-friendly explanations or definitions (Beck et al., 2013):Characterize the word and how it is typically used.
Explain the meaning using everyday language—language that is accessible and meaningful to the student.
Sometimes a word’s natural context (in text or literature) is not informative or helpful for deriving word meanings (Beck et al., 2013). It is useful to intentionally create and develop instructional contexts that provide strong clues to a word’s meaning. These are usually created by teachers, but they can sometimes be found in commercial reading programs.Research shows that when words and easy-to-understand explanations are introduced in context, knowledge of those words increases (Biemiller and Boote, 2006) and word meanings are better learned (Stahl and Fairbanks, 1986).6 When an unfamiliar word is likely to affect comprehension, the most effective time to introduce the word’s meaning may be at the moment the word is met in the text.Research by Nagy and Scott (2000) showed that students use contextual analysis to infer the meaning of a word by looking closely at surrounding text. Since students encounter such an enormous number of words as they read, some researchers believe that even a small improvement in the ability to use context clues has the potential to produce substantial, long-term vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, and Anderson, 1985; Nagy, Anderson, and Herman, 1987; Swanborn and de Glopper, 1999).
Sketching words is vocabulary learning strategySketching the Words
For many students, it is easier to remember a word’s meaning by making a quick sketch that connects the word to something personally meaningful to the student. The student applies each target word to a new, familiar context. The student does not have to spend a lot of time making a great drawing. The important thing is that the sketch makes sense and helps the student connect with the meaning of the word.Applying the target words provides another context for learning word meanings. When students are challenged to apply the target words to their own experiences, they have another opportunity to understand the meaning of each word at a personal level. This allows for deep processing of the meaning of each word. Analyzing word parts is a vocabulary learning strategyAnalyzing Word Parts
The ability to analyze word parts also helps when students are faced with unknown vocabulary. If students know the meanings of root words and affixes, they are more likely to understand a word containing these word parts. Explicit instruction in word parts includes teaching meanings of word parts and disassembling and reassembling words to derive meaning (Baumann et al., 2002; Baumann, Edwards, Boland, Olejnik, and Kame'enui, 2003; Graves, 2004).Semantic mapping is a vocabulary learning strategySemantic Mapping
Semantic maps help students develop connections among words and increase learning of vocabulary words (Baumann et al., 2003; Heimlich and Pittleman, 1986). For example, by writing an example, a non-example, a synonym, and an antonym, students must deeply process the word persist.Word consciousness is an interest in and awareness of words (Anderson and Nagy, 1992; Graves and Watts-Taffe, 2002). 7Students who are word conscious are aware of the words around them—those they read and hear and those they write and speak (Graves and Watts-Taffe, 2002). Word-conscious students use words skillfully. They are aware of the subtleties of word meaning. They are curious about language, and they enjoy playing with words and investigating the origins and histories of words.
Teachers need to take word-consciousness into account throughout their instructional day—not just during vocabulary lessons (Scott and Nagy, 2004). It is important to build a classroom “rich in words” (Beck et al., 2002). Students should have access to resources such as dictionaries, thesauruses, word walls, crossword puzzles, Scrabble® and other word games, literature, poetry books, joke books, and word-play activities.Teachers can promote the development of word consciousness in many ways:Language categories: Students learn to make finer distinctions in their word choices if they understand the relationships among words, such as synonyms, antonyms, and homographs. Figurative language: The ability to deal with figures of speech is also a part of word-consciousness (Scott and Nagy 2004). The most common figures of speech are similes, metaphors, and idioms.
Once language categories and figurative language have been taught, students should be encouraged to watch for examples of these in all content areas.at the leading edge of technology as CD ROM drives become cheaper. For language learning though, CD ROMs seldom offer interactivity and are too often the mere replica of older products. Two French products with digital video for ESP, Speak 92! and Speaker, are worthy of interest. is devoted to English for Business in an American context. Two versions of the package exist, one on videodisk and another designed with Quicktime called the ‘lite version’. It offers ten to fifteen minutes of video on screen. Owing to compression techniques, the standard speed of images has been improved, from 15 per second under Quicktime to 20 per second with a Raster Ops card. This means better, if not excellent quality. It is mostly devoted to listening comprehension since it claims to offer ‘linguistic immersion’. A series of questions are asked after the user has seen a video sequence. Comment is provided to help the user understand why his answers were wrong. In the 1.5 version, the user can also record his own voice and compare it with a native speaker model. No translation is available, although there is a help facility.Depending on how each user answers, the content he is offered is adjusted by the knowledge base of the system. It takes individual progression into account and decides which unit to skip or which test should be tackled first. The teacher can monitor the system to assign a task to a user and decide on priorities. Student progress can, therefore, be monitored either by the system or by the teacher. The artificial intelligence-based system is called Smartsystem.Speaker has been on the market for two years as an authoring tool, but a new version is being developed on Windows, using Video for Windows. The whole package is easier to use than other well-known multimedia authoring systems such as Authorware Professional, and is aimed at teachers or resource centre organisers with little or no computer experience. It is quite flexible. Apart from the handling of text and text-based exercises, it can deal with:Sound: It is possible to record a native speaker's voice, and then have students record and compare. Different types of graphs are available, either displaying a type of spectogram, or a bar chart indicating the stress in the sentence in visual form. There are other phonetics-based exercises which enable the user to listen to a sentence and then indicate on the screen in different colours where the stress is, whether there are elisions, where the weak form is, where sounds have to be linked. It can also be used in a more traditional form for listening comprehension with simple gap-filling exercises, accompanied by evaluation and correction.Scanner: Scanning images takes a matter of seconds, and it is then possible to keep only part of the image if need be, or enlarge it with a zoom. Of course, images are relevant to any kind of language course, but this facility is especially useful for ESP since it enables the author to include technical documentation, illustrations, or graph Optical Character Recognition is also available. Thanks to the toolbox facility, the user can choose any commercially available OCR system which best meets his needs.Pictures from a camcorder are digitised instantly as well. This is useful for short scenes enacted by native speakers, or even for the students themselves to practise interviews, so that they are able to see instantly what is wrong with their performance and to rework it until they get the expected result.As far as digital video is concerned, the choice has been not to try to make the picture as good as possible, but to accept the 15-image-per-second resolution so as to save space. It looks more like animated pictures than full motion video and is, of course, very far from videodisk quality. It is argued that, for the time being, this is a reasonable alternative in that it can be run on affordable machines. 8A better quality image would mean less space for practice and exercises and some users would not accept a limited number of exercises just to have a good picture. It also means that teachers can experiment with the contents and ponder over the reaction of the students when confronted with a multimedia environment and the learning process involved.Courseware has been developed using Speaker Author, called Business in Action, although it is not yet available on Windows. It could cater for the short-term needs of a company, or resource centre, while more adapted units are being developed with the authoring tool. This is also one way of solving the old debate of the relative merits of dedicated versus authoring systems.
Hyperdocument: Only part of the work can be accessed in hypertext mode. The scanned image is divided into different zones and clicking on different parts of it triggers different reactions. The browsing or wandering is, however, quite limited since there is no hypertext facility as such for the text of the exercises. For the teacher, a summary of the lesson designed is available and, of course, everything can be changed and updated at will.Speaker will be compatible with Quicktime for Windows as well. An interesting element is what is called the Toolbox, which includes OCR, a scanner and so on. In so far as the tools are independent of the rest of the package, they can be changed according to the user's needs and the evolution of the market. Paintbrush for instance can be replaced by something else. On-line retrieval of informationApart from commercially available software, the next element which is becoming increasingly popular is on-line retrieval of information. There has been abundant literature on the resources available for the humanities (from the CTI Centre for Textual Studies, for example), or for bibliographies. Little attention has been paid to ESP, whereas the potential here seems quite real. Large quantities of information are being compiled, as the publication of a database of databases testifies. In France, databases can be accessed for demonstration purposes or special queries at the British Council for British databases, or at the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie on different hosts. The most useful for ESP are DIALOG, and ESA (The European Space Agency). Costs vary depending on the server, the access mode, the telephone subscription costs, the type of network (national, European, international) and of course on the length of time it is used: 10 to 15 minutes on average, which costs about FF150 to FF250. A number of universities and research departments are connected to INTERNET, hence at least to . I have chosen a few (see table 1).Company catalogues are of little pedagogic use as such, unless activities are organised, such as comparing the growth of small businesses in different countries or making forecasts from the data provided.Summaries of research papers or articles, on the contrary, can prove very useful for advanced students. The students can download information for exposés or speeches. This was the case at Dauphine for two students presenting a paper on and on neural networks. It proved to be extremely successful since they had access to the most up-to-date information (which impressed their fellow students), and it was useful for their own research since they both worked in the field. They could even have sent summaries to other universities via the Internet network. This can lead to written activities, summarizing or expanding the information retrieved. The latter can provide written illustration of TV items, or documentaries (such as optical computing or telecommuting). There is here is an opportunity for exposure to different genres of writing and provides training in language and training in the retrieval of information.On-line resources are sometimes available on, sometimes not. University libraries are likely to invest in technology. For example, here is a list of what students have at their disposal in Paris IX Dauphine, and there are plans to acquire new titles. Some are in French, others in English.
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