Session 2 - Which words should learners focus on?
Imagine you are an English teacher of a group of Secondary Six students in Hong
Kong. Which of the following words / phrases in Column One do you think should
be taught and which should not be taught to your students?
What criteria did you use in making the above decisions?
Task for students:
Find the following words or phrases in Column One in the ‘Reading the Coffee Beans’
article and underline them in the text. Then, find a suitable synonym or partial
synonym in Column Two that may be used to substitute for the word or phrase in
the article.
Reading the Coffee Beans
Confused about the food on your dining table or the pills in your medicine
chest? Think "coffee."
No matter where you get your news--TV, daily paper, website, magazine, or radio--the
media are choked with conflicting medical information. From low-fat diets to hormones,
chocolate milk to pain relievers, calcium to vitamin pills, readers are confused. There
may be no greater offender than the mixed messages that pour in regularly about what
some consider America's national beverage--coffee. On this score, last week's report
in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the purported link between
coffee drinking and heart attacks is a godsend.
Keep in mind that coffee has been cast as vice and virtue for hundreds of years. When
it first seeped into Europe from Arabia around 1600, it was known to mess with the
mind. Blaming its klatches for inciting loose gossip and rebellion, a few tyrannical
monarchs destroyed coffeehouses of the day. Legend also has it that advisers to Pope
Clement VIII pressured him to ban coffee as an infidel threat. The pope insisted on
tasting the delicious elixir and baptized it rather than outlawing the drink.
Qualms. Yet there's long been a nagging fear. Caffeine can make a heart race or skip
a few beats and can add a few points to blood pressure. But the real coffee concern is
the research that shows its association with an increased risk for heart attacks. That
qualm has quieted of late, however, as other studies indicate that the effect is more
associated with cigarette smoking.
Adapted from:
Healy, B. (2006). Reading the Coffee Beans. U.S. News & World Report, 140(10), 70.
Word / phrase from article
Possible synonym / partial synonym
1.
confused about
a. …
2.
conflicting
b. …
3.
offender
c. …
4.
purported
d. …
5.
to outlaw
e. …
6.
choked with
f.
7.
elixir
g. …
8.
qualms
h. …
9.
infidel
i.
…
j.
…
10. quieted
…
Making input comprehensible (at the right level) for your target students.
According to Krashen (1985), the input that learners receive should be comprehensible and
presented at i + 1 (where i represents existing knowledge and + 1 represents that new
knowledge that the learner is ready to acquire) for learning to take place. Also, in order for
learners to be able to guess the meaning of unknown words from the context, the text
needs to contain at least 95-98% of words that are already known to the learners (Laufer,
1988; Nation, 2008), i.e. one unknown word in every 50 words to one unknown word in
every 20 words. Therefore, presenting learners with texts that contain too many unknown
words would be a hindrance to learning. Teachers can rewrite parts of the text to make it
more comprehensible and learnable to learners using their own judgment aided by the use
of Vocab Profiler.
Now, look at the same text used in the previous task. Highlight the words that you think
would cause great difficulty to Secondary Six students in Hong Kong. (You can use your
own judgment or use Vocab Profiler (http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/) to help you make a
judgment.) Then, rewrite the highlighted bits to render the text appropriate for the
learners (at the level of i + 1).
Other than using Vocab Profiler to identify off-list words that are likely to cause difficulty to
learners and replacing these words with higher-frequency words (you can also check the
frequency level of your newly replaced words on http://conc.lextutor.ca/list_learn/ where
you can find lists of words from 1k to 20k level and AWL and UWL), another benefit of using
Vocab Profiler is to see which of the off-list words appear repeatedly in the text, and to
pre-teach these words before getting students to read the text.
Strategies for selecting words to learn
Since there can be about 2 million words in the English language, it may not be wise to look
up every single new word you come across in your reading because some words may be
worth more attention than others. To be able to select words for learning (and skip some
words for the time being) is a crucial strategy for effective learning. You will need to decide
whether a new word is worth learning at the present moment or whether it is better to
ignore that word for the moment. Of course, there can be a number of factors affecting your
decision, but here are four questions that you might ask yourself:
1. Is the word related to the subject
you’re studying?
NO →
Ignore it
NO →
Ignore it
NO →
Ignore it
YES
↓
Learn it as part of your curriculum.
2. Do you remember seeing this
word before?
YES
↓
Learn it. It can be a word that you
have encountered and partially
learned before.
3. Does it contain familiar parts
e.g. prefixes or roots that you
know? Does it look like another
word that already know?
YES
↓
Learn it. The familiar parts will help
you remember it.
4. Is it repeated in the text you’re
reading?
NO →
Ignore it
YES
↓
Learn it. It's a useful word in the
text you’re reading and the
repetition will make it easier for
you to remember it.
Adapted from Nation, P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge:
C.U.P.