Vocabulary

R E S O U R C EB @ K S F O RT E A C H E R S

series editorAlan Maley

John M organ I Mario Rinvolucr i

OXTORD

Vocabulary

Titles in the Resource Books for Teachers series

BeginnersPeter Grundy

Classroom DynamicsJil l Hadfield

ConversationRob Nolasco and LoisArthur

Cultural AwarenessBarryTomalin and Susan Stempleski

DictionariesJonathan Wright

DramaCharlyn Wessels

Exam ClassesPeter May

FilmSusan Stempleski and BarryTomalin

Global lssuesRicardo Sampedro and Susan Hillyard

Grammar DictationRuth Wajnryb

HomeworkLesley Painter

The InternetScottWindeatt, David Hardisty,and David Eastment

Primary Resource Books

Art and Crafts with ChildrenAndrewWright

Assessing Young LearnersSophie loannou-Georgiou and Pavlosravtou

Creating Stories with ChildrenAndrewWright

Drama with ChildrenSarah Phil l ips

Games for ChildrenGordon Lewis with Gi.inther Bedson

The Internet and Young LearnersGordon Lewis

!earner-based TeachingColin Campbell and Hanna Kryszewska

LettersNicky Burbidge, Peta Gray, Sheila Levy, and MarioRi nvol ucri

ListeningGoodith White

LiteratureAlan Duff and Alan Maley

Music and SongTim Murphey

NewspapersPeter Grundy

ProjectWork 2nd editionDrana L. tne0-booln

PronunciationClement Laroy

Role PlayGill ian Porter Ladousse

Vocabulary 2nd editionJohn Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri

WritingTricia Hedge

Proiects with Young LearnersDiane Phillips, Sarah Bunruood, and Helen Dunford

Storytelling with ChildrenAndrewWright

VeryYoung LearnersVanessa Reil ly and Sheila M. Ward

Writing with ChildrenJackie Reil ly and Vanessa Reil ly

Young-LearnersSarah Phil l ips

Resource Books for Teachersseries editor Alan Maley

VocahularySecond edition

John MorganMario Rinvolucri

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Acknowledgements

We should like to thank the following people: stLrdents fromDavies's/Eurocentre Cambridge, the New School, Cambridge, andPilgrims, Canterbury; the many colleagues who have supplied uswith ideas, who are individually acknowledged where possible;Michael Rundell, for inspiration and practical guidance in usingcorpora; Yvonne de Henseler, who edited the first edition of the book,and Simon Murison-Bowie, who solved many of the problems thrownup by the second; our families in their participation in writing andtesting.

The authors and publisher are grateful to those who have givenpermission to reproduce the following extracts and adaptations ofcopyright material:

Bereavement Publishing, Inc. (www. be reave m entsou rces.com ) forpermission to reproduce the poem 'The Elephant in the room' byTeryzKettering.

Blackrazell and Mott for permission to reproduce an extract fromGrooksllbyPiet Hein.

Bloomsbury Publishing, McClelland and Stewart (Canada), andRandom House (Alfied Knopf) for permission to reproduce'Fugitive pieces' by Anne Michaels.

Committee on Poverty and the Arms Trade for an extract from Bombs

forBreakfastpublished by Campaign Against Arms Trade in 1978.Cedric Robinson and David Charles for an extract flom SandPilot of

MorecambeBay (79801.Daniella Cammack for an extract fiom an email.David HighamAssociates for permission to reproduce an extract

from'The Secret Pilgrim'byJohn Le Carr6. @ 1990 David Cornwell.Published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1991.

Faber and Faber for an extract from The rNhitsunWeddingsby

Philip Larkin.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber for permission to

reproduce'Home is so Sad' fr om Colle cte d P oems by Philip Larkin.Copyright @ 1988, 1989 bythe Estate of Philip Larkin.

The Guardian newspaper for 'Viaduct rescue' published in theGuar dian, 2 3 February 1 980.

Guy Browning for permission to reproduce an extract from 'You

talking to me?' published in the GuardianWeekend section, 9 June2001, @ GuyBrowning.

Acknowledgements I v

Hodder and Stoughton for an extract fromTheSecretPilgrimby

John Le Carr6.Julius Nyerere and Oxford University Press for an extract from Ujamaa

(1e68).Kent Messenger Group for an extract from 'Drive-thru destroyed by

inferno' ftom Kmt Messenger, 1 5 March 2002.Little, Brown and Co. and Mclntyre Management for permission to

reproduce an extract ftomGridlockby Ben Elton.Nicholas Brealey Publishing for permission to reproduce an extract

fromBreakingthroughCulhreShock:lNhatyouNeedtoSucceedinInternationalBusiness byElisabeth Marx. @ Elisabeth Marx 1999.Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing Limited in 1999.

Sheila Hocken and Victor Gollancz for an extract fromE;rnrna andl(79:77\.

Times Newspapers for'Charlie Cairoli the clown dies aged 70'published in TheTimes,l8 February 1980.

Although every effort has been made to trace and contact copyrightholders before publication, this has not been possible in some cases.We apologize for any apparent infringement of copyright and ifnotifled, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors oromissions at the earliest opportunity.

vi I Acknowledgements

Contents

The authors and series editor

Foreword

Introduction

Activity Level Time Aims(minutes)

Page

I Pre-text activities

1.1 What'sinthetext? Elementary 20-30 Tomotivatestudentstoreadatextby 13to advanced getting them to speculate beforehand

about its content.

1 .2 Predicting meanings Elementary '10-20 To encourage students to work out from 15to advanced context the meanings of unfamiliar words.

1.3 Predictingwords Intermediate 2O-25 Toreviewareasofvocabularywithwhich 16to advanced the students already have some familiarity,

so that new items in these areas can moreeasily be'slotted in' and remembered; tostimlate interest in a dull text.

1 .4 Criminal records Elementarv 30-40 To focus the students' attention on the 19to advanced ways they associate words by meaning or

context, and especially on the positiveand negative connotations words havefor them.

1.5 Ungrammatical gender Intermediate 30-40 To encourage students to explore their 20to advanced preconceptions about particular words

before meeting them in a context, sothat their reading becomes more directedand critical

1.5 Look, remember, and Elementary 30-40 To focus the students' attention on how 22complete the set to advanced they try to remember words, and on how

context might influence their memory.

1.7 Words on a map lntermediate 20-30 To motivate and focus the students' 23to advanced reading of a text by first exploring the'

personal connections of some of thewords and ohrases used.

Contents I vii


Page

1.8 Cards on the table Intermediate 20-30 To qet the students to clarifv their ideas 25to advanced about a topic or attitude before reading a

text, especially one that will be used as thebasis for discussion or essay-writing.

2 Working with texts

2.1 Customizing a text Intermediate 20-30 1 To focus the students' attention by 28to advanced giving them a specific task, rather

than simply tell lng them to read the text.2 To encouragethem to look closely

at words and phrases in context.

2.2 Favouritephrases Beginnerto 15-30 Togivestudentsachancetosharetheir 30advanced feelings about vocabulary and, perhaps,

overcome personal dislikes.

2.3 Cotrecttheteacher Elementary 25-35, 1 Togiveatask-basedfocustolistening. 31toadvanced 45-60 2 Toencouragestudentstobuildupa

wider set ofvocabulary choices.

2.4 Deleting words Post-beginner 15-20 To focus on whether a word is necessary 33to advanced or not as a way of exploring its meaning

in context.

2.5 Marginalia Intermediate 20-45 To get students to look closely at 33to advanced vocabulary in context, and to express their

own understandings of specific meaningsand connotations.

2.5 Hunt the misfits Intermediate 20-35 To develop students' critical awareness of 34to advanced meanings in context

2.7 Ghost definitions Elementary 20 To focus on the exact meanings of lexical 37to intermediate items, and how they can be expressed by

definitions or paraphrases.

2.8 Patchwork text Elementarv 2040 To scan and re-contextualize text 38to advanced fragments.

2.9 The words in your past Elementary 20-30 To make new vocabulary memorable by 39to advanced linkinq it to imoortant memories in the

students'own lives.

2.10 Towardslearningatext Beginner 15-40 Toencouragestudentstoremember 40by heart (a) to advanced contexts as well as single words and

phrases.

2.11 Towardslearningatext Beginner 15-30 Toencouragestudentstoremember 41by heart (b) to advanced contexts as well as single words and

phrases.

2.12 Cross-associations Elementary 15-25 Tousecreativeword-associationasan 42to advanced aid to memorv.

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Page

2.13 Be someone else Intermediate 30-40 To get students thinking about words and 43to advanced phrases in their cultural/historical context.

2.14 Email language Upper-intermediate 40-50 To get students to learn from'informal', 45to advanced unconected native-speaker texts

3 Writing activities

3.1 Invisible writing Elementary 10-20 To get students to reflect on and use 47to advanced

'known' vocabulary, and to learn fromeach other by reading and discussing whatothers have written.

3.2 The oracle Lower-intermediate 15-20 To practice newlv-learnt vocabulary in a 49

to advanced wide range of contexts and situations

3.3 Adding words to a story Elementary 30-40 To give the students an opportunity to 49to intermediate start writinq creativelv within a safe,

controlled fiame.

3.4 Expanding a sentence Lower-intermediate 10-1 5 To give the students an opportunity to 50to advanced start writing creatively within a safe,

controlled frame.

4 Bil ingual texts and activit ies

4.1 Sensory vocabulary Lower-intermediate 40-50 To make target-language words more 52choices to advanced memorable by evoking strong personal

associations through the mother tongue.The students are encouraged to use alltheir senses in this.

4.2 Changing the order of Elementary 15-20 To glve guided practice in contrastive 53the words to upper- translation.

intermediate

4.3 Focusing on difficulty Intermediate 40-50 To provoke contrastive awareness of 54to advanced vocabulary in two languages

4.4 Cultural keywords Lower-intermediate 40-50 To explore the cultural resonance of 55to advanced vocabulary, and the ways in which specific

vocabulary items can represent importantaspects of a culture

4.5 How many letters Beginner 10-20 To get students to visualize the look of a 56in the word? to intermediate word on the page, as an aid to memory

and spell ing.

4.6 Two-language texts All 1 5 To deduce the meaning of target-language 57words from a mother-tonque context.

Contents I ix


Page

4.7 learning by associating Beginner to 1 5-20 To introduce students to a practical way of 58elementary quickly learning vocabulary on their own.

4.8 Two-facingwords Upper-intermediate 10-15 Toexplorelexical ambiguityinafocused 59to advanced but amusing way, looking at homonyms,

homophones, and words that can be usedas different parts of speech.

4.9 On the walls Beginner to 1 5 To practise skimming and scanning 61elementary target-language texts for equivalents of

mother-tong ue expressions.

4.10 Translationreversi Elementary 20-30 Touseasimpleboardandsomepiecesof 62to advanced. card as a vocabulary exercise, in which

the playeiwho can translate mostaccurately has the best chance ofwtnntnq.

5 Using corpora and concordances

5.1 Reciprocal verb phrases Upper-intermediate 30-40 To show how corpus analysis can highlight 65to advanced patterns of grammar and meaning.

5.2 'Tend to': using Intermediate 3G40 To present and practise the language 67concordances with to advanced patterns associated with particular wordsstudents and Phrases.

5.3 More on 'tend to': using Intermediate 40-60 To work wlth a corpus to discover the 68a corpus and software in to advanced language patterns associated withclass particularwords and phrases.

5.4 Which word are we after? Elementary 10-20 To show how corpora and concordance 71to advanced software can help teachers (and students)

to oreoare classroom materials.

5.5 Barefacts,nakedtruth Intermediate 20-40 Touseacorpustofindoutwhichoftwoor 73to advanced more apparent synonyms is appropriate to a

Darticular context.

5.6 Working with student Elementary 2C-4:5 To show how concordance software can 76texts to advanced be used with the students' own texts to

discover or highlight features of vocabularyand style.

5.7 Quarrying the lnternet Intermediate 30-60 To encourage students to learn how words 78for words to advanced and phrases are used by searching the

lnternet tor examDle texts.

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Page

6 Words and the senses

5.1 Wordsandoutsenses Lower-intermediate 25-40 Tomakestudentsawareoftheirown 82to advanced sensory preferences through the words

they choose and the texts they respondmost strongly to.

5.2 Notionpictures Beginnerto 20-30 Toreviewandrecallvocabulary. 83intermediate

6.3 Machines and scenes Elementary 30-40 To provide visual and kinaesthetic ways of 84to advanced presenting and learning new vocabulary.

6.4 Elephants Elementary 40-50 Toencouragepeer-teachingbothof 85to advanced subject-matter and of lexis.

6.5 Exploring vocabulary Beginnerto 15-30 To learn vocabularythrough movement 87kinaesthetically advanced

5.6 Coinsspeak Elementary 15-25 Toexplorethespatial andhierarchical 88to advanced associations of words, as an aid to

understanding and memory.

6.7 Picture gallery Elementary 35-50 1 To get students to use known (or half- 89to advanced known) vocabulary in new situations,

and to learn vocabulary from each other.2 To get students to write texts that other

students will want to read.

5.8 L is teningincolour Elementary 15 Tolearnvocabularythroughspeci f lc 90to advanced visual associations.

6.9 Get as much wrong as Upper-intermediate 10-20 To meet head-on the challenge of l inking 91you can to advanced the meanings of words with their visual

and auditory representations.

5.10 OHPl is ts Beginnerto 10-15 Tobreakuptheorderandvisual 93advanced monotony of lists as an aid to memory.

5.1 1 Words round the circle Beginner to 10-15 To practise saying words using the full 94intermediate vocal range.

5.1 2 Fil l ing a landscape Beginner to 3, 1 0 To encourage students to discover 95advanced vocabulary for themselves and to teach it

to others.

5.13 Fishy adjectives Intermediate 30-40 To use, in a creative, memorable way, 96to advanced adjectives that describe people.

5.14 Objectsroundthecircle Beginnerto 10-12 Toencouragestudentstoexpress 98upper-intermediate meaning in any way that suits them

(visually, through movement, etc), andthen to ask for and learn the specificvocabulary they need.

6.1 5 Picturing words and Elementary 20-30 To use detailed, creative visualization to 99phrases to advanced associate with the English words the

students are learninq.

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Page

7 Word sets

7.1 Intell igencetest Beginnerto 10 Toexploretheideaofa'wordset'and 102intermediate the manv different wavs in which one

can categorize vocabuiary.

7.2 Unusual word families Elementary 10 To encourage students to group words in 102to advanced unusual, memorable categories.

7.3 Chains Elementary 20 Toencouragestudentstogroupwordsin 103to advanced imaglnative and memorable ways.

7.4. Collecting collocations Intermediate 5,30-40 To expand students'understanding and 104to advanced acquisition ofabove-the-word vocabulary.

7.5 How strong is the Upper-intermediate 20-30 To expand students' understanding and 105collocation? toadvanced acquisition ofabove-the-wordvocabulary.

7.5 Diagonal opposites Beginner to 1 0 To get students to look closely at the 107intermediate semantic and situational associations of a

word, and thus fix new vocabulary firmly.

7 .7 The egg exercise Beginner to , 20 To explore the various meanings and 107advanced associations of a word or phrase.

7.8 Prototypes Beginnerto 20-30 Togetstudentstoconsiderhowword- 108advanced sets are built up, by asking such questions

as'How strongly does this word belong toits set?', and in so doing to consider howeffective for them such categorizations arein organizing and remembering vocabulary.

7.9 Wotds from the Beginnerto 2-3, To provide a simple research tool for 110homestay family advanced 20-30 students studying in an English-speaking

environment and living in host families,

7.10 Mapping one's mood Post-beginner 15-20 To differentiate items in a'word field', 111to advanced which may easily be confused with each

other; in a personal, memorable way.

7 .11 A hierarchy of association Intermediate 20-35 To organize word sets as a hierarchy. 112to advanced

I Personal

8.1 Yougivemytalk Elementary 5-10, Tomotivatestudentstolistento,and 113to advanced 30-'45 therefore learn from, each other.

8.2 l ifekeywords Elementary 2540 Topractiseandsharevocabularywhichis 114to advanced personally important.

8.3 Turnoutyourpockets Elementary 20-35 Tousepractical,day-to-dayvocabularyin 115to upper- personally relevant conversations.intermediate

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Page

8.4 SCarS Elementary 40-60 To motivate students to overcome lack of 1 15to upper- vocabulary when narrattng.intermediate

8.5 Words my neighbour Intermediate 20 To encourage students to teach each 1 16knows to advanced other and learn from each other.

8.5 Aletterfromtheteacher Post-beginner 10-15 Topresentvocabularytostudentsina 117to advanced direct,'l-Thou'context.

8.7 Thesecretdictionary Elementary 15, Theprivateconnotationsawordor 118to advanced 1 0-1 5 phrase may have can be very strong -

strong enough to express as a 'definit ion'.

8.8 Phrases I like Lower-intermediate 1 5-25 To encourage students to acquire a wider 1 19to advanced choice of expressions.

8.9 Whathaveyougottenof? Beginnerto 15-20 Togetstudentstodiscoverandusenew 120lower-intermediate words to express things that are important

to them now

9 Word games

9.1 Circ legames Beginnerto 10-1 5 Toprovideabankofgameswi thavar iety 121advanced of learning purposes that can be played in

circles of three to seven players.

9.2 The prefix game Intermediate 30-40 To work on the various negative and 123to advanced pejorative prefixes in English, especially

for students preparing for an examinationsuch as FCE orT0EFL.

9.3 Definitions dictation Intermediate 20-30 To use a guessing game to practise using 125to advanced definitions

9.4 Crosswords Intermediate 20-30 To introduce students to English- 126to advanced language crosswords and show ways in

which they can be adapted and mademore creative.

9.5 Pivot words Lower-intermediate 20-30 To explore the different semantic and 1 31to advanced grammatical uses ofwords.

9.5 Hiding words Lower-intermediate 1 0-20 To discover words 'buried' in other words 132to advanced or surrounding text.

9.7 Treasure hunt Intermediate 1 0-20 To practise identifying words with the 133to advanced help ofdefinit ions.

9.8 Storyboard Elementary 20-30 To practise relating words to context. 135to advanced

. lLOnlents I x| | l


Page

lO Dictionary exercises and word history

10.1 Word dip Elementary 15-25 Tofamiliarizestudentswiththestructure, 135to advanced uses, and limitations of dictionaries.

10.2 From word to word Intermediate 15-25 To give further practice in the use of 137to advanced dictionaries, with the emphasis on the

language used in the definit ions given.

10.3 Writeyourself in Elementary 10-1 5 Toaddastrongpersonal elementto 138to advanced dictionary Practice.

10.4 Whatdolmean? Lower-intermediate 1G-l5 Tointroduceandpractisewordsand 139to advanced phrases used in defining and explaining

meanrngs.

10.5 Borrowedwords Intermediate 20 Toshowhowwordscanchangeform 140to advanced and meaning across languages.

10.6 Commemorativewords Upper-intermediate 20-30 Toexplorewordswithahistory 141to advanced

10.7 Dating words Upper-intermediate 15-30 To explore more words with a history, 142to advanced with the emphasis on more recent

c0lnages.

10.8 Thesauri Upper-intermediate 30-45 Toshowhowwordsmaybegroupedby 143to advanced meaning and context; to introduce and

practise using a thesaurus; and,incidentally, to show how words can beused to disguise and distort meaning.

11 Revision exercises

1 1 .1 Open categorization Beginner to 1 5-20 To allow students to categorize 149advanced vocabulary in any way they want.

11.2 Guidedcategorization Beginnerto 15-20 Togetthestudentstoforminteresting 149advanced and memorable word groups, and to

deepen their understanding of words bycomparing categorizations.

1 1.3 Words on a scale Intermediate 15-20 To concentrate the students' attention 152to advanced on the words under revision byfocusing

on their own, subjective reactions.

1 1 .4 Lexical furniture Elementary 1 5-20 To fix vocabulary in memory by visualizing 1 53to advanced connections with familiar obiects and

olaces.

11.5 Leapingwords Beginnerto 10-15 Togetstudentsto'draw'wordsas a 154advanced simple but creative way of remembering

vocabulary visually.

1 1 .6 Find the word a picture Beginner to 20-40 To get students to link words and visual 155advanced imaqes.

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Page

ll.7 Rhyming review Elementary 20-30 Toprovideasimpleauditoryreviewof 156to advanced vocabularv. which also focuses on

pronunciation and spell ing.

l l.8 Drawtheword Beginnerto 5, 15-20 Togetstudentstovisualizewordsasa 156advanced means of remembering them.

ll.9 Matchingwords Elementary 15-30 Toreviewwords,focusingonmeaning 157to advanced and context.

f l. l0 Giftwords Beginnerto 20 Toreviewvocabularyandatthesame 158adJanced time to establish or improve rapport

within a group.

ff.f 1 Forced choice Elementary 15-25 To generate conversation by a fast and 1 59to advanced energetic review ofwords.

I f .f 2 Question and answer Elementary 15-25 To practise the vocabulary under review 1 60to advanced interactively and in new contexts.

l l. l3 Wordstostory Elementary 20-30 Touseoral storytell ingtoreviewwords. 151to advanced

It.l4 Word rush Beginnerto 10 To reviewwords in an energetic, 161intermediate non-wordy way

t1.15 Comparing random Elementary 5, 1 5 To provide a somewhat surreal way of 162words to advanced reviewing'hard-to-remember' words

f 1-f 6 Multi-sensory revision Elementary 30-40 To get students to choose whether to 162to advanced revise linguistically, kinaesthetically,

auditorily or visually.

11.17 Writingto rule Elementary 30-40 Toencouragestudentstoextractas 164to advanced much meaning as they can from words

by l imiting the number they areallowed to use.

lrnotated bibl iography

Her

155

158

Contents I xv

The authors and ser ies edi tor

John Morgan has worked in EFL since 1966, as a teacher, teachertrainer, coursebook and resource book writer, and lexicographer.He has been associated with Pilgrims English Language courses sincergZS. With Mario Rinvolucri he has written )nceupon aTime andThe QBook, as well as contributing to many Pilgrims publications.At present he divides his time between teacher training andsetting crosswords.

Mario Rinvolucri is founder member of the Pilgrims netvvork ande dits IIum anising Langu age Te aching, h tt p : //www. h I t m a g . c o. u k, awebzine for teachers. In addition to this title, Mario has co-authoredLetters andVideo in the Resource Books for Teachers series, as well asChallenge to Thinklwith Berer and Frank, OUP, r98z). A frequentcontributor t o The Te acher Tr ainer, h tt p ://www.tttj o u r n a l. co. u k,Mario's most recent publications arc Ilumanising your Coursebook and,with Sheelagh Deller, Usingthe Mother Tongue (both with ETp-Delta,zooz).

Alan Maley worked for the British Council from 196z to 1988, servingas English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, andChina, and as Regional Representative in South India (Madras). From1988 to r99g he was Director-General of the Bell Educational Trust,Cambridge. From 1993 to 1998 he was Senior Fellow in theDepartment of English Language and Literature of the NationalUniversity of Singapore, and from 1999 to zoo3 he was Director ofthe Graduate Programme at Assumption University, Bangkok. He iscurrently a fieelance consultant. He has writtenLiterature,inthisseries, Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intnguing, Words,Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language Learning(all with Alan Duff), The Mind's Eye (with Franqoise Grellet andAlan Duff ), Le arning to Listen and P o em into P o em (with SandraMoulding), The Language Teacher's Voice, and Short and Sweet.

The authors and series editor | 1

Foreword

'vVhen the first edition ofVocabulary appeared in 1986, some ofthe ideas it presented seemed outlandish to many teachers. It is ameasure of the success of the book that these ideas have now enteredthe mainstream. What was then considered 'way out' now forms partofaccepted practice.

Vocabularyhas played its part in the more general movementtowards giving greater prominence to the teaching ofvocabulary that has taken place since its initial publication.

Current thinking, based in large parl on the analysis of computercorpora, has emphasized the importance of collocation, andtherefore the fact that vocabulary is largely phrasal. Words hangtogether in typical clusters rather than exist in splendid isolation.Lexico-grammar-the zone where syntax and lexis cooperate to forgemeaning-has become a key consideration in the way vocabulary istaught.

Another trend has been the revival of interest in the role of themother tongue in the acquisition of a second language. Bilingualassociations in vocabulary in particular clearly have a part to play.

Perhaps the other single most important development has beenthe recognition of learner differences, as evidenced through work inlearning styles, multiple intelligences, and neurolinguisticprogrumming (NLP). Learners apprehend the world differently, havedifferent preferred modes of learning, and therefore need learningmaterials which take account of these differences.

Altogether we are now better placed to understand the nature andfunctions of vocabulary what it means to know a word, and how bestto acquire vocabulary.

This new edition builds on its former strengths by incorporatingactivities based on the ideas outlined above. If anything, this hastended to reinforce the beliefs of the authors tfrat learning takesplace through the personal associations formed by learners. It is'depth of processing' that matters most. The activities included hereall seek to promote the key quality of engagement. The authors haveretained their freshness and originality of approach, and have againchallenged teachers to renew themselves. This new edition should beat least as influential as the old one was.

AlanMaley

Foreword | 3

Introd uct ion

Forty thousand schools, institutions, and teachers have bought the1986 edition of this book since publication, which means that severalmillion students will have experienced actMties from its pages.

Many teachers will have used it, too, and will have brought itsapproaches into their own teaching of vocabulary. t986 is a long timeago, however, especially in a fast-changing field such as languageteaching and learning, which is influenced increasinglyby newthoughts, new practices, and new disciplines. We greatly welcomed,therefore, the invitation to revise and update this book.

But first, what was our thinking behind the first edition ofVocabulary?When we asked students back in the r98os about theirfeelings on learningvocabulary two-thirds of them said theywerenot taught enough words in class. Teachers seemed keen to teachgrammar and pronunciation, but learning words-particular wordsthat they needed in everyday life-came a very poor third. Thereseemed to be an assumption that it was enough for teachers tospecify which words wete to be learnt-the when and the how wasup to the students.

'vVhy should this be so?Whenwe 'do' a reading passage or alistening comprehension with our students, surely we are teachingvocabulary? Sadly, in many classrooms this is not the case.Encountering and 'understanding' a word are seldom enough; aswhen we meet people, depth and interaction are necessary if theencounter is to be meaningful and memorable.

If teachers have not always recognized the need to devote time tothe teaching of vocabulary students themselves feel a very real needto devote time and effort to the process. Many students, indeed,develop their or,rrn methodologies for making words stick. \Mhether itis that of listening to successive news broadcasts on television orkeeping words in matchboxes-examples we cited in theintroduction to the first edition of this book-students intuitivelybring to bear the commonsense understanding that for something tobe effective it must be effective for them. Attention must be paid not toa generalized view of learning but to the variety of the individualprocess of learning. This book has grown out of our attempts to workwith that process, and this second edition seeks to incorporate newunderstanding of the factors that influence it.

Introduction | 5

Making new

Howhave things changed, then, in the two decades that separate theeditions of this book? We still see a need for practical activities of thekind offered here, and still hold to our view that vocabulary learningis best carried out interactively within the classroom, but we nolonger feel tlat we are mapping uncharted waters. Many newtheories and insights have emerged which have direct impact onwhat it is to 'know' a word. To stick with a nautical metaphor, wehave in the past sailed before the wind of many new trends and ideas,and some of the new chapters in the book continue to stem from thisnewthinking.

One reason why some students experience language learning as achore is because they find themselves asked to do again and againwhat they are already able to do with their eyes shut in their mothertongue. We strongly maintain, as we did twentyyears ago, that agood second language exercise will offer the student an experiencethat is to some extent new that they have never found themselvesdoingin their Lr.

When this kind of freshness and element of surprise crops up inlesson after lesson, then the language classroom begins to be aninteresting place. We also feel that a good Lz activity, at least fromelementary level up, is one that would also work adequately andmaintain a reasonable level of interest among students if done intheir mother tongue. This is why you should put this book in thehands of the teachers of tJe mother tongue in your staflroom.

A relationship with words

Another principle that underpins this book is the realization thatIearning words is a relational process.You could describe the process asmaking friends w ith the w or ds of the t arget language. We do not s ub s crib eto the view that a word is merely a 'signifier' that acts as a label for a'signif,ed' in the real world. It is much more than that. If a word issimply a label, whywill second language learners pick up andremember one word apparently effortlessly, while another word, metat the same time and place, will be refused a place in their mind?Justas a look, a movement, a chance remark, a tone of voice. orsomething in the setting can influence our flrst impressions of aperson, so our perception of a word can be affected by, for example:- its sound- the kinetic sensation ofthe lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, and nose

when saying the word- its tune- its pitch- its speed of enunciation- the other word company it keeps (collocating ability and breadth)

5 | Introduction

- its spelling- its shape on the page or screen- conventional associations: semantic and syntactic categories to

which the word appears to belong- literary associations ('pail of water' in the context ofJack andJill)- the associations the word has for the individual learner- the circumstances of meeting the word.

All these factors play a part in'learning' a word. If you take them allinto account, then meeting a word is a process of befriending, ofcoming to terms with a complex, self-standing reality.

We would like to round offthese opening paragraphs with aparaphrase of part ofAlan Maley's foreword to the 1986 edition:

The acquisition ofvocabulary is:

o a branching process rather than a linear one. Words are not learntmechanically, as little packets of meaning, but associatively;

. an intensely personal process. The associations and vibrationsdepend on our own past and present felt experience;

. a social process, rather than a solitary one. We expand ourunderstanding of word meanings by interchanging and sharingthem with others:

. not a purely intellectual, effortful process, but an experientialhands-on process too. An over-intellectual approach causes thelanguage to be seen as an object, rather than to be incorporatedwithin the subject-the learner.

New trends

In the years between the flrst edition of this book and today, therehas been-as we have already suggested-signiflcant work donewhich impacts upon the lexical component of language. This has fedinto curricula and coursebooks, while mainstream teaching has beeninfluenced by work on a host of theories: multiple intelligences,learning styles, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), and so on. It iseasy, too, to forget, or not take account of, the fact that back in ther98os computers had yet to have a major influence on our thinking.The computer explosion and the Internet have transformed theenvironment in which language is used and learning takes place.

These are some of the factors that have informed the updating ofthis book. We will conclude this introduction by summarizing underthree headings how they have advanced our understanding oftheteaching ofwords.

Introduction | 7

The relationship of the mother tongue tothe foreign languageOver the past ten years the EFL community, particularly in the UK,has talked increasingly of the major importance of the mothertongue in the learning of a second language. There is a growing revoltagainst the belief, held by proponents of the Direct Method, that themother tongue should be excluded from the second languageclassroom. In our view this revolt is common sense. In the case ofadolescents and adults, the mother tongue is the launch pad for thesecond language. These learners naturally reference newwords in Lzvia the mother tongue. To take an example: a rz-year-old Turkmeeting the English wordhouse will not go direct fiom his feelingsabout his home, from the sights and sounds of his home tohouse;hewill go fiom the concept and feeling to the Tirrkish word ev and fromthere make an equivalence with house. This is natural, inevitable, andlinguistically effi.cient, since ev is for him a brilliant, zipped-upsynthesis of all his thoughts and feelings surrounding the concept ofhouse.

Interestingly, the UK EFL voices who have recently advocatedsensible use of the mother tongue include university academics andpractising teachers. On the one hand you have influential writers likeProfessor Guy Cook from Reading University writing articles withtitles like 'Is there Direct Method in our Madness?'( ELGazefi.e,Isste239,19gq and on the other Andrew Morris, a teacher in Bangladesh,writingwhat follows:

I can't see the problemwith judicious use ofthe students' mothertongue-especially at lower levels. ... as a learner of otherlanguages myself I find it necessary at times to clarify a point ofvocabulary or grammar in English, again especially at beginnerlevel. It is absurd to operate all the time in a new second language,and ignore the many rich and valuable points of comparison theremaybe with their own.(ELTeCS-L Digest on the British Council websitehttp ://www. b ritis hco u nci l.o rg )

In Chapter 4, 'Bilingual texts and activities', we celebrate the lifting of

the Direct Method ban on the mother tongue by offering you someexercises that we hope will please those of your students with stronglinguistic intelligences. When we look back, we are amazed that weonly included a couple of exercises in the first edition of this bookwhich included the use of the student's mother tongue. We paid littleattention to our own natural, contrastive way of learning otherlanguages. If you flnd the exercises in this chapter useful and wouldlike some more, consult the large vocabulary section in Deller andRinvolucri zooz. (See the Annotated Bibliography at the end of thisbook.)

8 | Introduction

The sensorybasis ofboth experience andvocabularyWork with the technology offered by neurolinguistic programminghas made us much more aware than we were before of the fact that itis through the flve senses that we experience the external world andthe internalworld ofwords. Take this sentence:

The manwentto the window andlooked out.

Was your flrst 'representation' of the man, a picture, a feeling, or asound?What sort ofwindowwas it?\ /hat sort of house?Where inthe world did it happen? Did you get a feeling of the light, theweather, the temperature that da12 Or was it night? Were therebackground noises, sounds? As he looked out, what was out like?Were you inside the 'space' of the scene, or did you see it as anexternal picture?

As we use our mother tongue we are continually makingunconscious lexical choices based on sensorypreferences that comefrom our deep programming. If you want to express the idea that yougot angryyou might say:

I suw red.Ilostmy rag.Iflew offthehandle.I reached screarrnng point.

(visual)(kinaesthetic)

(auditory)

All the above phrases car4r the intended meaning, but they do so insensorily very different ways. To express ourselves in language, wehave no choice but to make continuous sensory choices as large areasofthe language system are based on seeing, hearing, orfeelingthrough the body. This awareness leads to a slew of emotionally aptactivities in the course ofwhich students discover a whole new areaof themselves and their relationship to words. So, for example,dictate a set ofwords tfrat the students have alreadv studied and askthem to classify them into four columns:

eye ear bodily feeling taste/smell

With the word sock, for example, in which of these columns wouldyou get your first representation? And the word mother? Some peoplehear their mother, others know her through bodily feeling, whileothers get a mental picture of her. At a later stage in this exercisestudents compare their sensory,categorization of the words dictatedand the room is fllled with animated, sometimes amazed voices, asthey discover that their friend's sensory process is different fromtheirs. (Here we chose an auditory representation of the classroomprocess.)

There are, of course, plenty of abstract words in the language thatare only etymologically sensory $ituation,for example, from the Latinword situs meaningplace) but the cuffent meaning has come to mean

Introduction | 9

something similar to ciramntance, which in turn originally meantwhat stands around). But if you go to 6.15 you will flnd an activity inwhich the teacher dictates abstract words and the students do aquick drawing for each. After the first shock of being asked tovisualize a word llke integritry, students find they can easily visualizeanalogues for or illustrations ofabstract concepts. It is in thisway that we 'domesticate' what is abstract into our own personalreality.

Neurolinguistic programming has a great deal to say aboutlanguage and words that goes well beyond the sensory system but inthis bookwe have confi.ned ourselves to this small area of NLP'sinsights. To flnd out more, see O'Connor and Seymour 1990.

The discoveries made bycorpus linguists

The growth of corpus linguistics over the past twenty-five years hasled us to new ways of understanding words. We can now study themin their collocational environment. and we can do this on a massivescale and across hectares of text. We consciously realize how thiscolours and changes their meaning. Let us take the verb to cause.ltturns out that this is not the neutral unbiased word you might think.According to one large corpus, ninety per cent ofthe things caused arenegative:

to cause embarrassmentto cause havocto cause chaosto cause distressto cause pain to

When we first heard these facts during a presentation in 1999, givenby Ron Carter, we were as surprised as he said he had been at flrst. Hewent on to add that corpus study had led him to doubt the accuracyof native-speaking introspection about words.

Another example, this time fiom Michael Rundell: his article 'If

onlytheyd asked a linguist' (http://www.hltmag.co.uk, zoozl showshow wrong the UK Post Off,ce was to re-name itself 'Consignia' someyears ago. (In zooz it decided to go back to calling itself 'The RoyalMail'.)According to the British National Corpus, the verb consign ismassively negative through collocational association:

consigtrtothe dustbin(6% of alloccurrences, of which half were thedustbin ofhistory)

consign to oblivion (5%)consignto the scrap-heap $%)consignto amuseum(3%)

Rundell writes, 'It is almost impossible to flnd a single context inwhich consign appears in a positive light'. Indeed the LK Post Offlce

10 | Introduction

should have consulted a linguist before renaming themselves withone of the most negatively collocating words in the language!

In Chapter 5 we offer two types of exercise: one where studentswork with evidence from corpora, set out on the page in front ofthem, and the otherwhere the students learn to use concordancingprograms so they can make their own discoveries from raw data. Thischapter invites you into the vast new thinking space that corpuslinguists have been creating over the past twentyyears.

Other changes to this edition

Readers of the flrst edition will notice that the book is nowconsiderably longer, and is divided into eleven chapters instead ofseven. This has enabled us to present the activities in a clearer wayand we recommend a close study of the table of contents as a way offlnding what you want. The inclusion of Aims for each activity shouldfurther facilitate this process. Some of the 'old favourites'have beenupdated with new texts and examples.

The development of the Internet has led to the inclusion of somenet-related activities and to a number ofvariations and additions toothers. Web addresses (unrs) have been provided for softwaresources and sites relating to dictionaries, corpora, and the like,though we cannot of course guarantee that all these unrs willremain valid. The Internet also provides us with an opportunity toestablish a dialogue with you, our readers. This book is among thefirst to be supported by a website devoted to the Resource Books forTeachers series, to be found at http://www.oup.com/elVteacher/rbt,and we welcome your feedback. There you will find, too, extraactivities, downloadable worksheets, author articles, competitions,etc. And there is more still at the OUP Teachers' Club athttp ://www. o u p. co m/e lVg I o ba l/teach ersc I u b/.

And one other thing . . .

All the materials in this book are offered as suggestions forexploration and modiflcation by the teachers and students whomight use them. We aim neither to present a method to be rigorouslyfollowed, nor to specifywhat to teach. We hope on the other hand toprovide a rich sourcebook of ideas to be dipped into, transformed,and added to. If you would like to share your ideas and experiences,please contact us via http ://www. o u p. co m/e lVteach erlrbt.

John MorganMario Rinvolucri

In t roduct ion | 11

1 . 1Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Pre-text activities

Although vocabulary may be learnt flom many sources, for themajority of students the 'reading passage'found in the coursebook orsupplied by the teacher is the most usual. Such texts have theadvantage that they can be speciallywritten or adapted to suitcurriculum needs, to present a steady progression of grammar andvocabulary to be learnt, to form the basis for student assessment andgrading, etc. On the other hand, they cannot address the huge varietyof individual student needs, even among those who are 'at the samelevel'. Learners differ in their experience of life, in their beliefs, intheir attitude to themselves and others, in their'learning style', intheir aspirations, and in countless other ways. Many of thesedifferences will be reflected in how and to what extent, they willlearn vocabulary from the text placed in fiont of them.

The activities in this chapter have two principal aims: to motivatethe students to read the text, and to get them to review and organizetheir thoughts and language resources before reading. It should beremembered that they concentrate onvocabularyuse andacquisition, not on furthering good reading habits, and that anactMty that is powerful enough to enable the students to learnlanguage from a dull text may also interfere with or swamp thereading ofa rich text.

What's in the text?Elementary to advanced

20-30 minutes

To motivate students to read a text by getting them to speculatebeforehand about its content.

One copy of the text for each student.

Preparation

Choose and make copies of a text and from it select flve to eight itemsof vocabulary for presentation as a 'word rose'. (See the sample textbelow for the kind of text that would be appropriate at upper-intermediate level.)The vocabulary items should be neither 'context-

free' (for example, structure words, neutral or very generaladjectives), nor 'keywords' that would closely typify the main

Pre-text activit ies | 13

1

2

meaning of the text: the airn should be to allowthe students areasonable chance of coming close to the text without restrictingtheir imagination.

Procedure

Put up the word rose on the blackboard.

Tell the sflldents that they are going to read a text in which thesewords appear (not necessarily in the order presented).

Ask them, in groups of four, to speculate on the content of the text.

Give out copies of the text for comparison and discussion.

An example of a word rose, based on the sample text below:

srgns

ignore polite

writing updated

driver carriageway

oermrssron

The language of road-signs

Signs are a great way of telling people things they don't know,pretend not to know, forget or simply ignore. However, there is aproblem with signs, and that is that most of them have been aroundfor so long that we're beginning not to notice them, and for a signthat is a fate worse than death.

Signs with writing on are particularly at risk because languagechanges a lot faster than pictures. For example, crvE wev. Thisphrase is straight out of the era of coaches and horses with anundercurrent of gentle submission. If this sign were at a politecocktail party it would say swooN. These days, no one gives wayunless they absolutely have to. This sign should therefore be updatedto No wAY. Or just No.

Duer cannrAcEwAy is another designaiion straight out of the r8thcentury. Americans think it is as quaint as we think their turnpikesare quaint. We all know what one is, but it's very diff,cult to think ofwhat else it could be called. Dousrn IANE or src noao? Themetatext of ouer cARRTAGEwAv AHEAD is clearly cHANcE TooVERTAKE SuNney DRIVER AHEAD oI FAST LANE AHEAD oT END oFFRUSTRATIoN AHEAD. Sadly, the one thingyou can never, ever dowith a road sign is give permission, or even imply, that you can go fast.

Even nnrucE spEED Now is suspect, and sounds like a drivinginstructor's instruction. This should be updated to slow DowN Nowor, a bit oxymoronically, srow DowN quICKry. Maybe we couldhave them in sequence: srART BRAKTNG Now. BRAKE Now. BRAr(E.ron Gop' s sAI(E, B RAI(E ! It's an unnecessary sign. Telling people toslow down because there's something in their way is gettingperilously close to teaching them to suck eggs.

Punctuation can also drift past its sell-by date. One of the mostcommon all-purpose signs is the exclamation mark. This is clearly the

3

4

Example

Sample text

14 | Pre-text activities

1 . 2Level

Time

Aims

Materials

1

2

same as cosH ! It implies that something moderately interestingcould happen ifyou're easilyinterested. What is needed is **! Orsomething flom Captain Haddock like .#@&! Because that's what weall say when we round a bend at 7o miles an hour and flnd a modernart installation in the middle of the road.

(Guy Browning. 'You talking to me?', The GuardianWeekend, g Junezoor)

Variation

Followr and z above, then ask the class to shout out anywordssuggested by the words you have written up. When you hear wordsthat are in the text, add them to the words already on the blackboard.rv\Ihen you have written, say, twenty more words on the board, carryon with 3 and 4 above.

Predicting meaningsElementary to advanced

10-20 minutes

To encourage students to work out from context the meanings ofunfamiliar words.


Preparation

Select fiom the text that you have chosen eight to ten words that youthink will not be familiar to your students. The sample text below isan example of the kind of textyou might choose.

Procedure

Put up the unfamiliar words on the blackboard.

Tell the class that you have selected the words fiom a text that theyare about to read and give them a briefoutline ofits content.

Ask them to take a sheet of paper and rule it into two columns. Theyshould write dovrn each of the words on the blackboard in the left-hand column, and then in the right-hand column write three or fourother words that are suggested by each left-hand word. Tell them thatthe words they write can be suggested by sound, spelling, possiblemeaning, or in any other way.

Ask the students, in groups of three or four, to compare what theyhave written.

Give out the text. As the students read, encoutage them to work outfrom the contextwhat the unfamiliarwords mean, before checkingwith you or their dictionary.

Magweta

After World War II, Magweta fi.nds itself with a small foreignexchange surplus and rudimentary armed forces and police force.

Sample text


The country's economyis based on agriculture, predominantly smallfarms run by one family, but also including a few large estatesprimarily producing cash crops for export. A civilian politicalgrouping has recently come to power with a policy of rapid industrialdevelopment, basing its appeal on nationalistic sentiment amongstthe people.

To transform the country the ruling group starts to import largequantities of machinery including small amounts of arms, althoughthe cost of the latter is reduced by a grant of military aid from aWestern power. Many of the ruling group have been educated in theWest and have acquired a Western lifestyle; they set the pace bypurchasing cars, radios, and similar luxuries which others in thehigher echelons then seek to acquire. The politicians make patrioticspeeches which justify the expansion and re-equipping of themilitary.

ffier a fewyears the foreign exchange position has seriouslydeteriorated and a loan is obtained from the IMF. Exports areencouraged and a major effort is made to expand the production ofcash crops through the use of improved agricultural techniques.Selective restrictions are placed on imports in order to stimulate localproductionbut arms imports continue to increase.

Although there is a short-term improvement helped by some directforeign investment, a steady decline in the price of cash crop exports,relative to manufactured imports, results in a second application fora loan. This is granted on condition that the currency is devalued andimport restrictions removed. This the government reluctantlyaccedes to.

The result of this policyis the destruction of embryonic localindustry as large foreign concerns, relying heavily on advertising andthe lure ofWestern image, flood the market. Several large tracts ofland, some of which were previously farmed under the traditionalsystem, are bought up by a few individuals and fi.rms and convertedto produce more crops for export. Employment in traditionalagriculture stagnates, and the most vigorous young people leave theland to move into the urban areas where most of the wealth isconcentrated. Rural society declines and shanty towns grow in theshadow of the westernised cities.(Bombs for Breakfast, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, r98r)

1.3 Predicting wordsLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 20-25 minutes

Aims To review areas of vocabulary with which the students alreadyhave some familiarity, so that new items in these areas can moreeasily be'slotted in'and remembered; to stimulate interest ina dul l text.

Materials One copy of the text for each student.


3

4

Sample texts

Preparation q

Choose a text with a fairly narrow and predictable set of vocabulary, byvirtue of its content and/or style. Examples of suitable texts might be:

o advertisements. passages flom coursebooks. news items with a well-known therne (arms talks, earthquakes,

sports reports)o fairy stories and folk tales known to the students (for example,

Cinderella, Washington and the cherrytree, Nasreddin stories)

o instructions, recipes, product descriptions

. popular songs

The sample texts below provide examples.

Procedure

Tell the students that later in the lesson theywill be reading atext/listening to a tapeihearing a story. Give them a very rough idea ofwhat the piece will be about: for example, in the samples below tellthem they are going to read a short article about the stresses ofworking for an international companyihear an Ametican cowboysong about whisky.

Ask the students, in pairs, to predict some of the vocabulary theymight encounter in the text. Tell them to produce a list of eight to tenitems. Allow dictionaries and give assistance when asked.

Ask the students to form larger groups (eight to twelve) and explaintheir lists to one another.

Give out the texts/play the recording/tell the story.

The international commuter

An interview with a 'Euro flyer' who commutes between the UK andthe continent everyweek shows the special challenges. This managergave the following account:

'I feel l can cope with the demands ofbeing in different places allthe time. I have always been able to work strange hours and to jugglea lot of balls in the air, but I can also see that my family needs morereassurance. They find it probably more difficult to cope with myfrantic life. In terms of the company, I would have expected moresupport. They do not realize the effect of short-term internationaltravel, despite being an international company. Ideally, I wouldexpect from my company more flexibility but also more trust. Iwould expect the company to treat me as a mature individual.

'What helped me personally to adapt to short-term internationa-work are the following personality characteristics: independence,selFdiscipline, cultural sensitivity, being open and light-hearted,being positive, being assertive, and not being arrogant but humble.

'My career expectations have completely changed as I now thinkmuch more globally. I think nothing of picking up the phone andarranging a meeting in another country or on another continent,

Pre-text activities | 17

whereas before this itwould never have occurred to me. The onlynegative effect of my frantic lifestyle is that I have become muchmore aggressive and less patient and people have in fact commentedon this. I do believe I have become less tolerant of people who wantto waste time and in such situations mytemper has become shorter.On the other hand, I believe I have developed a deeper and betterunderstanding of people.

'Another area that I need to guard for my own development is theprivate life/professional life distinction. Because I have a highlystressful international job, I find it difficult to switch offandtherefore my lifestyle has become extremely pacey and adrenalin-driven. I now find it quite hard to slow down in my personal life and Iwant to pack in all the social activities in a very short space of time.There is definitely not enough balance in terms of relaxation in mylife. This is obviously a risk in terms of long-term stress but it alsoputs a certain pressure on my personal relationships.'(Eli s abeth Marx. B r e akLng thr ough Culnr e Sho ck London : NicholasBrealey Publishing, 1999)

Rye whiskey

I'11 eat when I'm hungry Jack o' diamonds, Jack o' diamonds,I'll drinkwhen I'm dry; I knowyou of old.

If the hard times don't kill me, You've robbed my poor pocketsI'11lay down and die. Of silver and gold.

Beefsteak when I'm hungry Oh, whiskey, you villainRed liquorwhen I'm dry You've been my downfall.

Greenbacks when I'm hard up, You've kicked me, you've hurt me-And religion when I die. But I love you for all.

They say I drink whiskey, Rye whtskey, rye whiskey,Mymoney's myown; Ryewhiskey,lcry.

All them that don't like me If you don't gwe me rye whtskey,Can leave me alone. Isurelywilldie.

Sometimes I drink whiskey, (Traditional US cowboy song)Sometimes I drink rum;

Sometimes I drink brandy,At other times none.

Variation

A Polish colleague, Malgorzata Szwaj, suggests putting up the firstpart of the title of the piece, and then asking the class to suggest waysof completing it, and what their suggested titles might refer to.

18 | Pre+extactivities

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Examples

1

Name2

John Smith

1.4 Criminal recordsElementary to advanced

30-40 minutes

To focus the students'attention on the ways they associate wordsby meaning or context, and especially on the positive and negativeconnotations words have for them.


Preparation

Choose the keywords from a text.

Procedure

Write up on the blackboard a skeleton'criminal record card' of thetype shown below (column r only)

Fill in an example 'criminal record' as in column z.

Point out that words could also be said to have criminal records,and give a fairly concrete example in column 3:

2

3

7

8

Place of residence 3 Packer Street, West CroydonIftrown associates Peter Tackson, Arthur Baines

Crfuninal record robbery terrorism, kidnapping

J

fatbodycarbolrydrates,cholesterolheart diseaset r o l i n e < <

Write up on the blackboard the list ofwords fiom the textyou havechosen. For the intermediate text overleaf this could be:

land valuebelong rentmarket commodity

Ask the students to make out'criminal record cards' for each of thewords you have written up.

Ask the students to form small groups (three to flve) and tell eachother what they have written and why.

Ask the class to read the text.

As a follow-up, they might like to consider whether they havechanged their minds about any of the words after reading them incontext.

In one group, students produced the following three examples:

Name valuePlace of residence jewellery, safe

commodity rentshop Cambr idge

Known associates money, investment sell, buy landladydirty room, bad foodCriminal record stealing, cheating greed

Pre-textactivit ies | 19

Sample text Land

To us in Africa land was always recognized as belonging to thecommunity. Each individual within our society had a right to the useof the land, because otherwise he could not earn his living and onecannot have the right to life without also having the right to somemeans of sustaining life. But the African's right to land was simplythe right to use it; he had no other right to it, nor did it occur to himto try and claim one. The foreigner introduced a completely differentconcept-the concept of land as a marketable commodity. Accordingto this system, a person could claim a piece of land as his own privatepropertywhether he intended to use it or not. I could take a fewsquare miles of land, call them 'mine', and then go offto the moon.AII I had to do to gain a living from 'my' land was to charge a rent tothe people who wanted to use it. If this piece of land was in an urbanarea I had no need to develop it at all; I could leave it to the fools whowere prepared to develop all the other pieces of land surrounding'my' piece, and in doing so automatically to raise the market value ofmine. Then I could come down from the moon and demand thatthese fools pay me through their noses for the high value of 'my'

land-a value which they themselves had created for me while I wasenjoying myself on the moon! Such a system is not only foreign to us,it is completelywrong.

(Julius K. Nyerere. Ujamaa. Oxford University Press, 1968)

1.5 Ungrammatical genderLevel Intermediate to advanced

Time 3G40 minutes

Aims To encourage students to explore their preconceptions aboutparticular words before meeting them in a context, so that theirreading becomes more directed and critical.

Materials One copy of the text for each student

Preparation

Choose a text and list ro-rz words and phrases in it that the class arelikely to flnd hard. In the following example text these could be, forintermediate learners :

rush-hourperforming

crowded car chases traffic lanes oavements i t up and beg d isplay p loughing equat ion

alleyways

Jam

Procedure

1 Put up your list on the blackboard and ask the students to check (withdictionaries, from each other, or by asking you) that they understandall the words.

2 Ask the students, working individually, to divide the words into maleand female. Tell them that this has nothing to do with ideas ofgrammatical gender or'dictionary meaning' but should express theirownfeelings about the words.


4

5

Example

Sample text

Invite the students to discuss in pairs why they sexed the words as fthey did.

Give out the text for the class to read.

Ask them to discuss in pairs if the context has led them to changetheir minds about any of the words and phrases.

Here is what one student produced:

Male Femalerusn-nour pavemenr

car chases traffic lanessit up and beg crowdedequation alleywaysperforming jam

displayp lough ing

Movie chase

All week people sit in traffi.c jams. Sometimes, on a Friday night, theygo to the movies. On the way they sit in more traffic jams, they missthe first part of the movie because they can't flnd a parking place.

Then they sit in a dark cinema and watch a man drive a car throughrush-hour traffi.c, clear across a city at eighty miles an hour. If theman had turned into a six-foot banana we would say it was a stupidmovie, but a man driving a car through a crowded city at eighty milesan hour we not only accept but remark to each other how brilliantlydone the car chases were.

Nothing can stop the hero in his car. If he meets another car, hedrives round it, or maybe over it, or just possibly through it. He goes

on the pavement, he crosses into opposing traffic lanes, he hurtlesdown empty alleyways. His car can jump, his car can roll over, it ismore like a performing dog than a ton and a half of lifeless metal. Ifyou offered it a biscuit it would probably sit up and beg.

The fact that this display ... was shot at 5.3o a.m. on four successiveSunday mornings, means nothing. The fact that if you actually tried anyof that stufffor real you would not get twenty yards before ploughinginto a bus queue and killing thirry innocent pedestrians, is not part ofthe equation. The fact that Moses may have been able to part the RedSea but could not do more than ten miles an hour in London, doesn'tmatter. Movie car chases remind us of how much we love cars.

\Mhen the movie is over, everybody goes and sits in a jam again.

(Ben Elton. Gridlock. Macdonald, r99r)

Comments

Many teachers might be horrified at the idea of encouraging studentsto associate English words with gender-it's hard enough to stopGaston saylng'When I picked up the cup, she broke.' But quite aparrfrom the grammar, manywords are, for some of us at least, gender-

loaded.


1.5 Look, remember, and complete the setLevel

Time

Aims

Materials

Elementary to advanced

30-40 minutes

To focus the students'attention on how they try to rememberwords, and on how context might influence their memory.

One copy of the text, and one copy of the'word jumble'for eachstudent.

Preparation

From a narrative or descriptive text which you wish the class to read,select z5-3o of those vocabulary items which for you best reflect themood and action of the passage. Set out the words you have chosen asa word jumble like the one below, which is taken from the sampletext, and prepare sufflcient copies for each person in the group.

Procedure

Give out the word jumbles face down to each member of the group.

Tell the class that theywill have r5 seconds (or more if you havechosen a long list) to look at the jumbles, then tell them to turn overtheir sheets and read.

\Mhen the time limit is up, tell the class to turn the jumbles facedown again. Then ask them, working individually, to write out all thewords they can remember.

Then ask them to wdte down any more words they think might fitthe scene or action suggested by the words they have remembered.They could use a different coloured pen for this.

Ask the students to discuss in pairs the words they have writtendown, and the text they imagine contains them.

Give out copies of the text.

1

2

22 I Pre-text activities

Sample text

1 . 7Level

Time

Aims

Materials

\Mhen the students have flnished reading the text, ask them todiscuss in groups of three to flve a)which words they found hard toremember in step 3, and b)which words they think theywill nowremember, andwhy.

Moving house

It took the upheaval of moving house to bring home to me again thatI could not see. This may sound odd. But having Emma I could see:not in a visual sense, obviously, but I knew what was going aroundme as she reacted to her surroundings. All her feelings and moodstransmitted themselves through the harness. I could always tell ifthere was an obstacle ahead because of the way she slowed up andhesitated ever so slightly. I knew when we were passing another dog,because I could feel her looking, and her tail wagging.

But around the house itwas different. Moving in a room, or fromone room to another, a blind person is always mentally planning. Andmoving to a new house, you have to start all over again. Don helpedme move in, and we had a hectic time: he put up curtain rails andchanged electric plugs, while I carried on the endless business ofunpacking. Emma and I collapsed into bed at about two in themorning. In next to no time, it seemed, I heard someone knockingoutside (it was, in fact, Don) and I quickly got out of bed. Then Irealized I could not remember exactlywhere the door was. I felt I wasin a fitted wardrobe. After trying another wall, and coming backagain to the fltted wardrobe, I finally found the right door. Pausingonly to collide with the settee that I had forgotten had been put inthe middle of the living room, I got to the front door. There was noone there. Then I remembered there was a back door as well, whereDon was patiently waiting. It took me a long time to becomeaccustomed to all the different doors, after being used to my flat withits one entrance and fewer rooms.

(Sheila Hocken. Emmq andI. Gollancz, tg77l

Acknowledgements

This idea was suggested by a picture recall exetcise presented byAlanMaley at the IATEFL Conference in Decembet 7979.

Words on a mapIntermediate to advanced

20-30 minutes

To motivate and focus the students' reading of a text by firstexploring the personal connections of some of the words andphrases used.

One copy of the text, and one copy of a map or drawing,for each student.

Pre-text activities I 23

Preparation

Choose a passage and pick out 10-12 words and phrases from it tofocus on. For the passage given below we suggest these:

variationscomponenr+^ nanar r fo

expenmentin one's own voice

to run rntomobi l i tydaring to changejustificationsstandard rules

2

3

Sample text

Choose an image (a map of a well-known country picture of a well-known person, a symbol) and be ready to show it to the students, forexample:

Procedure

Show the class the image and give them the list of words. Ask them todecide individually which words apply in some way to the image.Alternatively, give out copies of the image and ask them to write thewords on it in appropriate positions.

Ask them to compare notes with their neighbours.

Give out copies of the text.

Children at play

Watching children play, I decided that if one presents young childrenwith the components of games, theywill generate games themselves.Children experiment with different ways of doing things, whereasadults get accustomed to believing there is one right and one wrongway to do things. Creating a game is much like discovering how towrite in one's own voice. Making games, writing, building are allways young people can discover that they can put things into theworld, that they can have some control over life.

The other day I ran into some children who were playing their ownversion of chess. The knights jumped two squares at a time, sincethey galloped like horses. The queen, rooks, pawns and bishopsmoved in their regular ways, though the king was given the mobility

24 | Pre-text activit ies

of a queen. \vVhen I came upon the game a young student was tellingthe kids how wrong they were in daring to change the rules of thegame, that theywould never be 'real' chess players if they didn't play

the rules. One of the kids said she didn't want to be a real chess player

but was curious about what happened when you changed the rules.The new game was interesting but the student teacher insisted it

wasn't a game and forced the kids to play by the standard rules.\Mhen I mentioned to him that there were dozens of variations ofchess played throughout the world, he claimed that the onlyjustiflcation for letting children play games in school was toaccustom them to learning to play by the rules. I disagree.

(H.R.Kohl. Wnting, Maths and Games. Methuen, 1977)

Cards on the tableIntermediate to advanced

20-30 minutes

To get the students to clarify their ideas about a topic or attitudebefore reading a text, especially one that will be used as the basisfor discussion or essay-writing.

One copy of the text for each student; one set of 24 word cards foreach group of six to eight students.

Preparation

For the first class: prepare a set ofz4 cards, each bearing a differentword. Choose the words from a fairlywell-defi.ned area of humanconcern, for example:

Things and ideas close to the individual

Sscial concerns and ideas

1 . 8Level

Time

Aims

Materials

d t I an imal enemy boy mind father ch i l d per

)3:'l soul family baby friend heart daughter morner

:,cd stomach group head woman g i r l adu l t blood

-ome scnool neighbourhood NCSI f r iends garoen nouse language

-atron estate conversatron properry land flat socrety country

:ceech hospital institution belongings fami ly wife corrage locality

2 For later classes: choose a passage, preferably one expressing a strongtheme or point ofview, and pick out z4words and/or phrases from it

which typify its content. Prepare a set ofz4 cards, each bearing adifferent word or phrase, for every six to eight students in the class.From the text below we have selected these:


threat scnoor psychiatrist police nursed neighbour

home perpetrated suicide iil teenager mother

statistics social services hospital mental ly snop theft

refuge magistrate community ACCUSCO vandal ism anorexta

2

3

Alternatively, you could dictate the list to your students and get themto prepare their own cards.

Procedure

Lesson 1

Arrange the classroom so that the group(s) ofstudents can standround a table or tables.

Lay out a set ofcards face up in random order on the table(s).

Ask the group(s) to arrange the cards in groups of three (or four, orsix) according to meaning. Stress that a) the group must agreeunanimously and b) all the cards must be used.

Invite the group(s)to justifytheir card affangement. If there is morethan one group, get them to circulate and see what other groups havedone.

Lesson 2

Follow the same procedure as above, but use cards bearing wordsderived from a text. The students may read the text before workingon the cards, afterwards, or both. The exercise can thus be used as alead-in to a text and/or as a way of passing comment on it andstimulating criticism and discussion.

My mother

About fi.ve years before her death my mother ceased her threatsof suicide and embarked on a life of persistent theft. It must havebeen a sweet moment when a shop assistant I had once flned in themagistrate's court for shoplifting asked: "vVhat are you going to doabout your mother's shoplifting?'

The local shops frisked my mother's pockets and shopping bag, butnever bargained for the capacity of directoire knickers with strongelastics. So she still got away with a great deal, although once sheshed onions and carrots as she walked.

'You mustn't do that sort of thing,' said the psychiatrist, now beingchased up by the police and the social services. She was now in deepdepression at being accused ofstealing, and he took her into hospitalfor a course of electro-convulsive therapy. It lifted the depression andshe was quite a h"ppy shoplifter, and the only place she was safe inwas the bank.

Next came illegal entry. She would go into houses and takeanything portable. During the hours of darkness my mother, then 83,fell over a wall between two houses, suffered appalling lacerations,and left a trail of blood back to her home.

Sample text


'Now they will be obliged to take her in!' said the GP. With asuitcase in the boot I drove her to the clinic.

'You have made a mess ofyourself,' said the psychiatrist. I droveher home-my home- and nursed her for six weeks.

With great resilience she became as active as ever, and thecommunity was beset by teenage vandalism. The police visitedschools, and my mother's neighbour, after several bouts of damage,bought a huge Alsatian, which, he assured me, would tear to piecesanyone who touched the car.

Watchers, some time after that, witnessed the car vandalism. Mymother selected the car. went into the house for an instrument, andperpetrated the damage. A frustrated policeman told me: And to capit all, the ruddy dog was helping her!'

'This time she will be taken in,' said both GP and social workers,but she was not. Her last refuge was anorexia neryosa.

'It is time you had some relief,' the psychiatrist told me. Heproposed taking her into the psycho-geriatric ward for three weeks.

Before that time came she had another fall. Lacerated and shocked,she was taken into the local general hospital. The following morningI was told by the ward sister that she was much improved, and eatingher breakfast as if she had not seen food for a month. A few minuteslater she rang back. My mother had choked to death. She had joined

the statistics of those mentally ill who are successfully maintainedwithinthe community.

(Clarice Maizel. A little old thief', The Guardian, 19 December 1983)

Comments

The activity can also be used after reading a text, as a way ofexpressing the reader's understanding or reaction.

Pre-text activities I 27

Working with texts

As in the previous chapter, we are concerned here with the use oftexts as a source of vocabulary and as an aid to learning vocabulary:we are not offering strategies for effi.cient reading. For that reason,we concentrate on shorter texts, which can be worked throughduring a single class session, and have also included activities thatcan be used with oral texts (for example, 2.3, 'Correct the teacher',and 2.r3, 'Be someone else'). The emphasis throughout is on gettingthe students to connect the words and phrases they meet in the textwith what they already know and with their own experience of lifeand language (for example, 2.9,'The words in your past').

The context in which one meets a word or phrase is important inestablishing its exact meaning and connotation, and due attention ispaid to this throughout, but it is also important in terms ofmemorability-an item met in one context maybe remembered, inanother forgotten. This applies also to the 'context of situation'-thesetting (place, people, mood and so on) in which the text isread/heard and discussed. To this end, we have tried to makeactivities that are both interactive and memorable in themselves.

Many of the activities in this chapter include 'sample texts'. Theseare intended purely as examples, to make the instructions moreconcrete and to give the teacher and students a ready-made packagewith which to try out the core ideas. Choosing your own texts, orgetting the students to choose them, will almost always bepreferable. For this reason, we have avoided designing activitiesround specific texts, and in those few cases where instructions relateto specific features of a sample text (for example, 2.r4, 'Email

language': '4 Ask them to make a list of all the two- and three-partverbs.'), it should be a simple matter to substitute a task based on theactual text you are using.

2.1 Customizing a textLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims 1 To focus the students'attention by giving them a specific task,rather than simply telling them to read the text.

2 To encourage them to look closely at words and phrases in context.

28 | Working with texts

Materials

3

4

5

Sample text

1

2

One copy of the text, and one copy of the'Alternative words'sheet, for each student.

Preparation

From the next reading passage you propose to use with your class,select ro-r5 words and phrases to focus on. Write these dovrn. Thenprepare a sheet of z5-4o different words and phrases (not onlysynonyms) fiom which alternatives to those in the text can bechosen. (See the example below, at intermediate level.)

Procedure

Give the students the reading passage to look through.

Slowly say the words and phrases you have chosen while the studentsunderline them in the passage.

Give out the sheet of alternative words and phrases.

Ask the students to select substitutes from the sheet for the wordsunderlined.

In pairs the students look at and discuss each other's choices.

Separation

I was about to start my second year of university and was determinedto be on my own, a fact my mother had refused to accept all summer.One sun-worn August morning I carried my boxes of books down tothe damp coolness of the cement parking garage and loaded up thecar. My mother retreated behind the closed door of her bedroom.Only when I'd carried out the last box and was really leaving did sheemerge. Grimly she prepared a parcel of food, and something waslost between us, irrevocably, the moment that plastic bag passedflom her hand to mine. Over the years, the absurd package-enoughfor a single meal, to stop hunger for a second-was handed to me atthe threshold at the end of each visit. Until it hurt less and less andthe bag was simply like the roll of candy my mother passed to mefrom the front seat on our Sunday drives.

The first night in my own apartment, I lay in bed only a few milesacross town and let my mother's phone calls ring into the dark. Ididn't call for a week, then weeks at a time, though I knew it madethem ill with worry. When I flnally did visit, I saw that, though myparents continued in their separate silences, my defection had giventhem a new intimacy, a new scar. My mother still bent towards mewith confidences, but only in order to withdraw them. At flrst Ithought she was punishing me for her need of me. But my motherwasn't angry. My effiorts to free myself had created a deeper harm.She was afraid. I believe that for moments my mother actuallydistrusted me. She would begin a story and then fall silent. 'It's

nothing that would interest you.' When I protested, she suggested Igo into the living room and join my father.

(Anne Micha els. Fugitiv e Pieces. Bloomsbury Publishing, 997)

Working with texts | 29

I Words and phrases for dictation (in the order they appear in the text):

was determined worryon my own Inilmacyretreated free myselfemerge created a deeper harmirrevocably protestedabsurd

Alternative words sheet

Alternative words and phrases (in random order):

without changing rejection had made up my mind hurt her more

alone come out caused more serious damage useless break away

show herself familiarity for ever attachment ridiculous hid

refused develop withdrew had decided escape permanently

independent anxiety closeness objected fear understanding

Variation

In step 4 above you can, ofcourse, allow the students to substituteitems not on the sheet. This gives them more freedom, but mayalso restrict their choice to what they already'know they know',instead of leading them to explore other possibilities.

Acknowledgements

This derives from an idea proposed by Gail Moraro, an AdultMigrant Education teacher in Melbourne, inESlTeachers' Exchange,December 1983.

Favourite phrasesBeginner to advanced

15-30 minutes

To give students a chance to share their feelings about vocabularyand, perhaps, overcome personal dislikes.

Coursebook.

Procedure

Deal with the coursebook unit text in your normal ways, and thenask the students to work on their own and underline three or fourphrases or words in the text that they specially like.

Ask students to read out a phrase they like and then explain theirreasons (in a beginners' class this will happen in the mother tongue).Ask if anybody else underlined the same phrase. Ask them for theirleasons: it is the students' own preferences, not yours, thatdetermine how deeply they can extract meaning from a text.

Repeat the process with ro-r5 students.

2.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials


2.3Level

Time

Aims 12

Materials

Variation

Ask half the class to underline phrases and words they do not like,while the others underline ones thev do like.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this simplest of techniques fiom Lonny Gold, and haveused it with grumpy teenagers, with illiterate adult immigrants,with English for teachers courses. We haven't had it failyet!Thankyou, Lonny.

Correct the teacherElementary to advanced

25-35 minutes in the first lesson and 45-60 minutes in the second,

To give a task-based focus to listening.To encourage students to build up a wider set of vocabularychoices.

One copy of the text and one word card for each student.

Preparation

Write out an anecdote in short sentences. Pick ro-r5 words fiom itthat you want the students to focus on and write paraphrases ofthem. Substitute your paraphrases for the words in the text, thenwrite out the original words on cards to be given out to the class. Youwill need one card for each student, so ifyou have picked out tenwords and your class is thirty strong, put each word on three cards.

The Sample text provides an example anecdote incorporatingparaphrases.

Procedure

Lesson 1

Read the story once through so the students get the outline of it.

Give out the cards to the students. Give them a chance to check thatthey know the meaning of the words on them.

Tell the class that you are going to read the story again, but that thistime they should stop you as soon as they hear a paraphrase of a wordthey have on their cards. After stopping you they are to repeat yoursentence, substituting the word on their card for yours.

Read through the story again.

Lesson 2

Once your students have done two or three exercises like the oneabove, ask them to produce anecdotes oftheir own:

Put the students in groups ofthree and ask each group to write ananecdote of their own.

1

2


t 2 Ask the groups to prepare 6-rz paraphrases of interesting words intheir texts and to put these on cards or slips ofpaper.

3 Ask each group of three to join with another group.

4 Within each pair of groups, ask one member of group A to readher/his group anecdote slowly to the members of group B. The cardsshould then be given out to the members of B and the activityproceeds as in the flrst class (above).

5 Repeat the activity, using group B's anecdote.

Sample text He was a hefty man in his mid-fifties. He had a large stomqchwhichlooked just right behind the wheel of his 3o-ton lorry.

One day, driving along abendy country road, he saw a bridge overthe road ahead of him. 'Maximum height: r4ft' he read onthenohce.

He stopped and got out. He looked from his lorry to the bridge,scratching his he a d thoughtfully .

'My lorry's t4feettinch,' he thought to himself, 'never get throughthere.'

fust at tfiat moment a motor-bike pohceman roared up and askedwhatthe oroblemwas.

'Can't get through,' the trucker told him.'Easy,' said the other. Just letyour tyres down an inch or two and

have them re-inflated on the other side.'The driver thought about this attentively for several minutes. 'No

use,' he saidweighnly, 'it's at the top it won't get through, not at thebottom.'

The original words are put on cards for the students:

Paraphrases in text Original words on cardssromach paunchlorry rrucKbendy twistingnotice stgnstopped pulled uPgot out of climbed down fromthoughtfully pensivelYpoliceman coporoblem troublere-inflated PumPed uP againattentively carefullYweightily ponderously

Variation

With beginners and very elementary students, give out copies of thetext, then simply dictate some words extracted from it: they shouldunderline the words they hear. In a later class, mix in a fewparaphrases ofwords or phrases in the passage.

Acknowledgements

We owe this activity to Lou Spaventa.


2.4Level

Time

Aims

Materials

2 .5Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Deleting Words 4

Post-beginner to advanced

15-20 minutes

To focus on whether a word is necessary or not as a way ofexploring its meaning in context.

Coursebook.

Procedure

Ask the students to re-read a passage fi:om the coursebook two orthree units back.

Tell them that texts are often improved and given more impact bycutting words out. Ask them to underline ro-u words in the passagethat they feel can usefully go, noting any grammatical changes thatmight also be necessary. The students work on this task in pairs.

Group the students in sixes to read their reduced version ofthepassage.

Share with the class the words you think are best left out and brieflyexplain why. Give them an opportunity to (dis)agree with you.

Variation

Working individually, students write a short composition. They thenpair offand swap compositions. StudentA deletes all the unnecessarywords in B's work and vice versa. They come back together to discussthe deletions.

Marginal ialntermediate to advanced

20-45 minutes, depending on the texts chosen.

To get students to look closely at vocabulary in context, and toexpress their own understandings of specific meanings andconnotations.

A different text for each group of students: five copies of each text.

Preparation

Choose a number of short but complete texts: poems are ideal. Youwill need a different text for each group of students.

Make copies of each text: one for each member of the group plus oneadditional copy.

Procedure

Ask the students to form groups of four members. Make sure eachgroup has access to at least one dictionary.

Give one copy ofthe flrst text to group A, one copy ofthe second textto group B, and so on.


I Tell the students to read and discuss their text within the group. Sayyou are available to answer simple questions about language, but youwould prefer them to flnd out from each other or from thedictionary.

After ten minutes, ask each group to divide up thefu text so that eachmember chooses a different word or phrase from it. Not everywordor phrase in the text need be chosen.

Give out the remaining copies of the texts, so that each student hashisiher own copy.

Ask the students to underline, on their own copies, the word orphrase theyhave chosen, and then, in the margin, to make acomment on it. Explain that this can take any form they like: aparaphrase, an example sentence to show how it can be used, aresponse or criticism, a better alternative, even a picture.

Tell the students to circulate their texts around the group and to readeach other's'marginalia'.

Variation

The same activity works well with texts generated by the studentsthemselves.

Follow-up'Publication' is an excellent way to encourage students to respect andenjoyboth their own work and that of others:

Put all the marginalia for each text on a sheet of paper together withthe original text and make enough copies for the whole class to read.

If you and your students are familiar with, and have access to,computers and browser software, make a simple website for eachtext: the original text should be on one page (or as the main frame ofa page) with each selected word or phrase made into a link and thecomments to it placed in a separate page (or frame) to be displayedwhen the link is clicked.

Hunt the misfitslntermediate to advanced

20-35 minutes

To develop students'critical awareness of meanings in context in alight-hearted way.

One copy of the original text and one copy of the doctored text foreach student.

Preparation

Choose a short passage you think will be easy for your students.Change some of the words in it so that it no longer makes propersense.

2.6Level

Time

Aims

Materials


In class you will need copies of both the original passage and the l[doctored one. (See the Sample texts below. For the second, you willneed to make your own doctored version.)

Procedure

Give the students a copy each ofthe doctored text and ask them toread it. Don't tell them what you have done to the text-let it dawnon them. Eventually one or more students will point out there issomething wrong, and you can ask them to make corrections.'vVhen they have corrected as much as they can, ask them to checkeach other's work.

Give out the undoctored passage.

Follow-up

\Mhen the students have done two or three editing exercises like theone above, give them an undoctored text and invite them to doctor it:some students take even more pleasure in constructing the textsthan in'correcting' them.

Choose for this purpose a text that presents few comprehensionproblems and make sure that the students have dictionaries to hand.Above all, the students must know enough to feel the text is withintheir grasp. (The text 'Viaduct Rescue' below would be appropriatefor a fairly advanced group.)

Variation

Put up the following sentence on the blackboard and invite the classto correct it:

Ma:no is notholy bad.

Now put up this sentence and invite them to introduce a similar,creative mistake:

Peter ismybestfriend.

Ask them, in small groups, to deform other simple sentences, forexample,

Londonis the capital of England.EJena asked me to feed the cats.There's no money inthebank.


I Sample texts

Gharlie

(The Times, 18 February 1980)

Gharlie Gairolidies aged 70

(The Times, 18 FebruarY 1980)

(The Guardian, 23 FebruarY 1980)

l5 | Working with texts

rescue

2.7Level

Time

Aims

Materials

3

Sample text

1

2

Ghost definit ions 4

Elementary to intermediate

20 minutes

To focus on the exact meanings of lexical items, and how they canbe expressed by definitions or paraphrases.


Preparation

Choose a text, and underline eight to ten words and phrases in it.Then, at the foot of the page, write deflnitions of these words, in noparticular order, togetherwith deflnitions of two to four otherwordsnot in the text, but related to the overall context. Make one copy ofthe annotated text for each student in the class. (See the Sample textbelow.)

Procedure

Explain howyou prepared the deflnitions.

Give out the text, and ask the students to match the definitions to theunderlined words, and then to find words to suit the remainingdeflnitions.

Ask them to look at the work of two or three other students inthe class.

Crossing Morecambe Bay

There is no route or path which can be taken regularly, in safety, overthe sands of Morecambe Bay. In November t963, sixteen RoyalMarines on a route march from Hest Bank to Barrow-in-Furnessnearly got themselves into serious trouble before I rushed out andput them back on to a safe course. They had started out one hourbefore I had suggested, and so were heading straight for deep water.Then there was a lad who tried to cross the bay on a bicycle, but soonfound how hopeless it was when he had to be rescued in mid-channel.Changes

"t" to dirr"tr" and so frequent. Each tide shillg the sand in

one direction or another, and along the coast, quite large chunks ofrock can be moved great distances. Even to someone withexperience, such conditions are not always easily predicted.

(Cedric Robinson. SandPilotofMorecambeBay. David & Charles, r98o)

a young manoftenthick, sol id lumps

half-way across the waterof different kindskept away from

way taken from one place moving in a particular directionto another changes the Position of

natural stream of water at evenly-spaced intervalslong journey on foot made known in advance

by soldiers in training

Workino with texts | 37

I 2.8 Patchwork textLevel

Time

Aims

Materials


2040 minutes

To scan and re-contextualize text fragments.A collection of 'source texts'(see below).

Preparation

None, except to ensure that you have sufficient copies of the 'source

texts'to be used (coursebooks, anthologies, handouts, newspapercuttings, etc.).

Procedure

Ask the students, singly or in groups of two to four, to riffIe throughthe source texts and select lines or shorter fragments of text. Fromthese they should construct the opening paragraph of a novel orshort story.

Variation 1

More advanced students can construct their texts from poetryanthologies; beginners to lower-intermediate students could usefragments of coursebooks, readers, pattern sentences, coursehandouts, etc.

Variation 2

There is a vast body of text, including poetry now available on theInternet. You or your students could use a search engine such asGoogle to flnd sources of favourite authors or themes, or go directlyto one of the anthology sites (for example, the University ofvirginia'shttp://wwwbartleby.com ).

Variation 3

The activity also works using texts written by the studentsthemselves.

Comments

This is both a reading and a writing (or at least an editing) exercise,but is included here because it depends crucially on the way werecognize, interpret, and respond to speciflc words and phrases. Inchoosing a fragment of text, the student is not only deciding on itsmeaning in a particular context, but is reviewing its potentialmeanings in other contexts. In assembling the 'patchwork text', thestudent is re-contextualizing the fragments in new and, we hope,creative ways.

Acknowledgements

This activity was suggested by a competition in the New Statesman.


2.9 The words in your pastLevel

Time

Aims

Materials

Sample text


20-30 minutes

To make new vocabulary memorable by linking it to importantmemories in the students'own lives.


Preparation

Choose and make copies of an emotionally charged text, like theSample text below. Only do this exercise in a group where there isplenty of mutual trust.

Procedure

Give out copies of the text, and ask the students to pick out six orseven emotionally strongwords and phrases. In the Sample text, askthem to look at all those the writer uses to describe the way Pruetreats her father: exploit I victimize I talce advantage of I play thelitrle girl I seehow far one can go I indulge.

Ask them to think back to a period of their lives in which these wordsmight flt, or for which they would be usefully descriptive.

Then ask the students to explain to one another, in pairs, how thewords they have chosen flt or describe the period they have beenthinking of.

Daddy

Prue, puttingthe phone down, thought: I exploithim, I knowl do. Orvictimize him even. Now Mummy's different: hearing her voice justnowthere was no tug-of-war. Perhaps she prefers the boys, alwaysdid; or maybe she just accepts me as another grown-up woman. ButDaddy I can take advantage of, even more than I used to. I simplycan't avoid it: an irresistible impulse to playthe little girl, to see howfar I can go, to what length of selFindulgence he will allow me tosink. Gavin won't. Gavin won't put up with my nonsense. It simplydoesn't appeal to him. He's tough.

It's extraordinary how quickly Daddy's forgiven me. Amazing,when I remember how angry he was. But he hasn't forgiven Gavin.Not at all. He can't even mention his name. I'm rather glad. That'swrong of me, I know. I should want tlem to like each other, but Idon't, not if I'm really honest, and I always am, to myself. They bothlove me: that's enough. I don't really need them to love each other aswell. And if they did it might somehow diminish their love for me. Imight not be quite such a special person for either of them if theydrew together over me. They might see me too clearly. Or they mightlike each other too much, and where would I be then? Squeezed outby all those things men like to talk about, whatever they are, whenthey're alone. It's bad enough when Gavin's friends come round.

(Andrea Newman. ABouquet ofBarbedWire. Triton Books, r.969)

r

Workino with texts | 39

I Variation

Instead of asking the class simply to think back, ask them to draw alife line, and to label it first with dates and events, as in the examplebelow, then with the words they have chosen from the passage.

1 955 1962 1966 1974 etc.Example lifeline 1949

went to live startedwi th Grandma 'b ig school '

hitch-hiked in got married met MarioDenmark &Germany

2.1O Towards learning a text by heart (a)

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Beginner to advanced

1540 minutes, depending on the length of the text.

To encourage students to remember contexts as well as singlewords and phrases.

One copy for the text for each student.

Preparation

Choose and prepare copies of a short text that you would like yourstudents to learn by heart. Alternatively, choose a suitable sectionfrom their coursebook.

Procedure

Pair the students. Tell them that one is A and the other B. Make surethat everyone has a copy of the text to be worked on, then ask themto change places so that no one is sitting next to their partner.

Ask all the As to copy out the text in this manner: they leave a blankfor the fi.rst word, they write the second word, they leave a blank forthe third and write the fourth, etc. Tell them to include anypunctuation and to leave blanks ofroughly the right length for eachword left out.

Ask all the Bs to copy out the text but leaving out the even words andwriting in the odd words, r, 3, 5, etc.

lVhen they have finished writing, tell them to turn face-down or putaway the original text and to exchange what they have written withtheir partners and, still sitting apart, to flll in the blanks.

Tell everyone to put away what they have written. Bring a student tothe board to write out the whole text fiom memory helped by therest of the class. Do not intervene if mistakes go up on the board. Atthe end ofthe exercise get one student to read out the original textwhile the 'secretary' coffects what is on the board.


2.11 Towards learning a text by heart (b)

Comments 4Current EFL methodology rarely encourages the student to learn textby heart, and yet, for some learners, this can be a happy andrewarding activity. Some texts (prose as well as poetry and song) havea music and sonority that make tJem a pleasure to recite, whileothers, suitably chosen, can constitute a valuable inner resource forvocabulary learning. Recent work in the areas of 'lexical grammar','above-the-word lexis', collocations, etc. has underlined the need forlearners to remember and recall much larger'chunks' of languagethan tJ.e single word.

Level

Time

Aims

Materials


15-30 minutes

To encourage students to remember contexts as well as singlewords and phrases.

A blackboard or whiteboard is essential.

Preparation

Choose a short text that you would like your students to learn byheart. Alternatively, choose a suitable section from their coursebook.Before the lesson starts, put the text up on the board. NB An overheadprojector or flip-chart will not work for this activity.

Procedure

Ask a student to read the text on the board aloud to class. Silentlyunderline any bits she mispronounced and ask her to re-read them.Ask a second student to read the paragraph aloud.

Rub out three or four words or phrases on different lines. Ask anotherstudent to read out the whole text, including tJre words that are nolonger there.

Rub out another three or four words and again ask for a reading ofthe whole text. Continue until there are onlv a few isolated words leftonthe board.

Comments

Rub out first the words and phrases you want the students toconcentrate on most.


I 2.12 Cross-associationsLevel

Time

Aims

Materials

2

3

4

Example


15-25 minutes

To use creative word-association as an aid to memory'


Preparation

Choose and make copies of a short text. An example will be foundbelow.

Procedure

Ask the students to read through the text and note down any wordswhich they don't know or which interest them. Ask them to find outmeanings, uses, etc. ofthe words.

Ask the group to build up a list of professions on the blackboard.

The students associate, in any way they wish, the words they havechosen with the professions.

Invite them in pairs to explain to each other their associations.

The following list of professions was produced by one group:

electrician joiner accountant bus-driver bakerclergyman foreman butcher teacher apprenticebusinessman socialworker farmer fisherman politician

After reading the text below the group formed the following associations:

beach, sand, sea teacher (because the beach is the best place forlessons)

paddock

squatting

horizon

farmer (connection with cattle)butcher

electrician (from the position these peoplejoiner often have to work in)

polit ician (because you can't see what is over thehorizon, and you don't know the f utureyou wil l get if a polit ician is elected)

Sample text Goblins

I never had clean beach sand to play on when I was a kid' In fact

never saw the sea before I was nine, so I used to build things out of

mud. I can see myself now squatting in a corner of the big paddock,

small and thin and brown in my patched khaki pants and shirt, lost

in the creation of a remembered town. I always built in this same

place, shapingwalls of mud, doors and roofs ofbark, and all around

among untidy lumps of mud I made tower things flom sticks above

holes in the ground. In my mind's eye the houses were all painted

dazzling white, and the big hotel on the corner was red brick with a

cast iron balcony and corrugated iron roof. The other things were

mines and slag heaps and pitheads, and stretching away from them

42 | Workinq with texts

I would see the spare desert scrub shimmering to a flat horizon andthe whole land panting with heat under a bleached blue sky.

When the other kids found me they used to laugh and break up mymining town. Then I began building towns full of white goblins and Istamped them into the ground in a rage.

(Colin Johns on. WiId Cat Falling. Angus and Robertson, 1965)

Variation

Other categories may be used to build the list of associations, forexample, furniture (chair, table, settee, wardrobe, ...), landscapefeatures (hill, valley, wood, field, river, ...), famous people, people inthe group itself.

Be someone elselntermediate to advanced

30-40 minutes

To get students thinking about words and phrases in theircultural/historical context.


Preparation

Choose and make copies of a short text that is fairlyrich in modernvocabulary and deals with a contemporary subject, as in the examplebelow

Procedure

Ask the students to read through the text and note down words thatthey would consider particularly relevant to today's world.

Ask each student to select for her/himself a historical role (forexample, an r8th-century peasant, an Egyptian Pharaoh, his/herown grandmother/father) and to spend a few minutes 'tlinking into'the role.

Ask the students to form pairs. One student should then read outhis/her list of words one by one to the partner, who free-associateswith the words as if s/he were the historical person chosen. Afterthis the student then explains whythese things came to mind.

The students then reverse roles and repeat the exercise.

2 . 1 3Level

Time

Aims

Materials


Example From the text below, one student produced the list:

firemen drive-thru restaurantdetectives taped off forensic

His partner, seeing himself as a 16th-century peasant, produced the

followino associations.

car breathing apparatuscorporate manager

f iremendrive-thrurestaurantcar

men who start fires?some kind of gate?a n I n n

no toea

breathing apparatus clearly lungs, but why say so?detectivestaped offforensiccorporaremanager

no idearoped offsomething to do with the lawbodysome kind of official, perhaps a bail iff?

Sample text Drive-thru destroyed by inferno

TWo flremen narrowly escaped injury while tackling a blaze thatgutted the McDonald's drive-thru restaurant on the Sturry Road in

Canterbury on Monday.Nearly 3o flremen from Canterbury Sturry Whitstable and

Faversham were called to the scene shortly after 3 am and battled toget the blaze under control.

It is believed that a car parked in the drive-thru section was set

alight and the fire spread to the building via a canopy. Flames quickly

spread through the roofvoid, destroying the centre ofthe building.Leading fireman Keith Dabson said two firemen who had gone into

the buitding with breathing apparatus came out seconds before the

roofcollaPsed.'We could see the flames spreading into the restaurant and as we

pulled the men out the roof fell down,' he said.'If we hadn't pulled them out at that moment they could have been

cut offand injured. We are trained to look for flashovers. There is nopoint in losing a life trying to save a building.'

Mr Dabson said that the restaurant was smoke-logged whenfiremen arrived and within zo minutes the building was ablaze.

'The fire went up the walls into the eaves and whistled through the

roofvoid,'he said.Detectives are investigating the suspected arson attack. The area

has been taped offand forensic experts and flre investigators were

examining the scene on MondaY.Robert Parker, corporate affairs manager for McDonald's, said the

company would have a better idea of how much rebuilding was

necessary once its construction manager had assessed the damage.

(KentMessenger, 15 March zooz)

Variation

You can also use this activity with audio recordings or live

storytelling.


2.14 Email languageLevel

Time

Aims

Materials

7

email text

U pper-intermediate to advanced

40-50 minutes

To get students to learn from 'informal', uncorrected native-speaker texts.

A copy for each student of the email text below.

Preparation

Make a copy for each student of the email text below. Alternatively,choose and make copies of an email you have received, and make anynecessary changes or additions to Steps 3 and 4.

Procedure

Give out the text below and ask the students to read it throughquickly and then to write a three-sentence reaction to it. Tell themyou will be available to help with unknown words and expressions.

Tell the students to underline all the features that make this piece ofwriting feel like an oral text. Then ask tJ.em to underline (in adifferent colour) all the features that come from the 'writing' frameofmind.

Ask them to copy out all the features of the text that indicate the ageand gender of the writer.

Ask them to make a list of all the two- and three-part verbs.

Ask them to list flve to six phrases or stretches of language that theywould feel happyusing in their ownway of speaking/writing English.

Group tfie students in fours to share their first impressions (asexpressed in the three sentences they wrote in Step r), their laterimpressions, and their lists.

Round offthe lessonwithvour own comments on the hardertasksabove.

Well. Here's the travelogue

Was firll of merrybable when I arrived.; managed to recognise my auntand cousin very happily, exclaimed several times how strange it was tobe here, and thought my Spanish was going brilliantly until I realisedso far everything I d said had been practised to myself on the plane.After a couple of hours my invention sadly gave out, as did mygrarnmar, and I fell asleep. But everybody in Santiago seemed very welland jolly and I had a funtime tryingto followthe latest going on in'Market of Love' (or something ), the smash-hit soap opera. And tryingto help my cousion Daniel with his biology revision. And watchingNellyFurtado onMTV

That was Wednesday. Thursday morning I waved everyone offto schooland went offwith Ximena, (my aunt) to the bus station ( hooray, mytrusty Rough Guide meant I knoewwhich one to go to and she didn't!)

4

5

Workingwithtexts 145

to get to Coquimbo, about six horus north of Santiago. Committed anabominable error on the way, though: rnanaged to leave my cash cardin the machine until some very angry bleeping called us back... Ximenanot very impressed at all and my desperate attempts to laugh it off/claim it had never happened before ( er...) in suitably casualcomfortably complicitous Spanish failed miserably due to poverty ofSpanish vocabulary. I think I impressed her with my diziness though.Managed not to ask her not to tell my mum. Just.

The bus was absolutely fantastic. Chile is a brilliant country: 'poor'

enough to be cheap, rich enough to make travelling massivelyenjoyable. My six hour journey largely consisted of me chuckling tomyself at the bed-like qualities of my chair and the enornous footrestin front, nad the several miles of legroom provided for a mere 5quid...and just when I was thinking perhaps only bringing water withme was a bit stupid, the conductor turned up with my lunch. TWo rolls,rice and huge chicken nugget, and oh my word,, hoiw tasty is thechicken here?... even a plastic-style nugget tastes just like a good roastchicken smells. I so nearlylaughed out loud.

Comments

Emails (even more than handwritten letters) share characteristics ofboth written and spoken language, and many can be seen as valuablerecords of native speakers'informal, uncorrected style, whichstudents can learn from as they can learn from overheardconversations. It must be stressed that there is no particular 'email

style' -emails varyfrom the formal office memorandum to theelectronic equivalent ofa note stuck on the fridge. Daniela passed

five A-level exams, each with grade A, and went on to study at OxfordUniversity. The email above, writtenwhen she was zo, shows just oneof her manywriting styles.

In addition to personally addressed emails, there are many public

newsgroups and special-interest'lists' accessible through theInternet, the aim ofwhich is to exchange news andviews withothers. To receive and send messages via a newsgroup, you can eitheruse a 'newsreader' (usuallypart ofyour email software) to connectwith a news server-many Internet Service Providers (Isrs) run theirown news servers, from which you can download a list of availablenewsgroups-or you can search, read, and send messages with your

web browservia http://wmv.google.com/groups . 'Lists' are privategroups to which one subscribes by sending an email request to anautomatic list-server or to the human who runs the list: a very good'list of lists' can be found on the web at http://www.liszt.com or bysending a blank email to [email protected] .

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Daniela Cammack for the email text.


Writ ing activit ies

Short writing tasks form part of many of the activities in this book.Writing is not only a useful skill in itselfl it can be used in theclassroom for a number of purposes: to focus thought, to provide aninterval of privary, to share ideas quickly, and so on. Visually orientedstudents may need the written shape of a word before they can learnit, while those who are stronglykinaesthetic (see Chapter 6) maybeneflt from the simple physical process, especiallywhen asked tomake wall-charts or take notes at the blackboard.

The activities in this chapter show a spectrum of writing tasks,from 3.2,

'The oracle', where writing is simply a convenient way ofgathering the questions to be used, through 3.4,

'Expanding asentence', which aims to widen vocabulary by looking at certainrhetorical features of written English, to more creative writing in 3.r,'Invisible writing'.

3.1 Invisible wri t ingLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 10-20 minutes

Aims To get students to reflect on and use'known'vocabulary, and tolearn from each other by reading and discussing what others havewritten.

Procedure

1 Ask the students to sit in pairs. Each student should have a pen and ablank sheet ofpaper.

2 Tell the students to look at their sheet of paper and to imagine thatthey have already written a text on it of about roo words. You may saythat this can be any kind of text-essay, description, letter, etc.-oryou can specify a particular kind oftext.

3 Ask the students to begin by picturing the whole text on the page,and to draw a rectangle around it. They should then try to make outindividual words in the text, and as these become clear, they shouldwrite these words, and only these words, in exactly the positions theyoccupy on the page. Ask them to choose words that are widelyseparated in the text.

4 Tell them to stop when they have written six or seven words.

Writing activities | 47

Get the members of each pair to exchange their pieces of paper and,working alone, to write out the whole text as they imagine theirpartner would have written it. Tell them they have ten minutes to dothis. (It may help some students empathize with their partner if theyalso attempt to imitate their handwriting.)

Give the students a further five to ten minutes to exchange theirpapers again and to read and discuss what their partner has writtenfor them.

Follow-up

The exercise is repeatable, and indeed students maybenefit fromexperimentingwith different partners, different types oftext (seeVariation r below), and different ways of selecting the initial six orsevenwords.

Variation 1

Randomlypairyour students and make sure the paired students arenot sitting next to each other.

Each person takes a moment to mentally prepare a one-page letter totheir partner. They think about tfie beginning of the letter, themiddle, and the ending. Some students will want to 'say' the letter tothemselves internally.

They then take a clean piece of paper and write down six to ten keywords on the blank page, placing them where they would come inthe text.

They exchange papers with their partner, then go back to their seatsand write the letter addressed to themselves.

The partners meet up and compare what they have written.

Variation 2

This type ofexercise can also be done by individual students: eachstudent imagines their own text, writes in six or seven words, andthen completes the text. In this case, though the mechanics arealmost the same, the character of the exercise is very different: mostimportantly, the text, once written, lacks a motivated reader. Wehave found this solo version useful, however, for particular studentswho 'can't flnd anything to write' or who genuinely suffer fromwriter's block.

Comments

This activity encourages students to write in the knowledge that theyhave at least one interestedreader. To write with no expectation ofbeing read, other than by the teacher, can be highly demotivating'

48 | Writing activit ies

3.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials

The oracleLower-intermediate to advanced

15-20 minutes

To practise newly learnt vocabulary in a wide range of contexts andsituations.

Make sure you have plenty of slips of paper (approximately 4cm x12cm): you will need at least twice as many as there are students inthe class. Also make sure you have two empty containers in class-cardboard boxes, waste-paper bins, even large hats will do.

Procedure

Give out two blank slips of paper to each student.

Tell the students to think of a question, either personal or moregeneral, and to write it on one of their blank slips, for example, 'Shall

I get married this year?', 'Will there be a war in the Middle East againsoon?' Collect up the completed slips and put them in Container r.

Now tell the students to think of an English word that they haverecently learned, and to write it on their second blank slip. Collectthese and put them in Container z.

Pass the two containers round the group, telling the students to closetheir eyes and take one slip at random from each container. (If theyhappen to take their own slips, it doesn't matter.)

In groups offour to eight, each student in turn should read out firsttheir question slip and then the word on the other slip, and discusshow the word might be interpreted as an answer, by the 'oracle', tothe question. For example, if, to the question 'Shall I be rich?', theoracle replies, 'global warming', the questioner might interpret theanswer as 'Yes, ifyou stop smoking'.

Comments

This is a writing exercise in the sense that t}le students put theirquestions in written form, but not perhaps in the sense of'composing written discourse'. We believe that activities such as thiscan be a great help in overcoming many students' fears ofcommitting themselves to paper.

1

2

3.3 Adding words to a storyLevel Elementary to intermediate

Time 30-40 minutes

Aims To give the students an opportunity to start writing creativelywithin a safe, controlled frame.

Preparation

Choose, or make up, a very short story and write it out as four to eightsentences. Alternatively, use the lower-intermediate example below.

Writing activit ies | 49

I

3.4Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Procedure

Dictate:Thiswas avillagewith [sracn] walls and [snecE] roofs.

Ask the students to add a few words in each of the spaces.

Dictate:It had not r aine d for marry, many months. S oon the w ells w ould run dry.The villagers desperately needed lsytcnl.

Ask the students to complete the sentence with two or more words.

Dictate:The men of the village w ent to the [s rec n ] mosEue to pr ay for r ain. Andnorainfell.

Ask the students to add two or more words in the space left.

4 Dictate:The w omen of the village w ent to the I s ra c r - a dd the s ame words aslast timel mo s que to pr ay f or the r ain clouds t o come. O ne little girl st ay e dathome. And no rain fell.

Ask the students to draw a quick sketch of the little girl they imagineand to add the caption: She was...+ three words.

Dictate:The next day the little gtfl w ent to the [s rac r ] mosque on her own to pr ay

for rain. She tookher grandfather's umbrella.

Tell the students to end the story in not more than three words.

Group the students in threes. In turn they read their stories to eachother.

Put up walls, roofs, mosque, etc. on the board.Get the students to come up and write the words they used to qualifythese nouns on the board under each heading.

Ask students to copyinto their notebooks the newwords theytake alikingto.

Expanding a sentenceLower-intermediate to advanced

10-1 5 minutes for each worksheet.

To give the students an opportunity to start writing creativelywithin a safe, controlled frame.

One copy for each student of the Worksheet + Example answers.

Preparation

Prepare and make copies of a worksheet. An example is providedbelow, but you may find it more useful to write your own, or usesentences drawn from your coursebook or created by you or yourstudents.

S0 | writing activities

Procedure

Give out copies of the worksheet and the Example answers and askthe students to notice the expansion ofthe original sentences on theanswer sheets. Explain, if necessary tlat there are three kinds ofexpansion in the examples: sequences of action, restatements (thesame or similar in otherwords), and inserted comments.

Ask your students to expand these sentences in a similar way:o He picked up his hat.o The sky is deep blue.o Not really.. D'you think you possibly could?. The light faded.o Yeah, I really feel cold.o Cut uo the tomatoes.r The tree is not what you think.

Group the students in sixes to compare theirwork. Ask each group toput two or three oftheir best sentences up on the board.

Worksheet1 He got up.

2 He leaned over.

3 He smi led .

4 He was a writer.

5 We went to a restaurant in Greek Street.

Example answers

1 He got up.He got up,yawned,and stretched.He got up,opened the curtains,and looked outocrossthe bay.

2 He leaned over.He leaned over, clutched his side,and fell dead on the floor.He leaned over,picked upthe book,ondthrew itonthefire.

3 He smi led .He smiled,ortried to smile,or startedto smilebutthoughtbetter of it.

4 He was a writer.He was a writer,a scribbler,a pen-pusher.He was a writer, a man of words, not a man of deeds.Hewas,or had been,or is saidtohave been,awriter.

5 We went to a restaurant in Greek Street.We went to a restaurant, a small place,iust four tables,in Greek Street.

Photocopiable @ Oxford University Press

Writing activities | 51

Bi l ingual texts and act iv i t ies

Translation is a special skill, and one that many otherwise competentusers of a second language, includingbilinguals, flnd difficult. It hasbeen attacked as a teaching tool for many decades, not least forproducing generations of students who may know a great deal about alanguage, but who cannot use it effectively.

To extend this criticism to any :use of the mother tongue in class,however, seems to us both unjustified and unrealistic. No amount ofurgmg students to leave their mother tongue outside the classroomdoor will prevent them, in the privacy of their own thoughts, fromcomparing, contrasting, and translating languages, or, despite ourbest efforts, fiom making target-language errors in the process. A farbetter approach, we think, is to accept that for most students themother tongue is the 'natural'language of expression, and to designexercises that draw on the wealth of experience of life and languagethat has come to them through the language theywere born into.

This does not mean a return to endless. unmotivated translation.The activities in this chapter include reflective and interactiveexercises that aim to turn mother-tongue experience into target-language competence.

Most of the activities that follow are best suited to classes thatshare a common mother tongue. Those that can be used or adaptedfor use in polyglot groups are so marked.

Level

Time

Aims

4,1 Sensory vocabulary choicesLower-intermediate to advanced

40-50 minutes

To make target-language words more memorable by evokingstrong personal associations through the mother tongue. Thestudents are encouraged to use all their senses in this.

Procedure

Ask the students to think of a place they really like, be it their home,someone else's house, or a place outdoors, and the season, the time ofday, the weather, etc. in which they like it best.

52 | Bil ingual texts and activit ies

4.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Ask them to write a list of ten mother-tongue words or phrases thatdescribe the smells of the place; ten to describethe sounds of the place;ten to describe the way the place look; and ten to evoke t}l'e feelingtheplace gives them.

Group the students in fours, with dictionaries, to translate the wordsinto English. They help each other and you help them.

Ask each student to write a free description of this place in Englishmixing sensory impressions.

Group the learners in sixes: t1ey read their pieces to each other.

Changing the order of the words

Elementary to upper-intermediate

15-20 minutes

To give students guided practice in contrastive translation.

One worksheet for each student.

Preparation

Choose six to eight sentences from a unit later in your coursebookthan the pointyou are at now. (See Comments below.) Translate thesentences into the students' mother tongue. Write each of theEnglish sentences as jumbled strings of words.

Example

Wir milssenmorgen sehr frilh aufstehen.early up tomorrow have very to we get

Copythe page ofjumbled strings so each pair of students can have asheet. Leave plenty of space under each line ofjumbledwords.

Procedure

Give out the sheet ofjumbled words to each pair of students.

Tell the students that you are going to read the first sentence in theirmother tongue and they are to write it under the first English stringofwords as a coherent English sentence with correct word order.Explain that they need to use all the words in the string.

Continue this way until they have translated all the sentences.

Ask different students to read out their translations. Give feedback.

Comments

In this and other activities we suggest using text from a coursebookunit that the students will not be working on until later in the course.There at least two good reasons for this:

It enables you to 'stretch'the students while still remainingwithinthe overall curriculum for the year.

It gives the students an idea of where they are going: coursebooks arenecessarily linear, but learning a language is not.

1

2

3

4

Bilingual texts and activit ies | 53

I 4,3 Focusing on diff icultyLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 40-50 minutes

Aims To provoke contrastive awareness of vocabulary in two languages.

Materials One copy of the text for each student.

Preparation

Choose and make copies of a short text. The Sample text is an exampleofwhat would be appropriate at an upper-intermediate level.

Procedure

1 Put the students in pairs, then give one copy ofthe text you havechosen to each pair. (This encourages co-operation.) Tell them to workwith their partner and decide which words, phrases, or sense-groupsin the English text are hard to render into their mother tongue.

2 Ask different pairs to tell the whole group which phrases they havechosen and the solutions they have come up with. Share your ownsolutions with the class, but not before the students have had their say.

3 The pairs now translate the text into their mother tongue.

4 The pairs form sixes. They read out and discuss their translations.

Sample text The Elephant in the Room

There's an elephant in the room.It is large and squatting, so it's hard to get around it.Yet we squeeze by with 'How are you' and 'I'm flne',And a thousand other forms of trivial chatter.We talk about the weather.We talk aboutwork.We talk about everything-except the elephant in the room.

There's an elephant in the room.We all know it is there.We are thinking about the elephant as we talk together.It is constantly on our minds.For you see, it is a very big elephant.It has hurt us all.But we do not talk about the elephant in the room.Oh please, say her name agarn.Oh please, say'Barbara' agarn.

Oh please, let's talk about the elephant in the room.For ifwe talk about her death,Perhaps we can talk about her life?Can I say 'Barbara' to you and not have you look awal2

For ifl cannot, then you are leavingMeAlone. . .In a room .. .With an elephant ...

Sa I gilinoual texts and activities

variation @Another way of getting students to focus on specific differences ofvocabulary across languages is to get them to produce, in the otherlanguage, a fairly detailed paraphrase ofthe text flrst. This is bestdone from memory, for example, after hearing the text read to themrather than reading it, using whatever language comes to mind. Theythen compare their paraphrases with the original and decide whatchanges they need to make to produce a more accurate translation.

Comments

Focusing first on the problem areas in a text discourages the studentsfrom simply plunging into a translation and, paradoxically,encourages them to stand back and see the text as a whole.

Acknowledgements

The Eileyhant in the Room, by Terry Kett ering. Bereavement Maganne,Bereavement Publishing, e989.

4.4 Cultural keywordsLevel Lower-intermediateto advanced

Time 40-50 minutes

Aims To explore the cultural resonance of vocabulary, and the ways inwhich specific vocabulary items can represent important aspects ofa culture.

Procedure1 Ask the students to work in small groups (4-6) and choose one or two

words that pithily sum up major values in their home culture (forexample, resignaci6n (resignahon) for southern Spain; saudade(ye arning-longing-nostalgial for northern Portugal; kirei (clean) for

Japan.2 Tell them they have four minutes to represent the most important

word they have chosen as a tableau or 'living statue': a staticillustration or symbolic representation made by the bodies of some orall of the group members.

3 Each group then presents their'statue'to the class, holding theposition for r5-zo seconds. Let the other students ask the 'staflle'

questions about their representation, if they want to.

4 Allow five minutes' quiet for students to write themselves notesabout their reactions to the statues.

5 Ask the students to work in new gtoups, and to come up with one ortwo cultural keywords about English-speaking countries they havestudied or been to (for example, individuality for the USA' hyltocrisyfor the UK, can-do forAustralia).

5 Give them four minutes to organize their statues.

7 Each group presents their statue to the whole group.

Bilingualtexts and activit ies | 55

I Allow five minutes for writing up reactions to the ideas presented inthe statues.

Round off with feedback about the statue-making.

Variation

An indirect way of exploring culture through vocabulary is to ask thestudents which of a suitably chosen set of English words and phraseshave one-word equivalents in their language(s). For example,air ing cupboard bungalow croft au fait withstandard (= ordinary) cream tea savoury semi-detachedcosymy old man

Comments

daddy l imo pflvacySpeaker (of the House of Commons)

In one of our classes the whole group made statues around thePortuguese keyword saudade (yearning-longing-nostalgia), aft er aPortuguese participant had explained it. We presented our statuesand she analysed for us how close we seemed have got to a genuine,full, Portuguese feeling for the word. It was a thrilling class in termsof learning cultural awareness.

This activity can be used in polyglot, multicultural groups as a way ofsharing their cultures as well as approaching the culture(s) of thetarget language.

4.5 How many letters in the word?Level Beginner to intermediate

Time 10-20 minutes

Aims To get students to visualize the look of a word on the page, as anaid to memory and spelling.

PreparationBe ready to dictate ro-r5 words from the bilingual list at the end ofyour coursebook unit.

Procedure

1 Explain to the students that they should write the words you aregoing to dictate in a vertical list that will look like this:

c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 k o d o m od . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 y u m e

2 Tell the students to write down only thefrsf letter of the word youdictate, followed by the number of letters in the word, and a mother-tongue translation (Japanese in the example above; the two Englishwords in the example are childanddream\.

3 Dictate all the words you have chosen from the vocabulary list in theunit.

4 Pair the students and ask them to flll in the missing letters.They then check with the coursebook.

S6 | ei l ingualtexts and act iv i t ies

Comments

This can be ofparticular importance to people whose mother tongueis not written in the Roman alphabet.

Acknowledgements

We came across the idea of counting letters inwords in Swan andWalter, C amb ridge English C our s e, B ook r, 19 8 4.

4.6 Tvvo-language textsLevel All

Time 15 minutes per session over several class meetings.

Aims To deduce the meaning of target-language words from a mother-tongue context.

Materials Copies of the two-language text for each student.

Preparation

Take an English text your students will find gripping and translate itinto their mother tongue. Leave one word or so per sentence inEnglish: choose words that can be guessed fairly accurately from thesentence context. Choose words that are repeated in the text.

Pick a fairly long text that the students can work on for a fewminutes per session over several weeks. Leave progressively more ofthe text in English, including phrases as well as single words, but donot be tempted to put too much in English too soon, or the readingwillbecome heavy.

For obvious reasons we cannot provide materials for your students:instead, see below for a text that assumes you are a beginner inModern Greek.

In class or as homework

Hand out the day's instalment and let the students read. After thestudents have worked through several sessions, they may feel a needfor discussion in their mother tongue.

Sample text The Barbarians come in the night...rvVhen the telephone kudunistinthe middle of the night, somethingunusual is happening.Just such atilefonimawoke me up at dawn onthe zrst ofApril 1967. From the other endtis gramis the journalist,George Papachristophilou told me in a trembling voice:

'There's been a coup-there are tanks everywhere and they'resurrounding everything-leave your spiti!'

'Are you serious?' I r6tisa l:Lim.Nd, I tellyou, I can see rifles, machine-guns, helmets, soldiers, get

out while you canl-I put down thetil1fono and stayed silent for someseconds. Then I began dialling arittmrts. Nlgramds to the centre hadbeen cut off.

Bilingual texts and activities | 57

Somehl€fona in the suburbs were still answering. I managed tospeak to a very few of my fllus and tell them the terrible news.

By now myln€kahadwoken up. As she got my clothes togethershe rotfse me:

'But who's behind the coup? Is it going to go on a long time?You've only just come back and nowyou fdvgts again. Thank Godyoumanaged to come back home from prison ... You must filefonisisme after lunch to let me knowyou're OK. You mrstn'tniizese aboutus-look after yourself and be careful ... And let me know how I can

""#Jllt *, xipnrsemy tvvo daughters, Eva, who was in her secondyear at primary school, and Iro who still went to nipiagogio. Theythought they had to go to school earlier. I explained to them that itwasn't yet 5ra and that I was going to have to be away from spttiforquite some time.

(T. Dimos. z3 4o Mer es shn P ar anomia. Glaros, 1977)

Comments

This exercise type is designed for classes sharing the same mothertongue, and particularlyfor those who are aiming at a readingknowledge of English. We have found it an excellentway of gettingbeginners gradually to assimilate new vocabulary by setting it in acontext that has not been denatured, as in so many target-Ianguagebeginners' readers.

Acknowledgements

The idea of using bilingual texts in the way described came to us fromreading Anthony Burgess's 196z novel AC'lockwork Orange: aftetreading the book you will find that you have absorbed around roowords and phrases of the (mainly Russian-based) slang Burgessinvented for his characters. (For a glossary seehttp ://www.c I ockwo rko ra n ge. com. ) A good, sustained example thatmixes German and English is Werner Lansburgh's Dear Doosie, FischerVerlag, 1979.

4.7 Learning by associatingLevel Beginner to elementarY

Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To introduce students to a practical way of quickly learningvocabulary on their own.

PreParation

Let us show you the procedure by teaching you two or three words ofZonka, the language ofBhutan.

1 Take a piece of paper, turn it landscape-wise and rule or fold fourvertical columns. Here are the column headings:

TL I WORD ASSOCIATION / MT / BRIDGE ASSOCIATIOIV

SS I eilingual texts and activities

Write down the word dumra in the first column (TL = translation).

Now write your association with the sound and shape of the word inColumn z (word association). It can be a word association or a picture.The more fanciful the association. the better.

Now write the translati on of dumra in Column 3 (mother-tongue):garden.

Compare the meaning you now know, garden, with the associationthat you had before, thus creating a 'bridge association', which goesin Column 4. As an example, here are one person's associations witha newword:

bha 'exclamation of surprise' cow 'I see a cow in my bedroom andgoBHA!! '

Procedure

Follow the procedure described above with around zo words ofEnglish you need to teach your beginners. (If you know little of thestudents'language, here is a chance to learn some more!) The wordschosen will probably be from a coursebook listening or reading.

Work on the listening or reading passage the words were taken from.

Comments

Not all students, of course, will have the right mindset for this. Sincethis activity is largely individual, and the teacher has no need tomonitor the association processes of the students, it can be easilyused in polyglot groups.

This is aversion of tlle so-called'keyword'technique, which has beenshown to be effective (for some learners) in the short-termacquisition of one-to-one word pairings, and is particularly useful inpreparing students for quizzes and examinations. It may also behelpful in laying a temporary foundation for deeper languagelearning.

Paul Meara, of the University of Wales at Swansea, has pointed out tous that to build the language house you need plenty of bricks beforeyou start. The bricks are the words. He suggests that with rooo wordsyou will begin to be able to get some of the gist of normal target-language texts. (See Meara 1997.)

Other activities in this book which employ similar visual mnemonicdevices are 6.ro, 'OHP lists', 6.rS, 'Picturing words and phrases', tt.5,'Leaping words', and t.8, 'Draw the word'.

4.8 Two-facing wordsLevel Upper-intermediateto advanced

Time 10-15 minutes

Aims To explore lexical ambiguity in a focused but amusing way, lookingat homonyms, homophones and words that can be used asdifferent parts of speech.

2

3


Materials


50 I Bi l inoual texts and activi t ies

2

3

One copy of the Dictation sheet (below) for your own use in class,and one copy for each student to be given out after the lesson.

Procedure

Tell the students you are going to dictate some English sentences tothem, which they are to take downintheir mother tongue.

Dictate the sentences fiom the Dictation sheet, slowly.

Pair the students to compare their translations. If you have aninternational class, pair the students according to their mothertongue, with one or more 'international groups' for those who haveno common mother tongue.

As you move round the class assure the students that all the originalsentences were ambiguous. Give help here and there, when pairs getstuck.

Round offby checking that everybody saw all the ambiguities.

Dictation sheetDictate the sentences printed in italics. The notes in (brackets)refer to the ambiguit ies, and thus to the di f ferent possibi l i t iesof t ranslat ion.

Ithink a lot of ltalian men. (l appreciate the men/they are often inmy mind/as an answer to the question: 'Who came hereyesterday?')

This was the one thing I did right/write in the workshop.

Canyou make suppertomorrow night? (come to supper as aguest/prepare supper)

Well,aren'tyou her nearest relative? (relational or geographicalcloseness)

You're cracking up-hang onl(your voice is becoming unclear onthe phone/ you are bursting into laughter/you are starting tobreak down)

This desk is made of cypress/Cyprus wood.

Did you hear aboutthe cookwho does potatoes and pees/peas in thepot?

Mad cow diseasewosformerly/formally known as BSE.

lhad this amazing experience and Ikeep relating itto people. (relatingcan mean telling or connecting)

Crackfound in lceland.(crack in the earth/crack cocaine, thedrug)

ls the book dated? (is it out of date?/does it have a date ofpublication?)

Oh,it's John is it? I'lltake him upstairs. (l'll talk to him on theupstairs phone/lead him upstairs)

Follow-up

As homework ask each student to hand in between three and sixambiguous mother-tongue sentences. Use these to do the sameexercise the other way round, from tfre mother tongue into English.

Comments

This activity is suitable for polyglot classes providing the students areappropriately grouped.

This activity stresses the fun aspect of linguistic ambiguity, as well asgiving a practical demonstration of how important context is indetermining meaning. Over-serious students in particular should beneflt.

You will find more ambiguous material in Davis et a\. More GrarnmarGames. Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995, pageazz.Above, we workon lexical ambiguity, but even more fascinating are grammatical

Janus-like sentences:

I don'thke youbecause I work with you. (I dislike you becauseyou're a colleague./It isn't just your being a colleague that makesme like you.)

DomensellbetterthanwomenT (Are the men selling something orbeing sold?)

On the wallsBeginners to elementary

15 minutes

lio practise skimming and scanning target-language texts forequivalents of mother-tongue expressions.

Posters, maps, other target-language texts.

Preparation

Get together a collection of posters, maps, and other textual realia,and pin them up round the walls of the classroom. Then choose tenor so words contained in the texts on the walls and prepare a list oftheir translations into the students' mother tongue.

Procedure

Put the list of translations on the blackboard. Tell the students thattheir English equivalents are to be found 'somewhere on the walls',and ask them to look for them.

Comments

This very simple activity can become an on-going, ever-changingfeature of the classroom. It encourages students, especially thoseremote from an English-using environment, to find vocabulary forthemselves, using clues and contexts, rather than waiting to be 'fed'.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this technique fromJean Cureau.

4,9Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Bilingualtexts and activit ies | 61

4.10Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Translation reversiElementary to advanced

20-30 minutes

To use a simple board and some pieces of card as a vocabularyexercise, in which the player who can translate most accurately hasthe best chance of winning.

Board, counters, translation cards etc. See below.

Procedure

Straight Reversi

The traditional game is played bytwo players ('vVhite and Black)with64 counters on an 8 x 8 squared board. A chessboard is ideal.Counters are white on one side and black on the other.

Each player in turn places a counter on the board, with her/his owncolour uppermost. A capture is made when one has placed a piece ateach end of a line of opposing pieces (row column or diagonal): thecaptured pieces remain in place but are turned over to reverse theircolours.

In the flrst four moves the four centre squares are filled; thereafter,each move must be a capture. If a player cannot make a capture, s/heloses that turn.

The game ends when neither player has a legal move and/or theboard is full. The winner is the player with the most pieces on theboard at the end ofthe game. (See page 65.)

Translation Reversi

This is played in exactly the same way as the traditional game, butwith a few extra rules:

Small pieces of card are used instead of counters: on one side of eachcard is written a word or phrase in English, on the other anappropriate translation into the mother tongue. Instead of '\Mhite'

and 'Black', one player is 'English', the other'Mother Tongue'.

Before being allowed to capture a single opposing piece, the playermust be able to translate the word on it before completing the move.In capturing longer lines of pieces, s/he must translate at least twowords in the capture stringbefore moving.

The player who successfully translates his/her opponent's piece orpieces then places pieces at the end of the line, as in normal Reversi.Sources for the words and phrases used in the game could includecurrent topic or text material, revision material, and problemsthrown up by students'work.

Variation 1

The game may be shortened by using a 6 x 6 board (36 cards) or a7 x Tboard (49 cards).

62 | Bil ingual texts and activit ies

Variation 2

Instead of translations, other paired items can be used: synonyms,antonyms, word + definition, orthographic/phonemic spelling, etc.

Variation 3

Even though, when introducing the game, it may be simpler to usematerials produced by the teacher, the activity has greater effectwhen the students produce materials for themselves or for each other.

Comments

This is the old game of Reversi-or Othello-which is now also anestablished computer game. A computer version of TrarslanonReversi,and other language games, can be found on the cD RoM MindGame,by Mario Rinvolucri and Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, published byClarity, available at htt p ://www. c I a r ity. co m. h k .

o a)o

The opening moves

White s response

oa aa) o

Black s first capture.

Position equal.

Io O- n a)

O a o o a)a) ^ o t C o

r) a) o o o a)a) a) a) (- o o

a) o


-) o o o o o o or) C r) a) a) a) a) a)a) a) a) o a) -

a) o a) o a) ( a)a) o a) o a) a) -

a) o a) o - n oo a) a) o a\ l

a a) a) : )a) a\ C I

White wins 47:17.White closes in I

C rf a)o o o C r) l t a)o o o C o r-\ a) a)o a o a) a) a) a)

a o o o o a) o a)a o o f-) n o o Ca) - a) a) ^ a\

64 I Bilingualtexts and activities

Using corpora and concordances

Put simply, a language corpus is a body of texts, selected according to

explicit principles, and organized to facilitate the discovery offactsabout language. Early corpora (or corpuses) were used for biblicaland literary studies and in philological research (for example, the

complete corpus of Otd English texts), but over the past 25 years

their use has grown enormously, not only among linguists, but in

many other fields. At the same time, the computer explosion has

both made possible the creation of very large corpora (5oo millionwords and more) and generated the need for ever more complexsearch and analysis tools (concordancers, indexers, parsers, and

so on) to deal with the sheer volume of information flowing around

the planet.In this chapter, we try to show how corpora and their associated

software can benefit langUage learners and teachers. Most Blitishdictionaries, and an increasing number of grammar books, are now

corpus-derived, and 5.r, 'Reciprocal verb phrases', and 5.2,

'Tendto',

show how the insights ofcorpus lexicography can influence both

what and how we teach. 5.3, 'More on fend t0', illustrates some of the

basic search and display techniques that teachers and students canapply directly if they have access to a corpus. s.+,

'\Mhich word are we

after?', and 5.5, 'Bare facts, naked truth', show how corpus work can

help in producing classroom materials. S.6, 'Working with student

texts', gives ideas for applylng concordancing to the students' own

written work, and 5.7, 'Quarryrng the Internet for words', looks at

,the biggest corpus of all'. Some further guidance and references areprovided in the Comments on this final activity'

Corpus lexicography is a rapidly developing field, and newmethods and applications are appearing all the time. David Lee's

frequently updated corpus website at htt p ://d evoted.to/co rp o ra gives

a comprehensive annotated list of corpora and the software needed

to work with them.

5.1 Reciprocal verb PhrasesLevel Upper-intermediateto advanced

Time 30-40 minutes

Aims To show how corpus analysis can highlight patterns of grammar

and meaning.

Using corpora and concordances | 65

Materials Copies of the Worksheet for each student.

Preparation

Read the Comments below and make copies of the Worksheet. If youand your class share the same mother tongue, be ready to help themfind good translations for the phrases.

Procedure

Give the students copies of the Worksheet. Tell them to completethe worksheet in groups of four, using dictionaries and any otherreference material they have. Tell them to call you over when theyneed further help. As the students work, go round helping to clarifymeaning, offering translations and contexts for the phrases.

Comments

In Chapter 6 of Collins Cobuild's corpus-derived GrammarPatternsl.Verbs (t998),'reciprocal verbs' are defined as those that 'describe

actions and processes in which tvvo or more people, groups or thingsdo the same thing to each other, have a relationship, or are linkedbecause they are participating jointly in an action or an event'. Theyare used with either a plural subject and no object (We made contacLIk

66 | Using corpora and concordances

Worksheet1 Look through this phrase l ist :

battle it out chew thefat compare notes cross swordsbury the hatchet do battle do business fall in lovechangeplaces gohandinhand shakehands gotowarhave it off have it out settle accounts have wordshititoff holdhands joinforces linkarmslock horns lose contact lose touch make contactmakefriends make love make peace mend fencespart company pass the time of day see eye to eye

2 Write down al l the phrasesyou do nof knowthe meaningsof.

3 Wri te down al l the phrases that have to do with repair ing a relat ionship.

4 Wri te down al l the phrases which involve negat ive feel ing between twoindividuals.

5 Write down all the phrases that basically mean totalkwith,tochatwith.

6 Look at these examples:

Wemadecontact. lmadecontactwithhim.They losttouch. He losttouch with her.

All the phrases above can be used in these two patterns. Choose ten of them andmake your own example sentences for each, adding context and details, forexample:

After she moved to London, Peter lost touch with her.


qndlbattledfi out.) or with a subject followed by with + object (Imadecontart wrthhim. They made friends with her.).

The deflnition combines meaning and grammar in a way thatmakes vocabulary learning hrghly effective, and enables us languageteachers to introduce them as a memorable and learnable groupingto our students. It is a typical product ofcorpus lexicography, whichuses computers to extract from examples of natural language notsimply a meaning for a word or phrase, blutfhe patterns associatedwith it.

In the next activity (5.2) we showwhat the output of a corpussearch (often called a concordqnce) can look like, and how this outputmaybe used in class.

'Tend to': using concordances with studentslntermediate to advanced

30-40 minutes

To present and practise the language patterns associated withparticular words and phrases.

Copies of one or more concordance printouts for the word(s) orphrase(s) chosen.

Preparation

Make copies of the Example concordance below. Alternatively, ifyouhave access to a corpus and appropriate software, make your ownconcordance ofa word or phrase you or your students have chosen.

Procedure

Explain to your students thattendto is extremely frequent in spokenEnglish, and that second-language speakers who use it tend to soundmore English than they really are! Tell them that this verb tends toexpress habit and regular occurrence.

Give out copies of the Example concordance and ask them to readthrough and see how many of the excerpts they can make sense of.Give help where required.

Pair the students and ask them to choose one utterance they like andto produce a four-line dialogue that it could be part of. Give them thisexample:

e: Shopping pretty good down your way, innit?s: That's right. Yeah, the shops tend to open about eleven o'clock.a: Bit late really.s: We're never up before eleven.

Ask the pairs to learn by heart what they have written, and to decidewhere the speakers are, how they are standing or sitting, and whattheir relationship is.

They turn their books over and bring the dialogues to life for the restofthe class.

4

5.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials


5 Get them to create another dialogue with a new excerpt and act thisout.

Example concordancetend toch Erm yeah bu t we don ' t tend to go very o f ten because I meaqu i te fa r away Mm but I tend to l i ke to save my money and sp

the dr i f t The th ing is I tend to bor row th ings o f f T im and he

tend no t to use names I tend to use d i rec t names very I i tLLenh l - tn l - rcd Yceh i ^ lha t I tend to do is read or watch te fev is is r igh t Yeah the shops tend to open about e leven o 'c lockI ly i f I do buy bacon we tend to have i r fo r a funch you know

s ix g rood g lasses bu t we tend no t to use them She was say incoup le o f t imes and you tend to f ind tha t a lo t o f the Londo

tha t a b i t down or tha t tends to go back I don ' t qu i te know

Acknowledgements

The Example concordance above was edited down from a cANcoDEoutput cited in Michael McCarthy. SpokenLanguage andAppliedLinguishcs. Cambridge, 1998. (cANcoDE is a specially prepared corpusof transcripts of spoken English.)

More on 'tend to': using a corpus andsoftware in classIntermediate to advanced

5.3

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Preparation

If this is the first time you have used a corpus, work throughProcedure byyourselfto get used to the technique. In later sessions,very little preparation will be needed. Wherever possible, encouragethe students themselves to formulate the queries at each stage, andto suggest the words and phrases to work on.

To getyou started, we have prepared the Example concordancebelow, using the cD-RoMS of the British National Corpus (nllc) andquery soft\^/are, sARA-32.

68 1Using corpora and concordances

Procedure il

Make sure that the corpus to be used is accessible to each workstation(this maybe through a local network or the Internet, or as a copyinstalled on each machine) and that the appropriate query orconcordance software is up and running.

Divide the class into groups accordingto the number of computerworkstations available: the optimum group size would be two to fourstudents at each workstation, so that everyone has at least one otherperson to talk to but is still able to see the screen. One member ofeach group should be responsible for operating the keyboard.

Ask the groups to search the corpus for instances of the phrase tendto. Depending on the corpus and software being used, the query maytake one of several forms:a search ontend: this will produce every instance of tend (but not

tends,tending, etc.), including all the cases where tendis notfollowed by to;

b search on the phrase tendto: this will exclude not only suchexamples as They tendthevlawnbrfi also She tends to worry;

c search using a special 'wild card' symbol (usually the asterisk): tend*will include tends,tending,tended, but also tendency,tender, etc.i

d specify a maximum number ofwords between the elements tendand to: this could be used, for example, to pick up instances of tendnotto:

e if the words in the corpus are marked ('tagged') as <noun>,<verb present tense>, and so on, search for tend+ <infinitive marker>:

f if the word or phrase being queried is fairly common, it willalso be necessary to restrict the number of instances output bythe software, for example, by asking for'the first 5o hits'or '5o random hits', and/or by limiting the search to textsofa particular type.

Tell the students to look at the results oftheir query and to considerways in which the examples can be grouped by grarnmar, meaning,context, etc. If any of the listed examples is hard to understand fromthe limited context given, they can use the software to increase theamount of text shown. (see Expanded output below).

Ask the students to choose one of the groups of examples they havedecided on, and to make a further search to obtain more examples ofthis group. For example, the item is tendingtoincrease may suggest asearch for more examples of tendto used in a continuous tense, whileI would tend not to may prompt the question 'ls tend not to used more inwritten than in spoken language?' (From the evidence of the BNC, wecannot say that there is a signiflcant difference here.)

Using corpora and concordances I o9

Example concordance

the who le o f g loba l warming does tend to come to mind when you seet e n d t o g e t t o o t o o f r i e n d l y a n d n o t k e e p i t o n a o n a b u s i n e s sY e s , a n d t h e y t e n d t o b e l a r g e r c a r s . W e l f i t s t o p s t h e t o pTranspor t , o f course , 1s tend ing to inc rease a f f the t imei n h s i n t h c i n d r r s t r i : l a r e : a n d f h e r u w i f f t e n d t O b e o f f i e e i o h s

This i s how they er , tend to compromise w i th i t .In many o f the ru ra f a reas , however , re fo rm tended to be uneven.T wou- Id tend no t to un t i l the scheme was ac tua l l y in managementI t , i t tends to be men, yeah, i t ' s more menvery o f ten deve lopment p rogrammes tend to ignore er ther rand you tend to sor t o f say we l f what do you rea l l y want Eo ta l -k

Expanded outputfor the tenth l ine in the example

I want us to th ink fo r a moment about the r igh ts and needs o f a f ft h o s e m i f f i o n s o f c h i f d r e n w h o d o n o t q o t o s c h o o l , w h o a r e i n v i s i b f e<pause> because very o f ten deve lopment p rogrammes tend to iqnore< p a u s e > e r t h e r r n e e d s .

Variations

Once you and your students have gained some expedence in workingwith a colpus and its associated soffware, you can add them to theclass reference library along with the dictionaries, thesauri,reference grammars, and so on. Here are some more suggestions forusing a corpus as a reference tool:

Ask the students to think of other expressions suggested by or similarto tendto (be inclinedto,be proneto, andhave atendency to come to mind),and then to explore them in the same way.

Give out a text and ask the students to select three to five words andphrases that are unfamiliar, or used in unfamiliar ways. Tell themthat they will be able to look these up in a dictionary but that first, insmall groups, they should get a list of examples (no more than ten) ofeach from the corpus, and then try to work out a deflnition orparaphrase from the lists. \vVhen they've flnished, they can checktfieir answers in the dictionary. (Since dictionaries are not infallible,this can also be seen as checking the dictionary against the corpusevidence they have obtained.)

Write on the board, or ask the students to choose, one or more pairsof words that have very similar meanings. (Examples arefreedom:Iiberr.y, choice:option, prime:premier,triple:treble.) Tell them to use thecorpus to discover how close in meaning the words in each pair are,and whether there are any 'rules' for deciding which word to use in agiven situation or context. Hopefully, their work will give you anopportunity to introduce the idea of collocation, the tendency of wordsto associate with particular otherwords: for example, we tend to saycivillibertrybrtfreedom of thought. (See also 5.5

'Bare facts, naked truth'.)


5,4Level

Time

Aims

Materials

The BNC, in common with many other corpora, consists of text files

that are 'marked up' or 'tagged' to give a great deal of information

aboutthe text and its constituent parts. Each word is marked as

<verb>, <adjective> and so on, and each textbegins with a header

that includes, among other things, details of authorship, publication

or composition, text domain (imaginative, science, leisure,

commerce, and so on), and, for spoken texts, details of the

participants' gender and age, and the situation in which a

conversation took place. So, for example, you could askyour students

to list words that they think are more commonly used in speech by

women than by men, and to test their predictions by searching the

spoken dialogues ofthe corpus fi.rst for instances in utterances tagged

<male> and then in those tagged <female>.

Acknowledgements

The Example concordance was produced ftom The British National

Corpus (WorldEdthon), available on two cD-RoMS from the Humanitres

Computing Unit, Oxford University ( htt p //www. h c u. ox. a c. u k/B N C)

using the program sARA-32 byTony Dodd, a copy of which is on the

same cD-RoIr,rs. (The SARA-32 help flle/manual is rather sparse, and

anyone learning to use sARA-32 is advised to look atTheBNCHandbook,

by Guy Aston and Lou Burnard, Edinburgh University Press 1998,

which includes an excellent sARA-32 tutorial' The second edition of

this, updated to take account ofrecent revisions ofboth the corpus

and the software, is expected to appear in late zoo4.)

Which word are we after?


10-20 minutes

To show how corpora and concordance software can help teachers(and students) to prepare classroom materials.

Worksheets for each student; access to computers, software, theInternet, etc. as circumstances permit.

Preparation

Choose a word or collocation that you would like the class to look atin detail.

Ifyou have access to a corpus, use a concordancer to extract tenexamples containing the word or phrase you have chosen.Alternatively, you can get your examples from one of the sites on theweb which allow limited free access to a text database, such asCollins Cobuild at http://titania.cobuild.collins.co'uk (up to 4o hitsreturned) and the Bdtish National Corpus athttp ://sa ra. natco rp. ox. ac. u k/l ooku p. htm | (up to 50 hits, and rathermore context).


3

4

Import the examples into a word processor and delete the chosenword/phrase from each example, leaving a gap, as in Exampleworksheet r below.

Print and make copies for each group ofthree to five students.

Procedure

Divide the class into groups of three to flve students.

Give one example worksheet to each group and tell them to work outwhich word or phrase should appear in the examples. (Example r islaundry and example ziswarmest.)

I

2

Example worksheet 1- - r ^ m F h ^ ^ ^ 1 1 ^ ^ ^ ^ r r r I ^ ^ a t h a r r h ou u f f s g s , P u - , v 9 e L r - L _ - " e

bu r Eu ropeans , see ing women knead ing

f ^ r l - h F f : m i l r ; r n n i c k ^ r r r ^ f f h a

p f a s t i c p a n t s . I ' v e u s e d m y

in t he o the r . A f so i dea l f o r

T o h e l p y o u c o n c e a l y o u r

d a I i r z a r n i n k r r n e n r l n e r r f n r r r n r r r

, . , L , , - ^ - r h r , ^ L i i h f ^ I h aw l r y J U l L L o r r y u l r f r r u J L y u r _ r L U L r r c

l - n r a m ^ \ 7 a r a : l l \ / t ^ 1 1 ^ h - f r i h - + F - l! ! u _ t j L u u Y r r r L a ! 1 r r L r r o L

: n r l r i r - c n r r l i t i a n i n a f n i r - a n a r r l a , 4

- and f ound Go rd ie ' s T - sh i r t cove red

- a t t h e r i v e r , a d o p t e d s h a m p o o " t o

- b a s k e t . S o m e t i m e s L h e y w o u l o n e e d

- s e r v i c e f o r t h r e e m o n t h s n o w . T h e y

- (wh i t es and co lou reds ) o r f o r

r n n l i r n a a M r T h - " ^ - . i d ^ - - - ^ ^- q P l v l a w r u g | o | | 9 9

l - \ a i n d r - l - n a i n t h a n a i n h h n z i n a f a r r n

b u s i n e s s i n t h i s c o u n t r y i s

. i F t a r n a n j - q ^ l ^ n e l e a v e b e h i n d .

- f a c i f i t i e s a r e o n c h e p r e m i s e s .

Example worksheet 2L r n n l r : A n r i e n h r a o z ^ ^ 1 r f - ^ r r ^ h f L ^

. ^ u ! r J y

has now es tab .L i shed h imse l f as t he

f r i end Don Edua rdo . He sends yo l n i s

r h c r . l : r r e L r h F n . t i m i n ^ - ^ ^ l - , , ^ ^ f h ^! r _ L u q r r u s a r r P f a y s u L r r s

l - i a T i : f a r n r ^ ^ f t h a r r : r a ^ r ^ h r l - i l \ / t h a

M r M a ' n r s n o k e r o M p s i n c h e

F o r w h a t e v e r r e a s o n y o u g i v e , m y

o r f a r i l v o f t h o s e w h o w e r e .

1 . . - l ^ ^ r L ^ l - ^ ! , . ^ ^ - - ^ k ^ ^u u ! ! ] I 9 y c a l D l I o D

- - 1 . ^ ^ , , - ^ ^ ^ ^ l - ^ L ^ ^ I ^ ! L ^y w u ! J , s s t , ! r r v u a \ j L r L r r s

d r - r ' t h A r h - ^ a i r u r i l l l e r r z a r z n r r

n e r q n n : l i j - ' z ' n t h e C o v e r n m e n t . "

r c n : r d c H a l h i n l z e t h i < . T i m m \ /

- s e n s u r r o u n d s o u n d s . N o w t h a t ' s

s n ^ r f q n l n r r c c . r O U ' . I l e V e r W e a r !

r a r m c r T a F : h ^ i r f f h a h r ^ e h a - l ^ T r

- t h a n k s . Y o u r s s i n c e r e l y ,

I h a n L c l - ̂ a \ / a r \ z ^ n a r r h n f c n h i n n a d

l ^ ^ T h : n L e t ^ t h A C r r ' l f q l r a r n

- ( ( ^ f A a r r r \ 7 ^ h l \ / t h a_ Y w u , L a ! ! f u _ r _ f L r _ E


5.5Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Variation

Ifyour students have access to a corpus and can use it for simplesearches (see the previous activity for hints on this), encourage themto make worksheets for each other: flnding and selecting theexamples is at least as useful as, and much more creative than,solving the przzle.

Bare facts, naked truthIntermediate to advanced

20-40 minutes

To use a corpus to find out which of two or more apparentsynonyms is appropriate to a particular context; to use a corpus toprepare classroom materials.

One copy of a concordance, frequent collocates, and a worksheetand key for each student, similar to the examples provided.

Preparation

\Mhen preparing your own materials:

Select, or get your students to suggest, two or more words with verysimilar meanings.

Get a concordance of the words you are investigating (on screen-there is no need to print it out), and use the 'sort' option to group theexamples fi.rst according to the words searched for and thenaccording to the words that appear before or after. Make a note of thecommonest collocations. (Some corpus soffware can do thisautomatically.) Select two or three examples of each of the commoncollocations and delete everything else. Save the resulting'thinned'concordance as a text file.

Import the saved text flle into your word processor. Make a mixedselection of zo or so items for the example concordance, and a secondselection, with gaps replacing the headwords, for the worksheet.Print these out.

Procedure

Give out copies of the Example concordance and ask the students,working alone or in pairs, to see if they can see any pattern in theway the headword has been chosen.

After a minute or two, give out the list of Frequent collocates.

After another minute, give out the Worksheet and ask them to wdtethe most likelyword in each gap.'vVhen they have flnished, give out the Key. Point out that in each casethis shows the word which actually appears in the corpus, and thatthere are several cases where eitherbare ornaked might have beenused.) Allow time for discussion.

2

3


Follow-up

(This can be set for homework.)Tell the class to look again at thefrequent collocates of bare andnaked and to mark those where themeaning is metaphorical (for example,barebones).They should thenwrite a short paragtaph to illustrate how each may be used.

Frequent collocates lbefore ll ... l l afterllay/laid; strip/stripped ll bare llfooUfeet; hands; bones; minimum; walls; chest;branch/es; room; leg/s; earth; essentials; skin; floor; necessities

half; found; stark; running; completely; caught; strip/ped; stand/ing/stood ll naked llbody/bodies; eye; gun; truth; excepU bulb; aggression; ambition; flesh

Example concordancebare/nakedI a f r h i c n r r i : m a c h o h i n r i : n n o m o r c e d s r a r k

I remembered the la rder was

I a ^ l . . d L , i i h t h ^ , , ^ - a r n : r t n f r h o t h i c h eu H Y v r y q ! r v

T 1 , d t 6 l t : e f h ^ , , d h h a h : r ' i h a o n e f r i . . c . l

t h : f t : n L e A h . l t r ^ ^ n .- , - 5 w r e f u r r i 9 9 u r r 5 a r r u

R i , l ^ . ^ r n i < : r i n n . h a r r e n n l v o i r r c t t s r h e

h a s d i f f e r e n c e s t h a t a r e i n v i s i b l e t o t h e

L o r e L L a P e e r e d a t t h e

a a . l a r n a r e - r _ r c q L o s o m e e x t e n t , o u r

d r a w e r o f h i s d e s k . T h e - o o m w a s q u i L e

c h a s s i s a n d c a r b o d y w e r e s t r i p p e d L o

i n m o s t i l s e c t s , t h e w i n g s a p D e a r t o b e

r / r t ^ l c f F ^ c . ' - L o r e c o n s t r u c t i o n w l c h a

I ^ l a c t A T ^ r f h a ? F / c a - o w e r t h e r e a n d l t ' S

t h e r e a r e l o t s o f- h 6 - r : r i - r . i c e f n r r n o t h a t L h e r e w a s a

F h a d ^ \ r 6 y n m a n t , < . a f ^ r m c u r a r a r o n l : c i n c

f r ^ m t h a h i n < r r n u r : r d -- ' P J u y w u - u 5

The f loors were o f the same wood, some

B o r h m e n w e r e a r m e d , e a c h c a r r y i n g a

r h o c r r i n < o : r e h T r - ^ - ' , . + r A a m a f a a -P v L u ! v - - r ' ! q a ! ! y ' l

T h o u g h s t i I L b l i n d a n dL ^ r - - ^ , - l ^ - - l ^ n ^

s l l e t l d u I l c v e 5 e e r l l y t r r g o I v r c ,

e v e n ' e r a r m s , s h o w i n g

n a k e d , a l t . h o u g h n o c s e r i o u s l y h a r m e d .

bare and took a snap dec ls ion to h i t

naked, and ha i r l i ke Mar fene D ie t r i ch !

naked and pushed ou t in to a foo tba l l c rowd

n a k e d b a y o n e t s w e r e L n L r o d L C e d a n d q u r I i r e

b a r e b o n e s o f t h e o r g a n i s a t i o n ' s s t r u c t u r e

naked eye.

b a r e f a c t s o f P u d d e p h a t ' s l i f e . W i l l i a n H u q h

naked in tu i t ions o f these proper t ies a re

b a r e l i k e a h o s p i t a l .

bare meta l , mudguards re -made. and woodwork

naked, mic roscop ica l examlnat ion o f ten

b a r e m ' n l m u m o f e q u i p m e n L y e r m a i n t a i n e d

b a r e o f t r e e s .

bare peop le on the beach, r igh t

b a r e p o s s i b i l l t y o f t i r e d a m a g e b u t ' t h a L'naked rac ism and exp lo i ta t ion w i th subt le

n a k e d s a v e f o r a c o l l a r , p r o b a b l y o f w o o d ,

bare , some covered ln l ino leum. and

naked sword and d i rk .

naked.

naked, the ch ick manoeuvres i t se l f ins ide

naked under a sheet .

b a r e w h e r e s h e h a d h e r s l e e v e s r o l l e d u p


Cxample worksheetbare/naked

I Her neck and shoulders are - and cold looking. l t 's a beaut i ful dress.She looks so pretty.

2 Ken Livingstone had made a - grasp for power that must not be allowed.

3 Patr ice [ . . . ] would assoon leavethe house - aswithoutmake-up.

4 The corridors beyond, though, were stark, and as cold and draughty aswind tunnels.

5 Many were forced to eke out a - existence in misery, and many othersbecame exi les and wandering beggars.

5 Deciduous shrub, four feet tal l , wi th f lowers on -, erect branches.

7 Hellenistic Greek kings were frequently portrayed a device suggestingsuperhuman status.

8 lt should be visible to the - eye as afuzzy patch (without a tail) two tothree t imes the size of the Moon.

9 The remaining - shel l is then cut up and sent off to i ts grave in theindustry's melting pot.

l0 Some people do the - minimum, just the surface that shows. But whenyou dust behind and underneath.. .

| 1 Everyone starts digging frantically, some with spades, others with pick-axes,and others with their - hands.

12 Achi l le Bonito Ol iva, commissioner of this year 's Biennale also appeared -on the cover of a magazine.

13 They stripped Patsy - , covered him all over with shoe polish, and lockedhim out the front of the house.

14 No British government in the past forty years and more has been elected witheven a - majority of the votes cast.

15 Like a child she wanted to explore. Cool stone steps were smooth beneath her- feet.

16 Lying f lat , my - chest against the cold concrete I fought with the thing t i l lmy eyes popped and my breath gave out

17 Chi ldren and so on wi l l exert inf luence out of proport ion to their -power.

18 l t wi l l s impl i fy much of the discussion and wi l l help lay - the innerworkings of the market.

19 Very sadly, her mother died a - two weeks after Pat's move.

2 0 S t i c k t h e c a r d i n a n e n v e l o p e t h a t w i l l Y e s . f i t i t . [ . . . ] M m . O h y e s i t w o u l d n ' t g o- through the post would i t?


5.6Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Comments

Looking at the co-occurrences of words in a corpus is a very profitable

way of finding out how words are actually used, how meaningchanges in context, how words may be linked to other words in onlya narrow tange of structures, and so on. For example, a BNC searchonplace throws up nearly48,ooo 'hits'. Ifyou download a randomselection of these. and then sort the results so that four-wordsequences containingplace appear together, you can see, almost at aglance, the most frequent sequences: in (the) place of , inthe nght place,aII over the place,take the place oJ and so on. Many of these will appear inrecent dictionaries, but manywill not, or will be given without someof the useful information that the corpus search can reveal: time andplace does not appear in the dictionaries we looked at, but iscommonly used (the right time and place, this is not the time and place

for . . .). Again, entries for inthe first place, tholugl:' they may give twoseparate uses of the phrase ('flrstly ...' and'as things are/were atthe start ofa process'), fail to show thato the second of these uses is eight to ten times more common than

the flrst,o in this use the phrase alrnost always appears at the end of the

sentence, or. even when people start a sentence or utterance with 'In the first

place ...', they almost never cany on with 'in the second place'.

Working with student textsElementary to advanced

20-45 minutes

To show how concordance software can be used with the studentt'own texts to discover or highlight features of vocabulary and style.

Computers, students' texts in machine-readable form, concordancesoftware as needed.

Preparation

Build up a small corpus of student-generated text. This is best doneover a period, in the course of normal classwork, by asking the classto do their written assignments on a computer, or to type fair copies

Key1 bare2 naked3 naked4 bare5 bare5 bare7 naked

8 naked9 bare

10 bare1"1 bare12 naked13 naked14 bare

15 bare16 bare17 naked18 bare19 bare20 naked

zO I Using corpora and concordances

of handwritten work. Asking them to keep a 'public diary' or 'blog'

(= web log) on computer is also a good way to collect texts.

Organize the texts in directories (folders), one for each student, andmake sure that each classroom computer can access them and hasthe necessary concordance soffware.

Procedure

Ask the students to make fi:equency-ordered wordlists, flrst of thewhole corpus, and then of only their own texts.

In groups of three to four they should compare the lists, and pick outwords which occur much more, or much less, in their own texts thanin all the texts taken together. (WordsmithTools has a'keywords'function which will compare two frequency lists and list theanomalies automatically. See page r7o.)

Encourage the students to look at these words in their originalcontexts, and to suggest possible changes to the language used.

Variation 1

If the texts were collected over a long period of time, say a year ormore, organize them by date of composition, and ask the students tocompare word-lists made from the earliest with wordlists from theIatest, and to see if there are interesting differences in frequency.Arethere words or phrases which they once used a lot, but which theynow don't seem to be using at all?

Variation 2

In a mixed gtoup, ask them to make two wordlists, one fiom thetexts written by males, and the other from those written by females,and to compare the two.

Variation 3

Depending on the type and content ofthe texts, students can look atspeciflc word types or semantic areas. In a collection of personal lettersor emails, for example, it might be instructive to compare the relativefrequency of Ilmelmy andyoulyour. A look at the use in descriptive textsof phrases such as lookslike,soundshke,feelslke, or at adjectives ofcolour, sound, and movement, may show clear differences betweenpeople who are primarilyvisual, auditory or kinaesthetic.

Variation 4

Ifyou have access to a large general corpus, such as the sNc, you canask the students to compare the relative frequencies of words andphrases in their own texts and in the larger corpus. If, for example, astudent discovers that they have used the phrase very rnce ro times intheir own zooo words of text (i.e. o.s%) and that very nice appeats 7ootimes in the ca. ro-million-word spoken dialogue section of the sNc(i.e. o.oo7%), they may decide to look round for a few alternativeexpressions.


5.7

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Quarrying the Internet for words

lntermediate to advanced

30-50 minutes in class, spread out over several sessions asnecessary.

To encourage students to learn how words and phrases are used bysearching the Internet for example texts.

To give practice in using computers and software without losingsight of more immediate language learning needs.

Computers, Internet access, concordance software as needed(see below).

Preparation

One or two lessons before you intend to do the activity, get the classto select a topic area that interests them and to brainstorm words andphrases which they expect to flnd in texts on the topic. Get them toreduce their list to fi.ve or six key items.

Open your browser and use a search engine such as Google orAltaVista to find on the web texts containing the words and phraseschosen. At this stage don't download any of the texts themselves, justthe lists ofweb addresses (unrs). The first ro-zo addresses for eachword or phrase, together with the textual context that is usually alsogiven, will be ample. Save the lists if you need to intermpt the work.Read through your lists of addresses: use the context information (thestrings oftext that contain the search words) to select rz-t5 texts.Download them and save them to disk.

Use suitable soffware (for example, Wordlist inWordSmith Tools)toprepare wordlists for each text, and a combined word list for all thetexts: these will show the words used in the texts together with thenumber of times they appear. Edit the word lists to exclude wordsthat occur very frequently in the language, such as articles andpronouns. (The software will probably be able to do thisautomatically.)You may also like to re-edit and/or re-formatthe lists in a word processor.

Print out and make copies of the original texts and the word lists. Youwill need one copy or more of each text to put up on the walls orspread out on the tables, and each student will need one copy of oneof the individual word lists and one copy of the combined word list.You should also have a few extra copies ofeach text for the studentsto read at home.

(Depending on the availability of computers and Internet access, andon the students' familiaritywith the equipment and soffware, someor all of the above can be done by the students themselves. See theComments below for ways of making the various processes involvedmore efficient.)

Za I Using corpora and concordances

Procedure

Put up one copy of each text on the walls, or on flat surfaces wherethey can easily be seen and read. In larger classes, you may need toput up more than one copy of each text.

Give each student one copy of tle word list for one of the texts. Insmaller classes, each student should have a different word list.

Tell the students to look through their word list for a minute or two,and then to walk round and try to find the original text from which itwas prepared. \Mhen they have done this, they should sit dovrn andunderline on their list all the words or phrases that they don't know,orwhich theywould like more information about.

As more and more students finish steps z and 3, get them to formpairs or threes to discuss whether (a) they were sutprised by theIanguage or content ofthe text they found, and (b) the texts, as awhole, met the expectations they had when they first chose thesearch words or phrases that yielded them.

Ask the students to form groups offour to six and give each student acopy of the combined word list. Tell them to use the lists to helpthem produce a list of newwords or phrases to search for, as inPreparation, step 1, above.

Variation I

Instead of producing word lists, print out the words and phrases incontextualized format. as in the concordance extracts in activities5.2, 5.3, and 5.4.

Variation 2

If you have computers available in the classroom, the students, insmall groups, can look at a concordance listing directly on screen,speculate about the wider context (vocabulary situation, etc.) of eachextract, and then expand it to check their predictions. If the listing isbased on a number of different texts, the filenames and line numberscan also be shown, making it very easy for the students to access awhole text that interests them and print it out for later reading.

Comments

To search the web, use your browser to access one of the many searchengines available, type in the terms you wish to search for, wait toreceive a page (or more often page upon page) of web addresses, andthen click to access as many papers as you wish. However, you mayhave problems with the sheer quantity of information you have towade through. How can you maximize your chances of quicklyflnding what you want, and how can you process it most efficientlyonce you've got it? Here are a few pointers:

If you are only interested in text, not pretty pictures, switch offyourbrowser's'fetch images automatically' option.

If you're fetching material for later study, and don't need to read it asit arrives at your computer, choose the 'Save to flle' or 'Save to disk'

Using corpora and concordances I zS

option; a lot of time can be wasted waiting for the text to appear onthe screen.

If you're using an on-line search engine, check the options it offers:you may be able to restrict your search to a particular topic area('Science', 'On-line Newspapers', and so on), to a particular languageand/or country, or to a range of dates (for example, only files updatedin the last year).

\Mhen searching for specific phrases, make sure you use the 'exact

words' option. (This may be a button, a check-box, or require you toenclose the phrase in quotation marks.)

Not all search engines use the same search methods: what one fails tofind maywell be listed by another. Use different search engines, ortry one of the 'metasearch' sites, which take your query pass it on toseveral search engines, and combine the results before sending themback to you. One site of interest to us ishttp://webcorp.org.uk/wcadvanced.htm l, which can present searchresults either as a normal listing or as a concordance display.

Text is found on the Internet in different forms, and not all are easyto process in word-listing concordance software. Plain text files (.txt)present few problems, and most concordancers will deal with normalweb pages, (.htmt, .htm). Word-processor flles (.doc, .rtf and so on)may need to be loaded into the appropriate application flrst andsaved as plain text, as will Portable Document Format (.pdf) andPowerpoint (.ppt) documents.

Many web pages contain the text you want, but a lot of other stuffaswell: advertisements, navigation links and so on. Whenconcordanced, such pages may give a false impression by showingrepeated occurrences of go to top, buy now, and so on. If you have towork with these pages, you will have to use your browser's 'Save As'or'Export' function to fiirn the file into plain text, and then, in aword processor, edit out all the unwanted material.

The book in this series by Scott Windeat, David Hardisty, and DavidEastment entitled Thelnternet (zooo) gives extensive guidance on theuse ofthe Internet for language teachers.


Words and the senses

The sensory emphasis in coursebooks and classrooms is mainly onthe visual channel of perception. Blackboards, wall-charts, bookillustrations, and printed texts combine to produce a feast for thelearners' eyes, but at the expense of those other channels whichmediate experience, imagination, and memory. Nor is perceptionitself as simple as it might appear: at the neurological level, thesensory signals that we receive from, for example, the retina in oureye, make up less than a quarter of the information that our brainprocesses when presenting us with a 'visual image'-the rest iscomposed of memories, stored patterns, and learnt procedures. In aconcrete sense, what we perceive and how we perceive it are largelythe product of training and habit.

In the same way, our memories, whether of sensory impressions,procedures, or 'facts', will in turn be affected by the ways in whichwe have learnt to process reality. For many years, psychologists,neurologists, and other researchers in the human sciences haveobserved that we vary widely in our 'preferred channels' ofperception, and that this has marked effects on how we learn, andon how we express ourselves. (For an early, but still influentialaccount, see Bandler and Grinder rgzs, which draws heavily on thework of the psychologist Gregory Bateson and the psychotherapistMilton Erickson.) Others, such as Howard Gardner at Harvard, havegone further, arguing for the existence of 'multiple intelligences'within us to explain differences of perception, behaviour, thought,and creativity. (See the Annotated Bibliography section at the end ofthis book for works by Gardner and others in this area.)

The implications of this for us as teachers are far-reaching, if not atpresent very clear. We can accept, however, thathow material andinformation are presented to and worked on by our students willhave a profound effect on their learning, and that in vocabularylearning, for example, the memorability of a word or collocation will,for any particular learner, depend on the settings in which it isencountered, the channels through which it is processed, and thetype of intelligence (in Gardner's sense) into which it must beintegrated. In this chapter, therefore, we offer activities that rangeacross the sensory spectrum, and which allow the student to processand practise language in ways appropriate to their perceptual andcognitive preferences. These include not onlyvisual and auditory

Words and the senses | 81

activities, but also those that involve space and movement(kinaesthesia), as well as more abstract, logical exercises.

6.1 Words and our sensesLevel Lower-intermediateto advanced

Time 25-40 minutes

Aims To make students aware of their own sensory preferences throughthe words they choose and the texts they respond most strongly to.

Materials A copy of the text for each student.

Preparation

Make copies of the Sample sheet below, which consists of threedescriptions of the same car accident, each written from a differentsensory perspective.

Procedure

1 Read the three descriptions aloud to your class and ask them whatdifferences they notice between them.

2 Read again and repeat your question.

Sample sheet

An accident

1 Swooping down to the r ight. Wet air rushing in through thewindscreen. Back on to the motorway surface-grinding,shuddering along the central barr ier. Over on two wheels.I am high, high. We are t ipping? We sway for hours.Oomph, ooomph, down on four wheels and amazinglyI am in control again. Veer over on to the hard shoulder andf ind I have stopped. A t ingl ing of f ine windscreen glassunder my top skin.

2 | see the phone as i t goes. Then there is a blank, l ike l 'm notthere, until I see cars coming the other way close, over thebarrier. Everything looks tipped over-we are on twowheels. Now I can see everything clearly, the fog in my headhas cleared and I steer us over to the hard shoulder. In themirror I see cars pul l ing up behind. How must al l that havelooked to the people fol lowing us?

3 A sharp crack. Metal on metal. The muffled shatteringof the windscreen powdering. Normal tyre roar and thud,thud, thud-we are back on the motorway. Screeching,scratching, scraping along the steel barrier. Bang bang, backon four wheels. And now l ike si lence, st i l lness and weta i r a round me.


82 | Words and the senses

3

4

6.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Give them copies of the texts to read for themselves.

Ask the students, working on their own, to weave the bits they likefrom each text into a new one, adding whatever they wantthemselves.

Tell them to circulate what they have written or to put it up on thewalls, and to go round and read what the others have written.

Comments

The language that we use often reflects the way in which particularsenses dominate our perceptions and thoughts: those of us who areprimarily auditory for example, may use a high proportion of soundwords and metaphors. Similarly, we may respond better to languagethat matches our own sensory preferences. (Skilled interviewers andcounsellors often use this to encourage people to talk.) In this activity,students are led to become aware of their preferences and to usethem creatively.

Notion pictures

Beginner to intermediate

20-30 minutes

To review and recall vocabulary.

Dictionaries.

Preparation

Choose a notion srcf:' as joining, water things, or protection Take a largedictionary with you to class, especially if English is not your mothertongue.

Procedure

Exemplify the concept chosen by drawing: for joiningthis might be,say, a hinge, and a priest marrying two people.

Ask the students to draw as many things and people that join as theycan. Let them work either on their own or in pairs.

Once the students have got a good number of drawings down onpaper, and not before, ask them to label their drawings. They can useeach other's knowledge, dictionaries, andyou as an informant.

Ask the students to stand up and work in pairs, showing theirdrawings and teaching their words to other people.'vVhen they havefinished with one partner, they should move on to another, ratherthan cluster in larger and larger groups. Stop the exercise when eachperson has worked with about five partners.


Exampf e When we have done this exercise wilh joining as the concept word,students have produced drawings of the following:

crowd river dividing l ineaudience apex shelfengagement ring bread and butter electric plugcocktail border handcuffsofloge comma

With waterthings, students have produced drawings of the following

sprinklerocropushosepipeesrua rygumboots

spirit levelstarfishwhaleirr igat ionumbrel la

rapwellnverspnn9bath tubswimming pool

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

goggles water meter

Comments

This activity is mainly visual. It is highly repeatable, especially if you,or your students, are willing to choose less obvious 'notions'.

6.3 Machines and scenes


3040 minutes

To provide visual and kinaesthetic ways of presenting ahd learningnew vocabulary.

Dictionary.

Preparation

Make sure before you start that you are fully conversant with thewords that may be called for by the students, so that you can supplythem if asked. Have a dictionarv handv in class.

Procedure

Find someone in the group who likes drawing and ask them to drawor diagram a given scene/machine/situation/process on theblackboard. Tell the artist to use the whole of the board.

Once the drawing has begun to take shape get someone in thegroup with clear handwriting to come out and start labelling whathas been drawn. This should be done with the help of the group.As teacher, you should only supply a word when asked to: i.e. actas inforr,nant only.

Tell the students to copy the board drawing into their notebooks andto write the words in on the drawings: this makes more sense thanwriting lists ofwords.

The words now need to be used in a context beyond the picture.Three ways of doing this are suggested in the detailed Examplesthat follow.


Examples

1

Some word areas that lend themselves to this activity

Tell the artist to draw abicycle. Follow steps 1' z, and 3 above in order

to familiarize students with the necessaryvocabulary. Then ask the

students to look at the illustration below and to jot down all the

differences they can see between the two bikes there. Ask the

students to form pairs and compare the differences they have

found-this willbring oral production of the words being learnt.

Tell the artist to draw the people working onabuildingsife, withhouses at different stages of completion. ffier doing steps 1, z and 3above, ask the students a question such as Canthe plasterer work onthehousebefore thebricklayer? Then tell them to organize themselves into aline across the classroom representing the time sequence in whichbuilding workers work on a house. Each student (or pair of studentsin a large class) is to assume the role of one type of worker. Youshould take no part in this organization, except to keep themspeaking in English.

TeIl the ar[ist to visualize the dashboard qnd controls of a car, as seenfrom the back seat, and to draw them. After the group has followedsteps 1, z and 3 above, put two chairs out in front of them, side byside. Then invite one student to sit on one chair and play the part of adriving instructor, while you sit beside them and play the part of aslow pupil: show nervousness, and ask the instructor what eachcontrol is and what it is for. Then ask the whole class to act out thelearner-instructor scene simultaneously in pairs.

As a follow-up activity, in a later class, ask the pairs to continue thescene into the first stages of a driving lesson: moving offand comingto a stop.

Comments

The exercises outlined here maybe used in any situation involvingthe drawing and labelling of pictures, diagrams, plans, maps, etc.


6.4 ElephantsLevel

Time

Aims

1

2

Example


40-50 minutes

To encourage peer-teaching both of subject-matter and of lexis.

Procedure

Ask each student to write down a list of 8 to rz words that are centralto their profession, or to a hobby or interest.

Ask the students to draw a picture of an animal, machine, etc. All thestudents should draw the same subject: choose something which isclear, easy to draw, and which has recognizably distinct parts (forexample, elephant, cat, bicycle).

Ask each student to label the picture with the terms on their list fromstep 1: where to put the words on the picture is up to the student.Form the students into small groups. They should in turn give mini-lectures on their chosen subjects, using their labelled picture as avisual aid.

One student who worked in photolithographic printing produced thiselephant:

Comments

This exercise may at first sight seem strange. So it should, as it usesthe principle of 'making strange'what is familiar. Having to place thewords from your list on the elephant forces you to look at them froma new angle. Looking at and listening to another person doing thesame makes what theyhave to say, and the words theyuse to sayit,memorable.


6.5 Exploring vocabulary kinaesthetically

Level Beginnertoadvanced

Time 15-30 minutes, depending on class size.

Aims To learn vocabulary through movement.

Procedure

With an upper-intermediate class you mlght choose to teach thenames oftrees:

1 Bring the students together in a big standing circle. (This may have tobe in among the desks, if they are fixed.)

2 Ask one of the students to bring to mind a tree. This must be aparticular kind of tree, and the student should tlen mime the waythattreewould be: the student mimes silently and everybody roundthe circle mirrors the mime.

3 The student next round the circle mimes a tree they have in mind'Everybody mirrors them. And so on round the circle, or if your classis large, round part ofthe circle.

4 Go back to the flrst student, who mimes their tree again andsays the word for it in the target language if they can, otherwise intheir mother tongue. (You or the dictionary give thetarget-language version. )

5 Proceed round the group like this. Have a student at the boardwriting down the words in both languages, until all the tree namesare up on the board.

6 The students return to their seats and copy the words into theirnotebooks, adding the mother-tongue word and, if they wish,a quick drawing.

Variations

At beginner level you can have students deal with a word fleld such asan:rmals; lower-intermediate students can deal with weather words (fotexample, mist,breeze, gale, frost-how would you mime being 'frost'?).

Advanced-level students can work with abstract words in a givenarea, for example, truth, deception, sincerity, shallowness, distrust. (Thisproduces much more revealing mimes than trees.)

Comments

This technique harnesses the kinaesthetic and the visualabilities ofthe learners. It gets the students out oftheir seats andallows them to move, something thatis essenhal for a minority ofthem. In multiple intelligence terms (see the beginning ofthischapter), it simultaneously activates the kinaesthetic/spatialand linguistic intelligences.


6.5Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Coins speakElementary to advanced

15-25 minutes

To explore the spatial and hierarchical associations of words, as anaid to understanding and memory.

A collection of identical small objects, such as counters, coins,buttons. You will need around ten per student. You will also needone sheet of white paper for each pair of students.

Preparation

Prepare an introductorylist ofwords with a strong spatial orhierarchical sense for the students to practise on, for example,airpoft beach village field forest school qaraqeorc/ass crowd regiment queue party club junta

Prepare a list or lists ofwords youwould like the students to work on:these should be words with a strong emotional or controversialcontent, for example,

guilt independence innocence revenge contradictioningratitude age stability sadness hostility death

Procedure

Ask the students to form groups ofthree to four.

Give them your list of spatiafhierarchical words. Make sure theycheck with dictionaries or by asking that they understand them all.Give each group a pile ofr5-25 counters or coins, and a sheet ofplainwhite paper to affange them on.

Ask one student in each group to select a word from the list and thenwithout saying which word they have chosen, to represent the wordby means of an arrangement of counters or coins on the paper.

When the flrst student has done this, the others in the group shouldtry to guess which word was selected.

After each member of the group has selected and represented oneword from the introductory list, introduce the second set ofemotional words and ask tfiem to continue working on them. Stopthe exercise after two or three more rounds.

1

2


Examples

co ̂ o.-,?O C U V \ J

c gggg^L/ L)r )v' !2 u^cc

U L /JUNTA: pna lanx

surrounded byMASSCS

q

..C O^V C U ^U C O ( )

ooo

SADNESS: TEATS

fall ing from eye

6.7Level

Time

Aims 1

2

Materials

M I S E R Y : O N C I S

excluded fromthe group

Variation 1

After the introductory stage, ask the students to write their own listsof words that are important or exciting or disturbing for them, and towork in pairs on these. This exercise can be repeated many timesduring a course withwhatevervocabularyhappens to be underconsideration: even abstract words can have powerful spatialassociations for many people.

Variation 2

The exercise can equally well be used as a pre-reading exercise.It then has the double value of exploring vocabulary from the text,and getting the readers to think through their own ideas/prejudicesbefore reading.

Picture galleryElementary to advanced

35-50 minutes

To get students to use known (or half-known) vocabulary in newsituations, and to learn vocabulary from each other.To get students to write texts that other students willwant to read.

A collection of magazine pictures (see Preparation).

Preparation

Collect magazine pictures with a strong direct impact, visuallyuncluttered-portions are often more useful thanwhole pictures.Select enough pictures for each member of the class to have two.Make a varied selection: don't choose only pictures thatyou like. TakeBlu-Tack, or some other means of fixing the pictures to the walls.

Procedure

Split the class into two equal groups, one at each end of the room.Spread out halfthe pictures for one group and halffor the othergroup.


8

Example

6.8Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Ask each student to choose a picture, but not to show it to anyone inthe other group. Remove any unchosen pictures.

Ask the students to write clearly on a piece of paper twelve wordssuggested by the picture they have chosen. Ban adjectives.

When everyone has finished, take away each student's picture andask everyone to lay out their sheets ofwords at their end of the room.

Ask the students to change ends and choose one list from thosewritten by the other group.

Ask them to read their word lists and then to write a short paragraphdescribing the picture they imagine behind the words.

\Mhen they have done this, put up the pictures around the walls, andask the students to look round for the picture that best correspondsto the list they have worked from and to put up their paragraph andthe word list next to it.

Invite the students to go round and look at the pictures and read thecompositions.

A student in one group chose a picture of a detail cut from a magazineadvertisement: the skin on a woman's stomach glistening with beads ofmoisture; her well-manicured hand is on her stomach, above the navel; a finegold chain encircles her stomach. The student wrote this list of wordssuggested by the picture:

finger smooth skin bath red nails woman chainstomach water play hair navel

A student from the other group wrote this paragraph, suggested by theword list:

A woman was lying in the bath. She has smooth skin. You can see herstomach and she was playing with a chain and you can also see her nailswhich reflect your eyes.

Comments

This is a mainlyvisual activity. See 3.1, 'Invisible writing'.

Listening in colourElementary to advanced

15 minutes

To learn vocabulary through specific visual associations.

A poster or other large, colourful picture.

Preparation

Choose a brightly coloured painting or poster in which there isplenty of action. It should not be too complicated. Prepare to describethe picture without mentioning any colour.


6.9Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Procedure

Put the picture or poster up somewhere the class can't see it. Tellthem that the picture is highly coloured, but that theywill have toimagine the colours for themselves. Then describe the picture in fullspatial detail, but without mentioning any colour.

Ask people to tell the class which colours they saw. They should be asspecific as possible.

Show the class the picture. Points such as these may come up ingeneral discussion:

o how the painter felt when s/he painted itr what kind of painter s/he was/iso what kind of room it would suite would you l ike i t in your house?

Variation

Instead ofusing a picture, you can tell a story taking care not to useany reference to colour in your descriptions. Then ask the students tore-tell the story in colour, for example,The dark-eyedgirlput onherbluecoav.. . .

Comments

Our visual perception is very complicated, and even those of us whoare 'highlyvisual' may differ markedly in howwe visualize. Colour,for example, may be vitally important for some; for others line,shape, or proporlion may dominate.

Acknowledgements

This idea appeared in an article by Malgorzata Szwaj inModernEnglishTeacherintg84.

Get as much wrong as you canUpper-intermediate to advanced

10-20 minutes

To meet head-on the challenge of linking the meanings of wordswith their visual and auditory representations.

A copy of the text for each student.

Preparation

Make copies of the short passage included at step 4 below.

Procedure

Explain to the class that you going to give them a dictation and thatevery time they hear lhere a homophone they are to wnte lright downthe written version that is wrong for the context.


To make the idea of homophone clear, write up a few on the board:

l ' l l a is le is lesort sought*freeze frees friezeor ore oar awe*sees Cs seas serze

(Words marked " are homophonic only in those dialects where end-of-syllable 'r' is not sounded, such as British RP.)

Offer a small prize for the student with the most 'mistakes'.

Give this dictation and do it slowly:

Homophones are an odd phenomenon. Take the word site, which can meana location, or the abil ity to see, or the act of quoting. We tend to exclude themeaning that is not contextually right lf you did not do this, you would gobarmy So, to be able to shut out unwanted meanings is part of being sane.

Group the students in fours to share homophones theywereaware of.

Give out the homophonic text below for them to compare their ownwith.

Variation

For homework, ask three or four of your more linguistically-interested students to go to homophone sites on the web and then toproduce short texts like the one above, which include plenty ofhomophonic words.

If four students have done this homework, divide the class up intofour groups, so that each group takes a homophonic dictation fromone of the students. A good site for this homework ishttp://www. peak.orgl-jeremy/dictiona rylhomophones. htm I

Comments

For many classroom learners, having to learn the spoken and writtenforms of a language at the same time makes things doubly difficultnot least because this involves the simultaneous exercise of auditoryand visual skills, in either or both of which they may be deficient.

The principle of treating effors as interesting rather than wicked isfundamental to non-behaviourist teachins.

Homophones are a nod phenomenon. Take the whirredsite/sight/cite, witch can mean a plaice, ore the ability to sea, oarthe act of quoting. Wee tend to exclude the meaning that isknot contextually write. lf yew did knot do this ewe wood gobalmy*. Sow/Sew to bee able to shut out the unwantedmeanings is part of being seine. (a serne net, or the River Seine)



6 .10Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Acknowledgements

We learnt th e idea of une dictde sans fautes oar une dicl6.e cents fautes(diclation without mistakes, or one-hrmdred-mistqke dictahon) fiom the

fiches pddagogiques in Le FranEais dansle Monde, February zooo.

OHP listsBeginner to advanced

10-15 minutes

To break up the order and visual monotony of lists as an aid tomemory.

Overhead projector and transparencies.

Preparation

Make a list of ro-r5 target-language words or phrases that you wantyour students to learn or revise, or ask them to glve you short lists ofwords or phrases they are having difficulty in remembering, andmake your selection from them.

Write the words on an overhead transparency in black, in two neatcolumns.

Write the words again on another transparency, but this time scatterthem all over the sheet. Use different coloured inks, different sizesand styles of lettering. Write some of the words at an angle, orbackwards. or around the circumference of a circle.

Prepare three more ffansparencies as in step 3, using the samewords or phrases but writing them differently on each sheet.Be adventurous.

Procedure

Put up the first transparency (the neat one in black lettering)'Allow the students to look at it for ro-r5 seconds, then switch it off.

Ask the students to jot down any words they remember and for eachto add abrief explanation or mother-tongue equivalent, frommemory or by guesswork.

Give the class five minutes to compare and discuss the words theyhave jotted down. If the words are new to them, you may want to join

in at this stage to give explanations and examples.

Tell the students to put away their written notes and toconcentrate on the screen. Flash up all five transparencies in turn,each for ro-r5 seconds.

Ask the students, in groups of three to five, to recall each word orphrase and to discuss which visual representation of it was the mostmemorable.

Words and the senses I 93

Variation

Instead of an overhead projector, you could use a computer + videoprojector and present your lists using one of the many software'presentation packages' such as PowerPoint or Shockwave. (In thesecases, you could even add a soundtrack!)

Follow-up

This is a highly repeatable actMty. Once the students haveunderstood the process, you can get them to prepare the OPtransparencies for their own use, or to use with students in otherclasses.

Comments

For some people, words presented in neat lists can be memorable. Formany, however, the very neatness makes it difficult to bring back apicture of what they have read: our visual mernory often depends onthe unusual, the unexpected. Scattering words on a page orblackboard or overhead projector transparency can be very helpful ingving students signposts to their memories.

This technique is particularlyuseful in preparing students forexams.

6.11 Words round the circleLevel Beginner to intermediate

Time 10-15 minutes

Aims To practise saying words using the fullvocal range.

Preparation

Choose ro-rz useful collocations from your coursebook or elsewhere-

Procedure

1 Get the students standing in a large circle right round the classroom-2 Numberthemoff 1 2 3 4 5 6 T 8... 7 2 3 4 etc.

3 Ontheboardwrite:

All 1s to whisoer.All 2s to call out loudly.All 3s to speak slowly.All 4s to soeak fastAll 5s to mouth without sound.Al l 6s to sing.All 7s to soeak in a shrill voice.All 8s to speak in their mother tongue.

4 Explain that you are going to take one of the collocations chosen inyour hands and then both say it andhanditto the person on yourright. This person holds out their hands and takes the collocation,then turns to the person on the right and gives it into their hands adsays it in the way suggested above, whispering, singing, etc.... Thus


1

2

the collocation goes right round the circle as an'object' and as anever-changing sequence of sounds.

Do the exercise round the circle. If any student makes a mess ofpronouncing the phrase, walk over to the person'downstream' ofthem (to their right), and give the phrase back to the person on themistake-maker's left, who then again gives it to the mistake-maker.This allows the person with the problem to hear the sounds twiceagain before re-pronouncing them.

Any student unsure ofthe pronunciation ofthe phrase can cross thecircle and grve you the phrase. You give it back and say it to theperson, who then goes back to their place in the circle to continueth-e chain.

Variation

This can also be done as a follow-up.

Get the students to work in circles of 6-'tz.

Ask them to work as in the activity above, but to choose forthemselves the best or most interesting way (shouting, whispering,etc.) of saying each item.

Comments

This activity is both highly auditory and kinaesthetic, and has provedvery useful in teaching adult immigrants without literacy skills.

Fi l l ing a landscapeBeginner to advanceo

3 minutes in the first class, 10 minutes in the second.

To encourage students to discover vocabulary for themselves andto teach it to others.

Photocopies of a picture for each student.

Preparation

Choose a picture with strong contrasts, such as a Breughelsnowscape, that will photocopy clearly. Make a copy for each student.

In the first class

Give out the copies. Ask the students for homework to write on thepicture anywords it suggests. These maybe labellings of features thatare there or they may be words suggested by the feel and mood of thepicture. Encourage students to use dictionaries to flnd the words theywant. Tell them they must be willing to teach any new words theyhave used.

In the second class

Put the students in fours to compare the words they have found: a lotof peer teaching will follow.

6 .12Level

Time

Aims

Materials


Variation I

The same exercise can of course be done with the students' ownpictures, but this often has the effect of lessening the peer teachingaspect: one may be more interested in the different way in whichsomeone else has seen the same picture, than in their reactions to acompletely different picture.

Variation 2

Instead of asking the students to focus on what they can see in thepicture, get them to speculate on what they cannot see: things whichmaybe hidden behind other things, things which are outside theframe of the picture, things or people which were there before thepicflrre was painted, orwhich the artist decided to leave out.

Comments

Peer teaching is an excellent way of learning. The activity is primarilyvisual.

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

6.13 Fishy adjectivesIntermediate to advanced

30-40 minutes

To use, in a creative, memorable way, adjectives that describepeople.

Copies of either Worksheet 1 or Worksheet 2 for each student.(See pages 98-9.)

Procedure

Ask the students to follow the instructions of whichever worksheetyougive them.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this exercise from Lou Spaventa.


Worksheet 1

reflectiveostracizedhostilemarginalill-at-easeintolerantconfusediilsubversive

selective deludedredundant self-centredcreative diffidentantisocial differentdiscriminating victimizedunemployed questioningdelinquent responsivein a dilemma irresponsible

paranoidexperiencedgullibletroublededgyconfusedprouddisruptive

out of her/his depthcondescendingeasily influencedout-of-placedeviantsent to Coventrytoo big for his/her bootsdivided

1 lf you were one of the f ish in the shoal, which one would you be? Put a tick by it.

2 What three things might you say to the rest of the fish in the shoal about the fishin the bottom left-hand corner? Write your answers:

Pick 10-15 adjectives and phrases from the list below or from your head, todescribe the fish that is out of the shoal. Look up any words from the list youdon't know or ask your neighbour.

Work in pairs with several different people in the group to find how and whythey chose their adjectives.

Talk to your partner about anyone you know who is like the fish outside theshoal, and about how they show i t .


Worksheet 2

"l

234

Give al l these f ish nicknames and wri te them down.

Which fish would you most like to be?

Which f ish would you most hate to be?

Jot down ten adjectives to describe the fish you most like and ten to describe theone you l ike least.

Compare your answers with your neighbours' .


Level

Time

Aims

Beginner to upper-intermediate

10-12 minutes

To encourage students to express meaning in any way that suitsthem (visually, through movement, etc.), and then to ask for andlearn the specific vocabulary they need.

Preparation

None, since the purpose is to work on the students' own areas ofinterest. (You may, however, find yourself doing quite a lot of follotu-up work, especially if their interests differ widely from yoursl)

Procedure

Get the students into a big standing circle. Ask them to think of apiece of sporting equipment and imagine they are holding it in theirhands. (It could be a baseball bat, a football, a golf tee, a fishing ro4etc.)The student with the object in their hands should feel its weigfr.texture, and temperature.

Ask one student, A, to showtheir object and then to hand it, withorusayrng anything, to B, their right-hand neighbour.

6.14 Objects round the circle


3 Student B receives the object, guesses what it is, and passes it silentlyon to C, who is one away to their right. Alternatively B may changethe object received into some other sporting object before passing iton to C.

Continue on round the circle.

Have a secretary at the board and askAwhat they gave to B. If Adoesn't know the word in English, then they say it in their mothertongue and you or a dictionary translates it. The secretary puts eitheror both words up on the board.

B now says what they received and then what they passed on. C doesthe same.

And so on round the circle. To get the students more into the realityof the objects, sometimes stop the studentwho is speaking and askthem about the weight, size, and colour of what they were receivingand passing.

The students sit down and an artistic one comes to the board anddraws quick sketches of each item. The others copy down the wordsand the sketches.

5.15 Picturing words and phrasesLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To use detailed, creative visualization to associate with the Englishwords the students are learning.

Preparation

Choose eight to twelve words and phrases you want the students togointo more deeply.

Procedure

1 (optional)Ask the students to shut tfieir eyes and notice theirbreathing. Ask them to imagine that they are breathing stress andanxiet]a out and energy in. (The fi.rst time you do this with teenageclasses be ready for giggling and noise.)

2 Say the words and phrases you have chosen aloud, leaving a ro- to zo-second pause after each. Ask the students to make picnrres in theirmind's eye as they hear each word or phrase.

3 Bring the students back from their reverie, say again one of the wordsand phrases, and ask a student of your choice all or some of thefollowing questions. Tell the other students to note down thequestions you ask:

How big was the picture you got?How close was the picture to you?Were you inside the picture, or outside looking in?Was i t in black and white or in colour?

4

5


Was it moving or stil l?What, exactly, did you see?

During this stage, students who did not understand some of thedictated words will have an opportunity to find out or ask aboutthem.

Choose another word from the list and put the same questions toanother student. Repeat with a third person.

Pair the students and ask them to explore the pictures they got fortJ'e words, using the questions you asked in step 3.


Word sets

There are manypractical reasons for organizingwords (or, moreoften, what the words refer to) into categories, or sets, or 'word

fields'. A supermarket without shelf labels would be a nightmare tonavigate, and it is a great help to the curriculum designer and thecoursebook writer to split up the vocabulary the student is expectedto learn into 'topic areas'. Linguists also like to work with word sets,not only grammatical categories, but meaning groups (synoqrms ornear-synonyms), ideas of 'concrete' and'abstract','animate' and'inanimate', words of a particular origin or register, and so on.

In relation to learning, however, things work out rather lessefficiently. We do not always agree about the categories we set up: wedivide up the world, and the words we use to describe it, in quitedifferent ways, according to our culture, our upbringing, our mothertongue, and our personal experiences and thought processes.Moreover, the categories that we use to describe things, or to findthings in supermarkets and reference books, do not necessarilycorrespond to the needs of learning and memory: very often weremember things because they are unusual, and do not fi.t into acategory and we forget things or muddle them up precisely becausethey do flt into a category and lose distinctive, memorable featuresthereby.

In this chapter, therefore, we have collected a dozen or so exerciseswhich deal with word sets in challenging, unorthodox ways, in whichthe students are encouraged to question, compare, and buildvocabulary sets for themselves. Some offer newways of handlingready-made sets (for example, 7.r,

'Intelligence test', and 7.8,'Prototypes'); others suggest personal, even surreal ways ofgroupingwords (for example, 7.6,

'Diagonal opposites', 7.ro, 'Mapping one's

mood'), while z.+, 'Collecting collocations', ar'd7.9, 'Words from the

homestay family', suggest ways in which the students can learn fromtheir own observations of language.

Word sets | 101

3 7.1Level

Time

Aims

3

Examples

Intell igence testBeg inner to intermediate

10 minutes

To explore the idea of a 'word set'and the many different ways inwhich one can categorize vocabulary.

Procedure

Put up the following items on the blackboard, explaining orillustrating where necessary.

pliers harrnner nail saw

Ask the students to write down the odd man out and give theirreason(s). \Mhen they have done this, ask for their suggestions. Thentell them that the 'right answer' is pliers, because it is the only onewith two legs. If there are many'incorrect' answers, a discussion onthe validity of such tests mightwell ensue.

Now ask the group to make as many sets as possible using two ormore of the items in the list pliers, hammer, nuil, saw.

all metal: nail hammer pliersaggressive/active: pliers saw hammernail set: nail hammer plierscould beverbs/are grammatically singular: hammer nail sawfools: hammer oliers sawonesyllable: nail saw-er ending (agent form): ham mer pl iersGermanicoriqin: hammer saw nail

7.2 Unusual word familiesLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 10 minutes for most of the suggestions below.

Aims To encourage students to group words in unusual, memorablecategories.

Procedure

Use only one of these student-directed suggestions in any givenlesson:

a Work in pairs and list things found in an office but not in a home.b Besides the sex differences, how can you tell your father and

mother apart? List the most salient physical and emotionaldifferences. Do the work alone, then explainyour list to a partneryou trust.

c Work with a parlner. List the differences between your car/birydeand theirs.

102 | Word sets

d Here is a list of commonverbs:

clean lLsten heat taste squeeze push tap open

Work in pairs and think of three typical doers of each action andone atypical one. For example:

clean: typical: laundryman/painter/dentistatypical:tramp

Compare your lists witfi those of other pairs.e Work together in fours. One person should think of a place,

building, or room, and tell the others three things that would befound there. The others should then try and guess the place. Forexample:

sruDENr e (thinkingof alibrary): shelf sunblind cataloguesruDENT r:A lawyer's office?sruDENT c: A supermarket?sruDENT n: Here's an extra word:book ...

ChainsElementary to advanced

20 minutes

To encourage students to group words in imaginative andmemorable ways.

One word card for each student.

Preparation

Prepare a card for each student. On each cardwrite the name of oneman-made object (for example, sweater, book, sewing-machine).

Procedure

Divide the class into small circles (four to five members). Give eachstudent a word card.

Ask the students to look at the word on their card and to write eitherthe name of something tfiat went into the making of the object infront of the word, or the name of something that the object mightbecome after the word. For example, if the word was sweater, orremight write sheepbefore it or paper after it.

Each student should then pass the card to their left-hand neighbour,who should again write a word before or after the two words now onthe card, for example, grass sheep sweater.

7.3Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Word sets | 103

3 Variation

Instead of arranging the chain in a linear fashion, a tree could bebuilt, with each student in turn adding a link, for example,:

'\ *\

,/t'^"cotton sheep

sweater

paper dishcloth

book parcel compost

Col lecti ng col locationsIntermediate to advanced

5 minutes in the first lesson; 30-40 minutes in the second.To expand students' understanding and acquisition of above-the-word vocabulary.

Enough English-language newspapers and magazines(old ones will do) to be able to give at least half of one to eachstudent. A page or two is not enough for this activity.

Procedure

Lesson 1

Give each student a newspaper or half a newspaper. Ask them forhomework to pick out adjective-noun combinations where at leastone item is new to them, or else their juxtaposition is. Ask them toflnd six such combinations each and to prepare to teach theirmeanings to the rest of the class. This may well mean bringing in thecontext in which they found them. Stress that they must be able toteach their collocations clearly and briefly.

Lesson 2

Divide the board into eight columns and invite a student to put one oftheir combinations in the first two columns and to teach it to theclass. Then ask the group to produce other nouns that combine wellwith that adjective. Suppose a studentvolunteers a combination suchas FORTHCOMIIVG EVENT-the columns might well look like this:adjective noun noun noun noun noun noun nounforthcoming event sale marriage issue publication strike? debnIf a person in the group comes up with a dubious companion forFORTHCOMING llke strike.let the students thrash it out as far aspossible among themselves-do not make a ruling for them, excathedra.Invite different students to volunteer and teach one oftheir sixcombinations. until the board is full.

7.4Level

Time

Aims

Materials

104 | Word sets

Variation

Many other combinations can be worked on, using the same method'

Here are some of them:

noun-noun: taxburdendanangmaster

adverb-adj ective : unforttntately misle adingvastly complicated

adverb-verb greatlytoberegreLtedinevitably flowedfrom

verb-adverb: vary greatlYrepliedhuffiIy

2 Put a list of twenty nouns and ten verbs on the board. The students

copy down the lists and supply each noun with a typical adjective and

each verb with a typical adverb, for example:

an eccentric milkonureto kiss lovinglY

Comments

Ifyou have access to a corpus ofEnglish and a concordance program

(see Chapter 5), you can use this to check out the frequenry of word

combinations. Alternatively, you can use a good Internet search

engine (such as Googte) for the occulrence of particular combinationsin web pages: make sure that you specify 'exact words' when you

enter the search phrase (for example, by enclosing the phrase

between double quotation marks).

Acknowledgements

We learnt this technique from Mike Lavery.

7.5 How strong is the collocation?

Level Upper-intermediateto advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To expand students'understanding and acquisition of above-the-word vocabularY.

Preparation

Choose a number of words closely related in meaning and/or context,

and make a grid like the example below

Procedure

1 Put this collocational grid on the board and ask the students to copy it

out into their books. Write it up without the +/-/? marks you have

on the next page: they give you, the teacher, the key.

Word sets | 105

unblemished spotless flawless immaculate imoeccable

performanceargumentcomplexionbehaviourkitchenrecororeputatrontasteordercredentials

T

T

?

T

)T

T

T

T

?

?

?

?

T

T

)

T

T

T

7

T

T

)T

T

T

5

5

Ask the students to look the adjectives above up in their dictionaries.Ask them to put some of definitions/translations up on the board.

Pair the students and explain that:

spotless collocates strongly with kitchen and with record (+)spotless collocates weakly with complexion (?lspotless does not collocate vnth order (-)

Pair the students and ask them to decide which of the adjectivesalong the top collocate strongly, weakly, or not at all with the nounsdown the left hand side. They mark (+) for a strong collocation, (?) fora weak one, and (-) for zero collocation.

Put the pairs together in sixes to compare their findings.

Give your book to a student to put the key up on the board.

Variation 1

This activity can be supplemented with web searches andconcordance look-ups, though in the latter case there may not besufficient data to come to film conclusions, as many of the items willbe of comparatively low frequency in the corpus used.

Variation 2

Advanced students may benefit from deliberately experimentingwith atypical collocations, as away of generating more imaginative,and less clich6-ridden, text.

Acknowledgements

We owe this exercise to a brilliant book by Mona Baker. In OtherWords, aCowsebookonTranslation Routledge, 1992, from an originalidea in Rudska, et aI.TheWordsYouNeed. Macmillan, 1982.

105 | Word sets

7.6 Diagonal oppositesLevel

Time

Aims

Materials

Beginner to intermediate

10 minutes

To get students to look closely at the semantic and situationalassociations of a word, and thus fix new vocabulary very firmly.

A soft ball.

Procedure

Put up on the blackboard three or fourwords with clear opposites,for example , cold, sad, rise. Ask the class to suggest opposites for them.

Add two or three words that do not have clear opposites,for example ,ball, typewriter,Wednesday. Suggest that by using thepersonal associations ofwords one can give these 'opposites'

too. For example,ballfmouse are opposites because both are cats'playthings-the one dead, the other alive.

Ask the class to form circles of six to ten people. Give each group aball. The first player takes the ball, shouts out a word, then throwsthe ball to another member of the circle. The second player shoutsout an 'opposite', then a new word, and throws the ball toa third player. Let the game continue until twenty words havebeen dealtwith.

Acknowledgements

We learnt the ball-game version from an internal publication broughtoutbyVolkshochschule teachers of French in Lower Saxony,Germanv.

7.7 The egg exerciseLevel Beginnertoadvanced

Time 20 minutes

Aims To explore the various meanings and associations of aword or phrase.

Procedure

1 Ask the students, working on their own, to complete the followingsentence stems as variedly and in as manyways as they can: at leastseven completions for each sentence:

An egg

Eggs

It s hard to eggs

2 Have a student come to the board and act as group secretary. Thestudents shout out aII the nouns and verbs they have used in theircompletions. Fill the board with the students' lexis.

Word sets | 107

3 In fours the students read out their sentences to each other.

Follow-up

This activity can be used over and over again to explore or fix themeanings of newvocabulary. Simplyreplace eggbythe newitem, forexample, Agrandmother [is a child's best friend], It'shardto [oppose]grandmothers.

7.8 Prototypes

to rainro Snow

oryro pour

Level Beginnertoadvanced(The example set below is for lower-intermediate.)

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To get students to consider how word sets are built up, by askingsuch questions as'How strongly does this word belong to its set?',and in so doing to consider how effective for them suchcategorizations are in organizing and remembering vocabulary.

Preparation

Find or construct sets ofwords, as in the examples below.

Procedure

1 Ask each student to take a clean sheet of paper and to writeweatherright in the middle of it.

2 They then draw flve or six concentric circles round the word, theouter one reaching the edge ofthe paper.

3 Tell the students you are going to dictate a number of words to themto do with weather.If the students regard these as very centrallyweather words, they put them in the inner circles. If they regard themas peripheral weather words, they put them in the outer areas.Here is a list:

blustery showers drought barometerbright intervals storm outlook

temperature dawn overcastunsettledsunshine

brightto blow

l u l lfogbreeze

to clear up low pressureearthquake rain or shineflood downpourthe sun cloud

forecast force-eight winddamp scorchingsand storm hurricanesky moon

Check that all the words vou dictated are known to at least some ofthe students.

Group the students in fours to share their placing of the vocabulary,in terms of how centrally'weatherish' they feel the words are. Thewords at the very centre of their circles could be called 'prototypes'-

the members most typical of their set.

108 | Word sets

Sample text 1

Variations

1 You can do this 'prototype' exercise with anyword set, for example:

Which males in the following list are most male?

bull ogre dog stag tomcat drake boar rambillygoat cock man elephant stallion gander cockerel'vVhich are the most'foody' of these foods?'Which the least?

tapioca cheese rice potatoes lamb snake burgercucumber trout chips art ichoke banana f lour

A roleplay: choose, or get the students to choose, a set ofwords suchasbirds,houses, carnivores. Each student should then choose a differentmember of the set and be prepared to speak on its behalf. Forexample, lfbirds were the set chosen, one student might choose

falcon, another pigeon, a third chicken, and so on. The students theneach give a one-minute talk about the set member they have chosen,in which they try to convince the rest that their choice is prototypical

of the whole set. This is done most effectively when the students give

their talks inrole, i.e. they might begin 'I am a falcon. I am light,powerful, and very fast' rather than 'I've chosen the falcon. A falconis light, powerful, andveryfast.'

(Advanced)The degree of 'prototypicality' of words may also becomeapparent in a text. Ask your students, in groups ofthree, to read thefollowing extract and underline flve to eight nouns in it. Workingtogether, they should then write each underlined word down andnext to it the name of a set to which the word might belong, followedby three or four other words that might belong to the same set. Theyshould then read and re-read the text aloud, replacing each oftheunderlined words in turn by a different member of the set, anddiscuss the effect of their substitutions.

Frightened people never learn, I have read. If that is so, they certainlyhave no right to teach. I'm not a frightened man-or no morefrightened than any other man who has looked at death and knows itis for him. AII the same, experience and a little pain had made me amite too wary of the truth, even towards myself. George Smiley put

that right. George was more than a mentor to me, more than a fiiend.Though not always present, he presided over my life. There weretimes when I thought of him as some kind of father to replace the

one I never knew. George's visit to Sarratt gave back the dangerousedge to my memory. And now that I have the leisure to remember,

that's what I mean to do for you, so that you can share my voyage and

ask yourself the same questions.

fohn le Carr6. TheSecretPilgrim. Hodder & Stoughton, r99r)

Try out different kinds oftext: newspaper article, coursebookpassage, business letter, etc. The students may also like to work withtexts they have written themselves.

Using the technique with poems can also bring unexpectedinsights into the perceptions ofboth poet and reader:

Word sets | 109

Sample text 2 Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,Shaped to the comfort of the last to goAs if to win them back. Instead, bereftOf anyone to please, it withers so,Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,A joyous shot at how things ought to be,Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:Look at the pictures and the cutleryThe music in the piano stool. Thatvase.

(Philip Larkin. ThelNhitsunWeddings. Faber & Faber, 1964)

Comments

In logic and mathematics, sets are deflned precisely in terms of thecommon properties of their members. In the real world, the sets orcategories we construct are far less precise. Even conventional wordsets, such asfurniture andfruit, include and exclude membersaccording to criteria that are far from cleat Apear is obviously a fruit,along with an apple, an orange, and abanana. For the botanist, so is atomato, though few tomato-eaters would agree. For them, it is avegetable, along with p eqs, potatoes, and cabbage. A cupboard is definite$a piece of furniture, blttabuilt-in cupboard is definitely not. Because itis immovable? Perhaps, but the seats one flnds in airports andconcert-halls, screwed to the floor and often to each other, are just asmtchfurniture as the armchairs and dining-chairs in our homes.

Acknowledgements

We learnt the idea of 'prototype' fromAitchison (1994).

7.9 Words from the homestay familyLevel Beginnertoadvanced

(The vocabulary in the example given is intermediate.)Time 2-3 minutes in the first lesson; 20-30 minutes in the second lesson.Aims To provide a simple research tool for students studying in an

English-speaking environment and living in host families.

Lesson 1

For homework, ask the students to get their hosts to take them intothe kitchen and teach them the names of all the utensils and thevarious verbs connected with cooking. Each student should come tothe next lesson with a substantial list.

Lesson 2

1 Get the students to fill the board with their cooking words.2 Get students to explain any of the words the others don't know

110 | Word sets

Show the students how many of the kitchen verbs have strongmetaphorical meanings :

Her anger boiled over. He was simmering with rage.Cool as a cucumber. To stew in your own juice.

Variation 1

There are many other areas in which the students can quarryvocabulary fiom the host family, for example:

the words around the car prv wordsgardening words

Variation 2

the vocabulary of home-buying

People working, but not living, in an English-speaking environment(for example, employees of British orAmerican companies abroad, orimmigrants to an English-speaking country whose home life isconducted in their mother tongue) can do very similar'researchtasks'with their colleagues, etc.

7.1O Mapping one's moodLevel Post-beginnertoadvanced

Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To differentiate items in a'word field', which may easily beconfused with each othen in a personal, memorable way.

Preparation

Choose a lexical field appropriate to your students' level andcultural background. The example chosen hereis animak, for anelementarygroup.

Procedure

1 Ask one student to act as secretary at the board and ask the group tobrainstorm all the animal words they know. Add a few more youthink they might want to learn.

2 Ask the students to work individuallv and write down the names ofthree classmates of their choice.

3 Ask each student to write down which animafanimals you, theteacher, have been like during the lesson so far, and which animalthe student herself has been like. She also chooses three animals toflt the three chosen students; for example, a given student mightdecide she has been a goat, the teacher has been a boa constrictor,and her three classmates have been a cat, a dog, and a squirrel.

4 Group the students in fours to share the animals theyhave chosen forthemselves and for the teacher.

5 Round offthe exercise by having half a dozen people telling thegroup the animal they have chosen for you and why.

Word sets | 111

7 . 1 1Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Variation

You can do this exercise with many sets of words, for example:

sunshine, showers, grey sky, lightning, sharp frost, monsoon, first snowwaterfall, hill, stream, moraine, plain, forest. marsh, heath, paddy fieldbassoon, violin, harp, flute, cymbals, piano, triangle, piccolo

Acknowledgements

We learnt this technique from Christine Frank at Pilgrims.

A hierarchy of associationIntermediate to advanced

20-35 minutes

To organize word sets as a hierarchy.

Copies of a text you or the class have chosen.

Preparation

Choose five to six key words from a text that you want them to reaC

Procedure

Explain to the class that, when words are organized in sets, a hierarchyoften emerges, representing levels of generality in the various contexBin which the words may appear. Church, for example, may appear highin the order in contexts such as Clrurch andState. but much lower in ThcCatholic church is on the corner, opytosite the Baptist chapeLBefore the students read the text put the first key word you havechosen on the board. With a student secretary at the board, get themto brainstorm 1o-2o words they connect with the key word.In a different part of your blackboard space, write up the key word onthe left-hand side halfway down from the top. Ask the class whichwords brainstormed are of a lower level of generality, which of thesame level, and which of a higher level. If the key word were church,here is how this board work might look:

Do the same with the other kev words and then have the studentsread the text.

Allow time for the whole class to give feedback on how thinking aboutthe key words before reading may have influenced their reading of the

worship faith evilbuilding religious property

church chapel mosque temple communityarch font crypt roof

text. This can be an excellent lead-in to work on register and style.

Acknowledgements

We received the spark for this exercise from Linda Orr.112 | Word sets

Persona I

The best conversations are those in which the participants aremotivated not only to talk but also to listen, and the best timeto learn vocabulary is when the need to express or understandis at its height.

The nine activities in this chapter encourage the students toexchange more personal experiences and thoughts, includingthoughts about language. 8.2, 'Life keSrwords', and 8.4, 'Scars', focuson experiences, while 8.8, 'Phrases I like', is more directly aboutlanguage. 8.r, 'You give my talk', creates a more interactive frame forlistening. 8.6, A letter from the teacher', introduces the vocabularyyou want the class to learn in a more personal, involving way. Thereare other activities elsewhere in the book, such as 7.1o,

'Mapping

one's mood', andu.4, 'Lexical furniture', which cover the same kindofground.

8.1 You give my talkLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 5-10 minutes in the first class and 3G45 minutes in the second.

Aims To motivate students to listen to, and therefore learn from,each other.

Procedure

Lesson 1

1 Ask the students individually to list five topics they would like to heara short talk on, and then in pairs to exchange lists.

2 Ask each student to choose and mark one item on their partner's listthat they would be willing to talk on.

3 Students should give back the lists to their partners.

4 For homework, tell the students to prepare a vocabulary list for thetopic their partner has elected to speak on.

Lesson 2

1 Have the students pair up as in the previous class and give theirvocabulary lists to their partners.

Personal | 113

2 Each student should nowwork individually on preparing their talk;they may use the words on their partner's list or not, as they choose,but the list will provide some idea of their future listener'sknowledge of and attitude towards the subject.

3 Ask one member of each pair to give their talk to the other.4 Ask the listener in each pair to explain how they came to construct

the vocabulary list, and what theywould have said in giving the sametalk.

5 Repeat the activitywith each listener now giving their talk.

Comments'vVhile speakers often impose subject matter on listeners, listenersseldom have the same privilege. Here the listener suggests the topicand guides its content by proposing a set of keywords. The wordschosen by the listener will also give the speaker some idea of thelistener's level of knowledge of the topic: for example, given thetopic 'Computers', the word-list keyboard, screen, Microsofi, wordprocessor, spellingwottld convey a very different impression frominstruction cycle, nm-time, optimize, kernel, hardware abstractionlayer.

8.2 Life keywordsLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 25-40 minutes

Aims To practise and share vocabulary which is personally important.

Procedure

1 Ask the students what date it is today. Write it on the board. Askthem what the date was seven years ago-put that on the board. Askthree or four people how old they were on that date, seven years ago-

2 Now ask the students to write down ten key emotional or idea wordsand phrases that sum up their lives now and a further ten to sum uptheir lives then.

3 Ask the students to pair offand explain the words and theirsignificance to their partners. Have them change partners three orfour times, not more, as this kind of talking is very tiring.

Examples In this activity. one person of 39 came up with:'Now'words 'Past'words

making new changeletting free hitch-hikingconflict inside shadow theatrecommitment commitmentunease with work group Chilefurure break with motherretirementdeath

114 | Personal

Another; an 18-year-old, had:

moneyuniversityfamilyfriendsfutureengagement

marblesfriendsschoolmusrcfathermother

8.3 Turn out your pocketsLevel Elementaryto upper-intermediate

Time 20-35 minutes

Aims ,To use practical, day-to-day vocabulary in personally relevantconversations.

Procedure

1 Ask each student to list some or all of the objects in their handbag/wallet/pockets: ask them to write their lists clearly.

2 'vVhen the lists are ready, ask the students to fold them and givethem to you. ShuffIe the lists and let each student pick one atrandom. No student should end up with their own list.

3 Ask the students to guess whose list they have and to tell thegroup why.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this exercise from Lou Spaventa. A similar one is found inG. Moskowitz. Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Aass. NewburyHouse, 1978.

8.4 ScarsLevel Elementaryto upper-intermediate

Time 40-50 minutes

Aims To motivate students to overcome lack of vocabulary whennarrating.

Preparation

Bring back to mind the story of a scar you have or that a close relativeofyours has.

Procedure

1 Tell the students your scar story. If it is about a scar of yours that isshowable, let them see it.

2 Invite the group to think of how they got whatever scars they have.Give them a few minutes to bring their stories back to mind.

Personal | 115

Ask a volunteer to tell their story. Help with words and write anyaccident-related vocabulary up on the board, for example, wound,bandage, stretcher, stitches, operate. Onlywrite up words actually neededby the narrator.

Ask three or four more people to tell their scar stories to the wholegroup, and build up further vocabulary on the board.

If the class is a large one, now ask them to work in threes andcontinue telling scar stories, until everybodywho wants to hastold one.

Pair the students. Each student is silently to imagine a scar story fortheir partner. At this stage, remind them of the words on the board.Discourage them from writing.

Each student tells the partner the scar story they have created forthem.

Variations

There are many other themes that can be used, though at differentlevels ofintensity and involvernent.lf scars evoke short stories, forexample, hair canproduce autobiographical novels. (How was yourhairwhen you were eight? Can you remember the first time you visited ahatrdresser's? Have you ever dyed your hair? ....1

Other themes for anecdotes that we have tried include stairs,clothes, andhouses.

Comments

As we noted in the introduction, vocabulary is best learnt at themoments it is needed. Some topics are intrinsically compulsive, andwill motivate the speaker to flnd ways of expressing their meaningdespite deflciencies of vocabulary. In steps 3 and 4, the teacher hasthe opportunity of teaching vocabulary when the students' attentionis at its height.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this exercise from Christine Frank.

8.5 Words my neighbour knowsLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 20 minutes

Aims To encourage students to teach each other and learn from eachother.

Procedure

1 Divide the class into pairs.

115 | Personal

Ask each student to write a list of ten words which their partner

a shouldknow,b should know but probably doesn't,c deflnitely doesn'tknow.

The partners must not communicate at this stage'

Then ask the pairs to check out the accuracy ofthe predictions.

A letter from the teacher

Post-beginner to advanced

10-15 minutes

To present vocabulary to students in a direct, 'l-Thou' context.

A copy of your letter for each student (see Preparation).

Preparation

Write a letter to your class, either about something personal you feellike telling them, about something from a previous class you wantthem to think back to, or about something connected with the classtoday. Having written the letter without thinking specially about thelanguage add in all the slmonyms you can, as in this example takenfrom Mario's work with an advanced class at Pilgrims:

Dear Monday Morning PeoPle,

I hope you had a good weekend, and Carmen, not too much riceovermucn

with the host familylhomestaY

How was your trip to the West Country, Celia?excursion Devon and Cornwall

This morning I hope we will be able to interview a lady at thewoman

Students' Union, up on the UKC campus. Have you been there andwandered across that hilltoP?strolledMarvellous views out over the city and the gentle, orchard-coveredsuper/wonderf ul/breath-ta ki nghi l ls that surround i t .

are all around it /are on everY side

Make a copy ofyour letter for each student.

Procedure

Give the students your letter and ask them to read it.

Go through those slmonyms which present differences of register, for

example, in the letter abovelady lwoman, and suyter lwonderful.

Ifyouwish, you can comment aloud on the factors that determinedyour choice of language for them.

I

3

8.6Level

Time

Aims

Materials

1

2

Personal I t t7

Comments

1 This is not a one-offexercise-we suggest that you use it every lessonor every week, so the students come to look forward to a letter fromyou. There are many techniques you can use with the letter but wefeel it is enough for the students to simply read it. You maywrite lesswell than Dylan Thomas or D H Lawrence but the fact that the text isyours and uniquelywritten for those particular students makes itspecial.

2 For more activities around letters and letter-writing, see the book inthis series by Nicky Burbidge et al. entitled Letters (996\.

3 It is much easier to pick up language from a personal letter than froma third-person text, written by and for nobody in particular.

8.7 The secret dictionaryLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 1 5 minutes in the f irst lesson; 10-1 5 minutes in the second lesson.Aims To express private connotations of a word or phrase-strong

enough to be used as'definitions'.

Materials A copy of the definitions texts for each student.

Preparation

Make copies ofthe deflnitions texts below, or, better, use similar textsprepared by different students in previous classes.

Procedure

Lesson 1

1 Ask the students to read 'The boy's definitions for his dog' and 'The

husband's definitions for his wife'. (See below.) Point out that thesehave been written by the boy from the dog's point of view, and by thehusband fi:om the wife's point ofview.

2 Tell them to write for homework similar deflnitions that encapsulatetheir understanding of another person's or creatule's worldview. Tellthem to write the definitions on detachable sheets.

Lesson 2

Ask the students to put their definitions up round the walls of theroom. Ask three or four people to read theirs out.

Acknowledgements

The Devil's Dictionary (l.88:-;9o6), by Ambrose Bierce (available freeonline from Project Gutenberg), contains deflnitions such as these:admiration, n. our polite recognition of another's resemblance

to ourselves.twice, adv. once too often.year, n. a period ofthree hundred and sixty-flve disappointments.

118 | Personal

The boy's def ini t ions for his dogbasket: home-place, place to arrange, place to bury bones

car: cat-cove4 cat hiding-place

cat: hateful, frustrating, dangerous, potential meal

burrow: wafting spiral of scent; space to be enlarged anddeepened

lamp post/wall: doggie lnternet chat room

walkies: a thousand smel ls, tugging at the leash

The husband's def ini t ions for his wife

children: the central task facing humans-bearers of one'shopes and ambit ions

money: something necessary of which I am the recipient,s imi lar to rain. I am not sure where ei ther of them come f rom.

car: a luxury that I see as a necessity and which no one shouldhave because of global warming

work: a general excuse that men offer to justify long absencesfrom the reality of homelife


8.8 Phrases I l ikeLevel Lower-intermediateto advanced

Time 15-25 minutes

Aims To encourage students to acquire a wider choice of expressions.

Procedure

1 Group the students in threes. Tell the students each to think ofthreephrases they like to use when speaking English, and then to explainthe phrases to their partners and tell them when they use them'

2 Each student then thinks of situations in which they could use theirpartners' phrases and tells their partners about them.

3 Tell each student to choose one oftheir own phrases and to outlinethree to flve situations in which they would use it. They now rehearsethe language for the situation but substthtte anew phrase instead oftheir favourite phrase: help the students where necessaryto findequivalent phrases/paraphrase s.

4 Ask the students to fiIIthe board with the substitute phrases theyhave found, and to teach their phrases to the rest ofthe class.

eersonal | 119

Comments

In our mother tongue, we show personal preference for some phrasesover others. This activity asks the students (and the teacher) to extendthis freedom to the target language, and at the same time to widenthe range of choices made. With advanced students, this is essentialin 'flnding one's voice' in the other language.

8.9 What have you got ten of?Level Beginner to lower-intermediate

Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To get students to discover and use new words to express thingsthat are important to them now.

Procedure1 Get a volunteer student to ask you these questions:

What have you got ten of?What have you got three of?

Give truthful answers, for example , ten dicttonanes, three close frlends.2 Now demonstrate the exercise the other way round, with you asking

the questions up to ten. Tell the student to respond in English, but ifthey don't know a particular word to use their mother tongue. Putthe mother-tongue word on the board, with its English equivalent.

3 Group the students in threes.

4 Roundr:

Student A asks the questions (up to ten).Student B answers as much as possible in English.Student C notes down any mother-tongue words B was forced to use.

5 Rounds z and 3: the students in the threesomes change roles andrepeat the questioning.

6 Ask the 'secretary' to write on the board the mother-tongue wordsused in the exercise.

7 Get the class to try and find translations-if they can't, then yousupplythem. Rub out the mother-tongue words as the English onesreplace them.

Variations

The basic question rNhathave you got x of? may become limiting after atime. Here are some other productive patterns:

What three things have you got that I haven't?What have you thrown away this week?What five things do you wish you could do without?lf you were X, what three objects would you value most?What things to eat could you mosVleast happily do without?

Comments

As we have seen in previous activities, the best time to teachvocabulary is when a student reallywants to say something.

120 | Personal

Word games

The activities in this chapter serve a number of purposes: they areintended to appeal to the students' puzzle-solving side; they can beused to alter the mood or focus of a lesson; and they promoteexperimentation. Once students have grasped the rules, most of thegames can be played in ro-zo minutes, and are repeatable.

9.1 Circle gamesLevel Beginnertoadvanced

Time 10-15 minutes for each game.

Aims To provide a bank of games with a variety of learning purposes thatcan be played in circles of three to seven players.

Letter by letter

Player A says a letter. Player B thinks of a word beginning with A'sletter and says its second letter. C thinks of a word beginning withthe tvyo letters already given and says its third letter, and so on roundthe circle. The person who, in saying a letter, completes a word, losesand must drop out (or lose a life). If a player, ontheir turn, thinks thatthe combination offered so far cannot lead to a word, they maychallenge the previous player to say the word they are thinkingof: if there is no such word, that player loses a life, otherwise thechallenger is penalized. The game continues until only one playeris left. For example:

A : dB : o ( + i s g ;C : l ( + 4 s 1 s 1D : l ( + d o l l a r )E: That's a word !D loses a l ife.

A: cB : h ( - r c h a n g e )C: r (-r 661;t1;D: o (-r chromium)E: That s not possible: what s your word?D: c-h-r-o-m-i-u-mE loses a life.

Tail to head (1)

A thinks of a word and says it aloud. B has to say a word that beginswith the last letter ofA's word, then C a word beginning with the lastletter of B's word, and so on round the circle until someone makes amistake, or cannot find a word. (A time limit of,, say, five seconds perplayer makes this more exciting.)

Word games | 121

More difficult: B has to flnd a word beginning with the last twoletters ofA's word, for example:

table LEmon ONly LYmph PHarmacy.. .

Tailto head (2)

A thinks of a word and says it. B has to find a word beginning with thelast sound ofA's word, for example:

edge join noisy evi l Iook catch cheese.. .

Theme alphabets

A chooses a category states it, and names one member beginningwith A, for example, buildings: A is for Acropohs. B must fi nd a buildingbeginningwith B, for example, BisforBank, and so on round thecircle. ('Hard' letters such as Qand X can be omitted if wished.)

Lipograms

A chooses a letter of the alphabet and gives a short sentence whichmust not contain that letter. The other players, in turn, must makesimilar'lipograms'.

A: 'S' . We're al l in a circ le.B: lt may rain tomorrow.C: lt 's not raining now.D; Wrong! There's an 'S' in 'it 's'.

Sets

Find all the professions you can startingwith S and endingwith R(sailor, schoolteacher, ...). Find all the verbs of sound containing thesyllable -ing- (ring, sing,lingle, ...).

Tonic solfa (do re mi fa so la ti do)

Round the circle, each player must make a word containing one ormore of the notes ofthe tonic solfa, such as dortbt,Iitre, comic, isolate,fat, place, institution.

Try exploring other areas-symbols from chemistry (reFer, CaNada)and maths (rapid), initials and abbreviations (sTUCk, raCIAl)-according to the background and interests ofthe group.

Swapped syllables

Aproposes a polysyllabic word. B must change one of the syllables tomake a new word, and so on round the circle, for example: contain,contend, pretend, prefer, prepare, compare.

Tennis elbow foot

A says a word. Within a strict time limit (say three seconds), B mustsay a second word that connects with the f,rst in some way. Then Coffers a third word to connect with B's word. and so on round thecircle. At any point a player may challenge the connection of anotherplayer. For example:

122 | Word games

A: tennisB: elbowC: footD:baIIE:fallF'. autwnn

ftenniselbow is an i l lness)(elbow and foot are parts of the body)foot+ball =football)

fallrhymeswith bal/)fqil isUS synonym f or autumn\

A:hymn (the last -n of hymn and autumn is silent)

In each group, the members decide on 'acceptable' connections.

Rhyming definitions

Each player in turn must think of a rhyming phrase and give a briefdefinition of it; the others must then tly to guess the phrase, forexample, large hog (bigpig), happy father (g;lad dad), false pain (fakeache), senior policeman (top cop).We learnt this from EugeneRaudsepp 1977.

9.2 The prefix gameLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 30-40 minutes

Aims To work on the various negative prefixes in English, especially forstudents preparing for an examination such as FCE or TOEFL.

Preparation

Prepare a list of words and put them on the board or make a poster.

Procedure

1 Ask the students to push their books away, relax and shut their eyes.Ask them to notice their breathing. TelI them to put their fingers onone nostril while breathing in and out with the other, and then to dothe same again, but swapping nostrils. (You may also choose to playcalm, low-volume music in the background.)

2 With their eyes still shut, tell them you are going to read them somewords. Tell them to just let the words flow over them, whether theyknow their meaning or not. Read these words slowly and gently:

irrational immoral clockwiseincapable to misappropriate to misbehaveserviceman irresponsible inaudibleincaut ious i l logical disapprovinginconceivable to apply ex-servicemanto function inappropriate intuitivelegal unhappy impossiblenon-violent caoable audiblelogical responsible conceivableunattractive to behave to misapplyto appropriate to malfunction at easecounter-intuitive illegal immortalil l-at-ease mortal rational

Word games | 123

moral anticlockwto pack verbalfit to unpack

3 Read the words again twic,

4 Bringtwo students to the Iteams, and appoint one sttteam A a word that they hiGive them ten seconds' co:right, one ofthe secretariethe other writes down the

5 Give teamB awordto matrBack to team A etc. ...

6 At the end of the game, aslthe board in their noteboomonolingual class check sr

Variation 1

1 Put up the following on th

U N

2 Ask the class to suggest wcto brainstorm other preflx

3 Invite the students, indivicown containing the brainswords exist.

Variation 2

ffier the students have wcsome or allof theprefixes aall the roots. They should tlproduce new'words', whi<dictionaries.

Variation 3

Instead ofprefixes and sufnouns. This is particularlyregularly puts adjectives alSpanish. Even though thesmistakes with adjective + rnoun + noun phrases, as sc

1 Put up the following list olcommonly used in noun +

head house wotchair money towclothes market car

124 | Word games

Ask the students to make newwords and phrases by combining pairsof words on the list or byusing one word from the list and one wordof their choice. Encourage them to use everyword as both the firstand second element in the combination, as, for example: townhall, toytown.

Tell them now to check tJ'e new words and phrases in a dictionary.

Comments

The relaxation exercise at the beginning can be used as anintroduction to any activity demanding speed and concentration.

9.3 Definit ions dictationLevel Intermediate to advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To use a guessing game to practise using definitions.

Preparation

Choose a very short text (r5-zo words) and prepare deflnitions, hints,and clues for each of the words in it, as in the upper-intermediateexample below.

Procedure

1 Explain to the students that you are going to give them a dictation,but that, instead of saying the words for them to write, you will givethem deflnitions and clues. Ask them to work in pairs with only oneperson wTltrng.

2 Dictate as follows:

You say:write:

The definite article. The

The word begins withf and means the same as last. final\4lhen you walk you take many of these. In the singular. step.

That was the title of the poem; now for line one:

A two-letter word that expresses doubt and ends inf, AThird person plural pronoun. The word ends iny. they

Past tense of a verb with a meaning very like do. made

Going head flrst into water. It ends with iing. dittingThe first word in the phrase '- and lodging'.

The students

boards

sxx

tnchesshorter

Here it's plural and meansyianks.

Start a new line of the poem:

Half a dozen.Anglo-American units of measurement, about

2.5 centimetres long.The comparative form of the opposite oflong.

Word games | 125

Start a new line:

This is the verb that describes the main action ofphilosophers.

AnanagramofWHO.The word for many thatyolJtrse with uncountable

nouns,The flrst word in the phrase '- or later'

Start a new line:

Second person pronoun.Thinkwhat trees are made of. Then think of a modal

verb with the same sound. Contract it and linkit to the word before with an apostrophe.

Hamlet was worried about this inflnitive.A two-letter word. The second letter is n.Definite article.This word is wet and rhymes with shorter.

Ask one of pairs to read out the title and the poem:

The final step

If they made diving boardssix inches shorter-

thinkhowmuch sooneryou'd be in the water.

(Peter Hein. More Grool<s. Blackrvell and Mott. )

thinkhow

muchsooner

you

. A

belnthewaver

Follow-up

Once you have used this technique three or four times, ask fi.vestudents, for homework, to prepare this type of dictation. Each ofthem dictates their deflnitions etc. to a fifth of the class: the five'dictators' working simultaneously. They should keep their textsshort, as in the example above.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this technique from Mitzi Powles, whose idea is quotedby Paul Rogerson in an article in the AISLI magazine, EuropaVicinaN.6, March zooo.

9.4 CrosswordsLevel Intermediate to advanced

Time No more than 20-30 minutes in any one session.Aims To introduce students to English-language crosswords and show

ways in which they can be adapted and made more creative.

Comments

Crosswords are not everyone's cup of tea, and they can be laboriousand time-consuming to compose, particularly if one has to restrictoneselfto common or'useful'words. The two examples here aredesigned to make the teacher's, and the students', task a little easier.

126 | Word games

Materials Copies of the crosswords for each student.

Procedure

A Anagram crosswords

Published crosswords, such as those in newspapers, can pose all sortsof problems to the non-native speaker: the words used are oftenobscure, the deflnitions maybe allusive, and the cultural referencesmaybe impenetrable. One wayto use them is to rewrite thedefinitions, or to add anagrams of the solutions as an extra help. Hereis an example to getyou started: addyour own deflnitions ifyouwish.

Anagram CrosswordEach clue is an anagram of the word you should wri te in thediagram. One answer is the name of a wel l -known woman,now dead. Another is an Engl ish ci ty.

8

1 0 1 1

I t4

t 5 l 7 t 8

t 9

Clues Across

1 T H E N S C R E A M7 G A S8 B U S H R I B9 M E E T R E X

1 1 L A L1 2 L I L1 4 G R I S S E T1 6 I N D Y G U N1 8 O P T1 9 P E N N Y C E D E D

Clues Down

1 M T O R Y I S S U E2 T H I N G3 R A S H V E T4 B S O5 TAVIE6 H O L Y P I S H O P

1 0 E G G D A N E1 3 D E L L A1 5 A T E E N17 CEI

Photocopiable @ John Morgan

Word games | 127


Write your own clues

Many students find it much more fun to write the clues than to solvethem. Divide the class into groups of three or four and give eachgroup one blank diagram and one completed diagram and one ormore dictionaries. Tell the groups to choose a secretary and tocompose clues for the crossword, which the secretary should writeunder the blank diagram. \Mhen they have flnished, the groupsshould exchange the blank diagrams and clues and try to solve thepuzzles.

Here are four completed diagrams and fourblank diagrams to startwith:

Anagram Crossword solution

M A N c H E s T E R

Y I A o v P

s A G R U B B I 5 H

E x T R E M E A t L

I L L T I G R E s 5

1 6

U N D Y1 7

I N G T o P

s L c E E H

D E P E N D E N c Y

128 | Word games

I

V E R B A B L E

E E 5 R v

A D t E c T I v E

L E A L N

A c u T E L Y

s T T I1 0s

w H T E W A s H

A o R N It a

N I N Et 3s T o P

F E W w A s T E

o E o P A

u N D E R W E A R

D I E D s T o P

B A D M I N T o N

U A M o N

s T Y L E R A Y

1

G E T A c R o s s

s A A c T E A

N c K R N

G E T A R o u N D

o U R A U D I o

W c L U10N o R T H W E 5 T

o D D M A N o u T

N E L P R

T I M E P I E c E

H A s R A

E D G E T A L cD o s T H

o R G A N P I P E

t U A o R

E1 1

M E R G E N c Y

lhotocopiable @ John Morgan

C Software aids to crossword setting and solving

There are several programs available to assist in designingand printing diagrams. Our favourite is Henry Casson'sCrossword Utihty, downloadable free fromhttp ://home.f reeu k. neUd ha rrison/puzzl es/uti I ity. htm.

There are also programs to assist in finding words to fit into yourdiagram: you can choose your own words, or ask the program tosearch a word list for words that will fit. More than one word list (orphrase list) can be used, and you can write your own lists, or make

Word games | 129

t

1 0

t 1

tz

5

8

n

l 2 3

I

I 9

t o

2 I

9

t 0

1' l


one from a corpus oftexts usingconcordance software. (SeeChapter 5.) Good examples areTlEA& Symytatlry fromhtt p ://b ryso n. ltd. u k and Crossw or d Compiler 6 ft omhttp://www.crossword-puzzl e-ma ker.com.

Finally, students (and teachers) interested in looking at how'cryptic' puzzles work will get a lot of help from the surprisinglyeffective crossword-solving program Crossword Maestro, ftomhtt p ://vrrvr,w g e n i us2000. co m.

130 | Word games

9.5Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Pivot wordsLower-intermediate to advanced

(The example here is upper-intermediate.)

20-30 minutes

To explore the different semantic and grammatical uses of words.

One copy of a worksheet for each student (optional).

Preparation

Collect together 1o-2o 'double sentences' (see below) at a levelappropriate foryour class, type them out, and make copies.

Procedure

Write this example up on the board:lMho is the Prime Minister of this country hotels are nice to stay in,aren'tthey?

Show the students trow country is a pivot word. It is the last word ofthe flrst sentence and the fi.rst word of the second sentence:

tNho is the Prime Minister of this country?Country hotels are nice to stay in, dren't they?

Explain that you are going to give the students a dictation of 'double'

sentences like the one above. They are to take down your words andunderline the pivot word. Point out that in two of the examples the'pivot word'will have two different spellings.

Dictate these ten'double sentences' :

Old people need quite a lot of help me down these steps, would you?Babies can keep you awake at nrght watchmen keep the neighbourhood

safe.Small kids love a rough and tumble driers are useful in winter.They decided to shear the ewe really need a haircut.Husbands are often late husbands can be a matter of regret.He took his clothes off-the-cuff speeches are hard to make.Mary had a little lamb stew is on the menu for lunch todayThe old woman lived in an expensive house prices have gone up recently.Home is the olace to come back to and two make four.Our team won the game pie is really delictous.

Pair the students so they can compare their answers.

Ask students round the class to read out the 20 sentences.

For homework ask them to come to class with six doublesentences each.

In the next class, group the students in fours to work on each other'ssentences.

3

4

5

Word games | 131

9.6Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Variation 1

You can use this technique to focus on phrasal verbs, for example:N ev er gw e up the mountain they w ent.I'm afraidyouletme downthe road qndthenright andthenyou're there.

or on differences of spelling, for example:Add some rosemary and time travel is impossible. (thrye)

or on features of pronunciation, for example, liaison inIf I see a mouse, I sream comes in many Jlavours. (ice reaml

(ForUS speakers, and some UK speakers, there is also a difference instress here.)

Variation 2

A development of the above is to present the 'double sentences'withthe pivot words omitted. This is more difficult, but appeals to aprzzle mentality.

Acknowledgements

This idea comes from Milton Erickson's work with hypnotic languagePatterns.

Hiding wordsLower-intermediate to advanced

10-20 minutes

To discover words'buried' in other words or surrounding text,Dictionaries.

Procedure

Put up the following words on the board:

THE CENTExplain that many words can be found hidden inside other words:

oTHEr reCENTly

and even inside phrases:

I took the BUS Home. Do you knoW HER E-mail address?Put on the board, or ask the students to select, three to flve words.Ask the students to hide them, one or more to a sentence, as in theexamples you gave. Tell them they can use dictionaries to find thewords for their sentences, but not to spend too long on this: if theycannot easily find a way to 'hide' a word, they should discard it andmove on to another.

Get the students to exchange their sentences and flnd their partner'shidden words.

132 | Word games

Variation 1

Hide the words as every other letter of the newword or phrase, for

example:

PIGEON + my speed kept sliPplnG bElOw Ninety kilometres an

hour.

Variation 2

Hide the words backurards:

KNIT + sTINKingfish

Variation 3

Use each lefter of the word as the first letters of the words of a

phrase:

TEACH + Take EverythingAnd Come Home

Comments

Games like this appeal to lovers of logical puzzles, intelligence tests'

crossword puzzles, and so on. Many students will prefer constructing

the contexts to finding the hidden words.

Students may be weak in English, but strong in puzzle-solving, and

vice versa. As a help to those who cannot spot the hidden word, add a

brief definition.

9.7 Treasure huntLevel lntermediate to advanced

Time 10-20minutes,orashomework.

Aims To practise identifying words with the help of definitions.

Preparation

Make a 'word chain' like that shown below, in which each word

overlaps its neighbours by exactly three letters. You will flnd some

more example wordchains at the end of this activity'write a simple definition for each word in the chain and put the

definitions and the number of letters in each word on a worksheet, as

in the example below. To get the students started, give the first three

letters of the first word.

Procedure

1 Write on the board the following string of letters:

P RACT IC ALENDARTB OARD ENTERRIBIEA CHIE YENING

Word games | 133

Using coloured chalk or markers, or by underlining, show that this isa wordchain in which each word overlaps its neighbours by exactlythree letters:

PRACTI CAI EN DAR TBO ARD EN TER RI BLE ACH I EYE NINGGive out the worksheet and let the students get on with it.The exercise can be done individually, in pairs or small groups,or as homework.

Students should also be encouraged to prepare worksheets for eachother.

Comments

As in a treasure hunt, each question has to be answered before thenext can be attempted. This can be frustrating for some people!

Suggested wordchains

Here are some more word chains from which you (or your students)can prepare your own worksheets:

BLTRDE}IAIISMANAGERMAAD4{OI4IEVERDrcTIONARY

ARO LATDERNEATHE]VYGNPOS TEOPATTIYROIDTIPSYCHIATRI CKSHAWTHORNAMENTIRETYMOLO GYARMCTI/IRBRUSHERMITTEATIACTE\4RBATIMIDRIFFY

INGOTHICCWBOARDOTJ"RSEIVESTRYING

(The last one is a word necklace!)

Example worksheet1 n. representative of a group or category

E X A _ _ _ _ ( 7 )2 ad j .en joyab le - - - - (8 )3 adj. very old - - - (7)

adj . feel ing sick ( in the stomach) _ _ _ _ _ _ (6)

5 n. protection given by a state to a political refugee- _ ( 6 )

5 n. t imber, wood for bui lding _ _ (6)

7 adj. lacking, esp. in hope or support _ _ (6)

Key

EXAMPLEASANTIQU EASYLUM BEREFT


134 | Word games

9.8 StoryboardLevel

Time

Aims

Materials


20-30 minutes

To practise relating words to context.

Word cards (see PreParation).

Preparation

Choose a short text, preferably containing not too much new lexical

material for the class. write it out clearly on cards measuring 20 x 15

cm. one word to a card, so that each word is clearly visible to the

whole class. On the back of each card write the same word very small'

Procedure

Stick the cards to the wall or blackboard in the coffect text sequence,

with the large-print side hidden.

Tell the class that there is a text on the blackboard which they will

have to uncover, one word at a time. Ask them to shout out any

words that come to mind: if you hear any of the words in the text'

reverse the corresponding card immediately, using the smallprint

words as a rerninder.

From chance beginnings, the text will gradually appear, as more and

more context becomes available to the students.

Variation

If you can memorize a short text exactly, then you can of course

dispense with the cards on the blackboard. Short poems, especially

ones with clear rhyme and rhythm, are ideal for this'

Comments

This was originally devised as a computer game, but, with a little

preparation by the teacher, works even better on the blackboard.

Acknowledgements

John Higgins and Graham Davies' Storyboard. Wida Software, l98z'

word games | 135

10 .1Level

Time

Aims

Materials

1(DDiction ary exercisesand word history

The first three activities in this chapter aim to familiarize studentswith dictionaries and show how to use them in enjoyable, creativeways. 1o.4, '\Mhat do I mean?', looks at the language we need toexplain and comment on howwe use words, and to.8, 'Thesauri',

shows how a thesaurus can be used to stimulate thought anddiscussion. ro.5, 'Borrowed words', and the two activities that followcater for students who are interested in the history of words.

The choice of which dictionary to use depends very much on thestudents'level, interests and learning style. New dictionaries are alsoconstantly appearing, which makes it hard to give concreterecommendations.

Jon Wright's Dictionaries, in this series (1998), contains a number ofveryuseful suggestions for choosing, using, and flndingyourwayround dictionaries.

Word dipElementary to advanced

15-25 minutes

To familiarize students with the structure, uses, and limitations ofdictionaries.

Sufficient monolingual dictionaries to have one for each group oftwo to four students. Any monolingual dictionary will do, thoughfor more advanced students the various learners'dictionaries maybe less stimulating. Pocket dictionaries will not be adequate.

Procedure

Ask the students to form groups of 3-5 players each. Make sure eachgroup has a dictionary.

Explain or demonstrate the game, then ask the groups to play onecomplete round. The game goes like this:a Player A opens the dictionary at random.b A chooses a word defined on the pages open and tells the other

players what it is: this maybe awordA thinks the other players donot know, or a known word which has a less well-known meaning,

136 | Oictionary exercises and word history

10.2Level

Time

Aims

Materials

4

5

Example

stsch as fomtd (= establish, as well as being the past tense of find)' Itmay be helpful to insist that A both pronounces the word andspells it out. A may also give other information, such as part ofspeech, but not meaning.

c The other players then question A on the meaning (or the specificmeaning chosen byA) of the word. A may only answer/es or n0.

d A scores a point if no one guesses the meaning within, say,zo questions. Otherwise the flrst person to guess the meaninggets the point.

Two or three rounds should be tfie maximum to sustain interest.If the students wish to continue, then repeat the game on a lateroccasron.

From word to wordlntermediate to advanced

15-25 minutes

To give further practice in the use of dictionaries, with the emphasison the language used in the definitions given.

Sufficient monolingual dictionaries to have one for each student.It will be more interesting if you provide a selection of differentdictionaries.

Procedure

Ask the students to work individually. Give each student a dictionaryor make sure they have brought one to class.

Write up a word on the blackboard. Choose one which will producea rich set of paraphrases/synonyms.

Ask the students to look up in the dictionary the word you have puton the board and to read through the definition(s). Then ask them tochoose one of the words in the deflnition and to look that up.

Ask the students to continue in this way until they have looked up,say, a dozen words. At each stage they should write down the wordthey look up.

Ask them to form pairs and compare their lists.

Starting from the headword plant, one person produced this list:

plant -r vegetable + organism 1 structure + framework + skeleton a bone+ bobbin + reel -t cylinder + tubular + chamber

and another.plant -r grow ) increase + rise+ swell + wqves ), hair + thread ' cotton-r understand

Dictionary exercises and word history | 137

@

10.3Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Variation

Students who share the same mother tongue can do the exerciseusing a good bilingual dictionary, moving back and forth betweenEnglish and mother-tongue entries.

Follow-up 1

After working through steps 1-4 above, ask the students to link thewords in their list into a paragraph or short story.

Follow-up 2

Ask the students to use the technique above to 'quarry'words

relating to a particular subject or theme (for example, wordsneeded in writing a description, words used by policemen).

Write yourself inElementary to advanced

10-15 minutes

To add a strong personal element to dictionary practice.

Dictionaries.

Preparation

Select 6-rz words from a text or other source ofvocabularv.

Procedure

Ask the students, working individually, to look up each of theselected words in their dictionary. 'vVhen they have read the entryand any example sentences given, they should construct an examplesentence for that word including their own name, or a reference tothemselves. So, if a student were to look tsp take one's mind of and flndthe example Hqrdwork always takes your mind off domestic problems, theymight write English classestake my mind offwork.

In small groups, the students comp;rre their example sentences.

Variation

This exercise can easily be adapted as a pair exercise by asking thepairs to write sentences that apply to both members, for example:

veal: We areboth opposedto the production of white veal.

138 | Dictionary exercises and word history

10.4Level

Time

Aims

Example text

Example textrewritten

What do I mean?Lower-intermediate to advanced

10-15 minutes in the first class; 10-20 minutes in later classes.

To introduce and practise words and phrases used in defining andexplaining meanings-

Procedure

Lesson 1

Invite one student to ask you a question in front of the class. Insteadof answering immediately, pick out a word or phrase from theirquestion and put a question back to them, for example,

Student: rNhat\ your favourite colour?Teacher: What do you meanby 'favourite colour'?Student: The colour youlike to wear.Teacher: Inthat case, my favounte colour isblue.

Ask the students to form pairs and to put questions back and forth toeach other in the wayyou have shown.

After five minutes, tell them to take a piece of paper and, workingindividually, to recall two or three of the questions they were asked.They should then write their answers as single sentences includingthe phrase by whichlmean, for example:

My favourLte colortr,by whichlmeorrthe colour lliketowear, isblue.

Lesson 2

Remind the class ofthe previous activitybywritingyouroriginal example sentence on the board, underlining the phrasebywhichlmean:

Ivty favourite colour,by whichl meonthe colour Ikke to wear, isblue.

Teach, or get the class to brainstorm, other phrases that can be usedinstead ofby wlnch I mecm, for example:

in other words that is (to say)or rather meaninq

in the sense oft . e .

Tell the students to rewrite a short text by picking out asmany words and phrases from it as they want and adding to each acomment introduced by one of the phrases in the above list.See the exarnple below

Country people have a different attitude to the road from town people.They are not better drivers, but they are more considerate.

Country people, that is people who both live and work in thecountryside, have a different attitude to the road from town people.They are not better, in the sense of technically more comPetent,drivers, but they are more considerate. By this I mean they actuallyconsider what they, and other drivers, are doing while they drive along.


Follow-up

Use the questioning and rewrite techniques to explore otherways in which we seek to clarify, modify, comment on, orcorrect the language we are using. Here are a few examplesets ofphrases:

a clarifying by example:

for example for instanceT a k e . . .

b specifying:

in particular specificallyto be specific to name one

c approximating:

more or lessas tT were

. . . , s a y . . . .

particularly

in a manner of speakingto an extent

rn a sensesort of

10 .5Level

Time

Aims

Materials

for want of a better word

d abandoning an explanation or example:

etc.and so forth

and so onyou know what I mean

you know the sort of thing I mean work it out for yourself

Comments

The dictionary is not the only place where deflnitions are found. Weare constantly explaining, paraphrasing, and commenting on themeaning of the words we use. Here the student is encouraged tolearn some of the words we need in order to talk about words.

Borrowed wordslntermediate to advanced

20 minutes

To show how words can change form and meaning acrosslanguages.

Copies of the word list and key for each student.

Preparation

Prepare a set of Englishwords that derive fromwords in otherlanguages: if your class contains speakers of different mothertongues, try to represent each ofthese languages in your set.Put the whole list on a sheet of paper and make a copy foreach member of the class. An example set is given below.

Procedure

Give out the word lists. Tell the students which original languages arerepresented by the words and ask them, working individually, tomatch them to the words in the list.


The students may now compare and discuss their answers. This isparticularly useful if you have included words borrowed fromlanguages spoken by the students.

Give out the key. Ask the students to check their answers not onlyagainst the key but also in a dictionary. They should pay attention tothe pronunciation (which maybe very different from that in theoriginal language), the meaning(s) (which maywell have changed orbecome restricted), and, if the dictionary also gives etymologies (forexample, OED,Chcnnbers), something of the how, when, and evenwLry of theborrowing. (In the example list below, teawas borrowedfrom Cantonese, not Mandarin;pork refers to the meat of the pig,not to the animal itself; sherry derives from an older pronunciationof SpanishJerez;bwtgalow came from a Hindiwordthat simplymeans 'of Bengal'.)

10.6 Commemorative words

Level Upper-intermediate to advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To explore words with a history.

Materials Etymological and otherdictionaries.

Preparation

Take several eqrmological dictionaries to class. You may also like toread up a little on the people and events referred to.

Exampleginsengpundithippopotamusluteatombungalowmarzrpan

teatyphoonsiestacattleoperacanastasherry

soyadecidecurryorangecool iek i logramarmada

alcoholatmospheretorsochemistporkapronp iano

KeyArabic

alcoholluteorangechemist

Spanish

siestacanastasherryarmada

lndian Frenchlanguages

bungalow aproncurry porkpundit catt lecool ie decide

Chinese Greek

typhoon atmospheretea hippopotamussoya ki logramginseng atom

Italian

torsomarzipanoperap iano



volcanomaramoncardigan

6

10.7Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Procedure

Get a secretary to come to the board and then dictate these wordsto them:

sandwich wellingtons spaplimsoll quisling hoovermackintosh biro caesarian

quixotic meanderto meetyourWaterlooto cross the Rubicon

Check that all the words are semantically known to the students,especially harder ones llke plimsoll: found in the phraseplimsollline,the safe loading line on a ship; also a type of sports footwear.

Explain that all the words or phrases refer back to the name of aperson, a place, or an event. Ask them if they can identify any ofthese.

Ask the students to work in small groups and give each group adictionary. Assign a small group of words to each group of students.Ask the gloups to lookup theirwords and flnd the person, place orevent that lies behind each.

Each group teaches the whole class the derivation of their words.

Dating wordsUpper-intermediate to advanced

15-30 minutes

More on words and history, with the emphasis on more recentcoinages.

A copy of the wordlist for each student.

Preparation

Make a list of words that you are confident most of the class arefamiliar with, or use the example list given below (with the yearsomitted). Include as many recently introduced words/meanings asyou can. Make enough copies for each student or group ofstudents.

Procedure

Ask the students to work either alone or in groups of two to three.Give out one copy of the wordlist to each student or group.

Ask the students to write next to each word the approximate yearwhen it was flrst used in English.

Get the students/groups to join together to compare their answers.Ask them to check their answers against an appropriate dictionary,or give out the example list again with the dates included. For newerwords, we recommend John Ayto' s Twentieth-Cenhtry Words (t999) and

1

2

3


Elizabeth Knowles' Oxford Dictionary of New Words (;997). For olderwords, ttle OxfordEnglishDicttonary (Second edition) gives datedcitations of almost everyword deflned.

Word listpoverty l ine (1901)nappy (1927)think-tank (1959)pylon (1923)fab (1 e57)doodle (1937)

gr€€h = ecological (1972)crew-cut (1940)carer (1 978)drop-out (1930)gremlin (1941)rock and rol l (1954)

car bomb (1972)j ing le (noun) (1sitcom (1964)genocide (1944)in-house (1956)cassette (1960)


Here is an example entry fromJohn Ayto's excellent

Tw entieth- C enturY Wor ds :

tab adj(1957) wonderful, marvellous. Slang A shortening of fabulous

(which is not recorded in print in this sense unti l 1959). The usage really

took off around 1963, when it became attached to the Beatles (sometimes

called 'The Fab Four') and other Merseyside pop groups. After lying

dormant for a while, it enjoyed a revival in the 1980s (see fabbo (1984) ).

1963 Times. She stretched her stockinged toes towards the blazing logs.'Daddy, th is f i re s s imPlY fab. '

1963 MeettheBeatles. Most of the Merseyside groups produce sounds

which are pretty fab1988 National Lampoon'. 'And I just think it s fab!'

To which we should addthatfab is now back in a period of'dormancv'.

10.8 ThesauriLevel Upper-intermediateto advanced

Time 30-45 minutes

Aims To show how words may be grouped by meaning and context; tointroduce and practise using a thesaurus; and, incidentally, to showhow words can be used to disguise and distort meaning'

Materials Dictionaries, copies of the Thesaurus extract and worksheet

Preparation

Choose a word or phrase with strong or controversial associations.Make an extract from a thesaurus entry containing it, or use theexample below, and prepare enough copies for each student to have

one. You should also make copies of the worksheet (which can beused with any item chosen) for everyone. Provide a variety ofdictionaries and other reference books in class.


Procedure

Write the word or phrase (in this case the wordterronst) in the centreofthe board, then get five to ten students (depending on the size ofyour class and of the board) to write all the words and phrases theycan think of that have the same, or a similar, meaning. Tell them toscatter the words around the board, not in neat rows and columns,and stop them after two minutes.'vVhen all the students are back in their seats, tell them to take a pieceof paper and copy down the words on the board, arranging them intogroups according to meaning. Tell them that they may also add anyother words of similar meaning that come into their minds, but arenot on the board.

Tell the students to stand up, walk around, and compare what theyhave written. Keep them moving round: in a class of zo, every studentshould have read what at least eight others have written after tenminutes.

Give out copies ofthe Thesaurus extract and ask them to lookthrough it. Tell them what a thesaurus is (a collection of words,arranged in groups according to meaning, but without deflnitions orexamples), and that it can be a useful aid to memory andimagination. Stress that it is not a 'collection of synoqrms', and thatto get best value out of it, one should use it in conjunction with adictionary.

Give every student a copy of the Worksheet. Tell them they have15 minutes to complete it. Encourage them to use dictionaries andreference books, and to ask you and each other questions.

Group the students in fours to compare and discuss what theyhave done.

1zl4 | Dictionary exercises and word history

Worksheet1 Look through the Thesaurus extract, underlining any words and phrases you

have not met before, or which you would like to learn more about.

2 Choose five of the words or phrases you have underlined, look them up in thedictionary, and write an example sentence for each:

3 Look through the extract again. Which two words or phrases are for you mostal ike in meaning? Write them here:

4 Which two words or phrases are most different in meaning?

5 Write down five words or phrases which you would be surprised to find in thesame short text (essay, newspaper article, radio talk, short story, etc.)

6 Write down five words or phrases which are not in the extract, but ought to be.

7 Which single word or phrase in the extract is closest in meaning to the oneprinted in bold text?

8 And which is furthest in meaning from that word or phrase?



@Thesaurus extract#361. IDestruct ion of l i fe; v iolent death.] Ki l l ing.-N. ki l l ing &c. v. ; homicide, manslaughte4 murde4 assassinat ion;

blood, bloodshed; gore, slaughtel carnage, butchery;massacre; fusillade, pogrom, thuggery Thuggism [obs].

deathbloW finishing stroke, coup de grace, quietus;execution &c.

(ca pita I pun ishment) 97 2; judici al m urder; ma rtyrdom.butche[ slayer, murdere4 Cain, assassin, terrorist, cutthroat,

hi tman, thug, racketeel gunman, matador; gal lows,executioner &c. (punishment) 975; man-eater, apache[obs],hatchet man.

regicide, parricide, matricide, fratricide, infanticide,foeticidelobsl, uxoricidelobsl.suicide, felo de se[obs], hara-kir i , suttee; immolat ion,

auto da fe, holocaust.suffocation, strangulation, garrotte; hanging &c. v. deadly

weapon &c. (arms) 727; l. . .l

#913. [Malef icent being] Evi ldoer- N. evi ldoer; wrongdoer&c. 949; mischief-maker; oppressol tyrant; destroyeri Vandal;iconoclast.

firebrand, incendiary, firebug IU.S.], pyromaniac; anarchist,communist, terrorist.

savage, brute, ruffian, barbarian, caitiff [obs], desperado;Apache[obs], hoodlum, hood, plug-ugly, pug-ugly [U.S.] ,tough IU.5.] ; Mohawk; bul ly, rough, hool igan, larr ik in[Aus],ugly customer; thief &c.792.

cockatrice, scorpion, hornet.snake, vipeq adder; snake in the grass; serpent, cobra, asp,

rattlesnake.canniba l ; anthropophagus, anthropophagist ; bloodsucker,

vampire, ogre, ghoul, gor i l la, vul ture.wild beast, tiger; hyena, butchel hangman; blood-hound,

hel l -hound.hag, beldam, Jezebel.monster; fiend &c. (demon) 980; devil incarnate, demon in

human form; Frankenstein's monster.harpy, s iren; Furies, Eumenides.Hun, Att i la, scourge of the human race.[ . . . ]


A note on Roget's Thesaurus

Roget's original Thesaurus of EnglishWords andPlnases has long been outof copyright. Now there are innumerable versions all claiming to beRoget's Thesaurus, and all independently copyrighted. These differ inmany ways: some are based on British, others on American English;some ate highly literary while others are based on up-to-date spokenEnglish. Most follow Roget's original plan, as in the extract above, butthere are also 'alphabetical thesauri' such as that published byOxford University Press, and electronic versions that can be usedwith your word-processor.

The full text of the r9t edition is available from the web: you canfl nd it by visiting htt p ://www. g ute n be r g. n et. When you havedownloaded the flle (about r.5Mb), you can open it in your word-processor and search forwhatyou need. (The Thesaurus extractabove is taken from this public-domain version.)

There are also online versions, which enable you to type in a searchword or phrase and receive an HTML page containing the appropriatesection(s) of Roget. One of these can be found athttp://www. bartleby.com/thesa u ri .

Other online thesauri

Plumb Design' s VizuaI Thes aurus at htt p ://www. vi s u a lth esa u ru s. co m isa remarkable combination of thesaurus and mind-map. \Mhen youenter a word, a graphics display opens with your word in the centre,joined to other words of similar meaning by spidery lines. If you clickon any of these, the display changes to make the new word central,and other words appear or are replaced. To use it, you will need toenable Java in your browser.

TheLexicalFreeNet thesaurus at http://wwwlexfn.com allows a searchon one word (in which case it gives a list of synonyms) or on a pair ofwords. If you enter two words, it will return a series of words linkingthe flrst to the second. For example , dream andleviathanyteld:

dream+ ntghtrnare +horror + monster -leviathan


11AKevrsron exercrses

Traditionally, revision has been much more on teachers' maps thanother aspects ofvocabularywork. A colleague in Cambridge startedeach morning on her intensive courses by asking students to closetheir eyes and think back over what they learnt the previous day.Examinations, the curriculum, and the teacher's human need tobelieve that she has actually taughtthe students something, allencourage the use of revision exercises, but we believe that there is adeeper need: one simply does not 'learn' something by encounteringit once. With vocabulary students need to meet, and use, and reflecton words many times, in different contexts and settings, in thecompany of different people, and, perhaps, in different frames ofmind, before they can be said to have truly learnt a word or phrase.

A note on notebooks

Many of the exercises that follow should be done in the students'vocabulary notebooks. In this way learners will have a powerfulrecord ofthe exercises they have done with and around new lexis.Many activities here aim, for example, to improve the visual quakty ofnotebooks, to go beyond the monotonous column of bilingual pairs:

Frau - womanund - andStuhl - chair

A ground plan of one's home with the words you were learningwritten all over it is a lot more memorable than this. (See t.4,'Lexical furniture'.)

The vocabulary notebook may well be a sort of history of thelanguage class: students can write personal notes about thecircumstances of learning as well as the apparent'content' of thelesson. From a Greek student, for example, we might have thefollowing page:

ghost (phantasma) Got a good letter from home today.conviction (pepithesis) The teacher is looking out of the window.politics lt 's a Greek word-l got the English stress wrong

metaphoraga in !

Makes me think of moving house.

148 I Revision exercises

11.1 Open categorization


Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To allow students to categorize vocabulary in any way they want'

Procedure

1 Write the words to be reviewed on the board.

2 Invite the students, working individually, to categorize the words

into more than tvvo groups. The way they do this is up to them: the

look of the words on the page, associations with the words, the sound

of the words, idea groupings, etc. Do not tell the students how to

categorize: let them find out for themselves.

3 Ask the students to give each of their categories a heading'

4 Go round the class asking some of the students to read out their

headings and the words in the corresponding categories' Do not

reward or censure students byyour facial expression and tone of

voice for the way they have categorized: be as neutral as you can and

say as little as possible. How the students group the words is up to

th.em, and telling them that they are 'right' or'wrong' will only

increase their dePendence onYou.

Comments

If you are working with beginners, they will use their mothel tongue.

Acknowledgements

we learnt this technique from caleb Gattegno's silentway. For more

about his work, and especially his views on learner independence

and the role of the teacher, see his book, The commonsense of Teaching

F oreign Languages. Educational Solutions, 1976'

11,2 Guided categorization


Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To get the students to form interesting and memorable wordgrolps, and to deepen their understanding of words by comparing

categorizations.

Procedure

A Nice words versus nastY words

1 Give the students the words to be reviewed and ask them each to pick

three they like and three they don't. Give them time to think'

2 Put up two headings on the board: Nice words and Nasty words. Ask

each student to write lp one of their nice words and one nasty word.

Revision exercises | 149

@ \Alhen everybodyhas tlvo words on the board, invite people toexplain why they like or dislike parlicular words. Do not gloss orcomment yourself: don't give or withhold approval. By keeping quietyouwill help the students to talk.

In one group the review words were:viaduct ambulance to lower motorway

to volunteer hair-raisingintensive

prun9e jack-knife

lelly windscreen

Here are some of the things different students said about some of the words:ambulance I used to be a nurse and an ambulance comina meant more work.l

don't like the word.intensive I don't like it because the -nt- is too hard to say correctly.jelly llike it.The sound is right.windscreen I don't like it because I learnt it last term and can't remember it.

Variation

The exercise above can be adapted to run over the course of a wholeterm:

Get a large sheet of card to hang on your classroom wall. Find a closedbox and make a slot in the top: these will become permanentclassroom fixtures.

Invite students to stick on the large sheet anywords they like, or thatinterest them. These maybe single words written on slips of paper,cuttings from newspaper headlines or advertisements, etc. Ask themto 'throw away' in the box anywords they don't like, or can't or don'twant to remember, or which confuse or bother them. Tell them thevcan do this whenever they like during the course.From time to time, hold comment sessions: let the studentsintroduce their own words flrst, followed by comments from others.Try to keep in the background and let the students run their ownsession.

Other binary subjective categoriesUsing the methodology suggested in A, you can ask the students towork on contrastive categories of many different sorts, for example,very English wordsnew worosme-connected wordshigh wordspast words

not very English wordsold wordsseparate-from-me wordslowwordsfuture words

Example

150 | Revision exercises

c1

Words and shapes

Put up on the board the following shapes:

Ask the students to copy the shapes into their notebooks and thenassociate the words to be reviewed with the shapes. They may, ofcourse, link a given word with more than one shape.Pair the students and let them explain their word-shape associations.

Words and countries

Ask the students to jot down the name of a country they haveenjoyedvisiting orwould like to visit.

Have them draw maps of these countries on the blackboard.(Inaccuracy gives life to the exercise.)Ask them to write down the names of the various countries acrossthe top of h piece of paper, and then to rule tle paper into columns,each with a country as heading.

Put up your list of words and ask the students to write them in one orother column according to the associations they feel between theirwords and the countries.

Ask them to explain their associations to their neighbours.

In one class the list of words under review was.shed translucent corruqated

3

D

1

4

5

Example

loop rackdraughty pai l

hingesuck

hefty staplehook lethaldra in goat


One student produced these associations:

Words and colours

Ask each sflrdent to wdte down six colours in order of preferenceranging from most liked to most disliked. (For this exercise black andwhite are colours.)

Put a set of words on the board and ask the students to associate thewords with the colours. They should do this individually in writing.

Ask individual students to tell the group which colours they assignedto different words and why.

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Marilyn Spaventa, who used this techniquewith classes on Pilgrims summer courses.

11.3 Words on a scaleLevel Intermediate to advanced

Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To concentrate the students'attention on the words under revisionby focusing on their own, subjective reactions.

Procedure

1 Fut the table below up on the board. Explain that it shows a series ofscales between extremes, and ask the students to copv it into theirnotebooks:

valuable - worthlessshallow - deeoslow - fastactrve - oassivesmal l - largeclean - dirtyweak - strongtasty - distastefulrelaxed - tensecold - hot

E

1

Romania Mongol ia Denmark Wales USA Tanzania

sneopa i lSUCK

goat

translucent h ingeracK

lethaldra inhefty

draughtycorrugated

No associations: staple/loop/hook


I

Write the words to be revised on another part of the board and askthe students, working individually, to choose six words and decidewhere each of them should go on each scale. If one of the words to berevised were consistency, for example, a student's scales might looklike this:

valuqble X worthless

shallow

slow_ deep

- - fastactive X _ passwe

This student thinks corsistency is a valuable quality that probablyindicates depth. Speed seems unimportant but it takes an activestance to be consistent.

3 Pair the students and ask them to explain their scales to a partner.

11.4 Lexical furnitureLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 15-20 minutes

Aims To fix vocabulary in memory by visualizing connections withfamiliar objects and places.

2

3

4

Example

Procedure

Ask each sfi;dent to draw a ground plan of their house/flat/home/room.

Put up on the blackboard a set of twenty or so words for revision.

Working on their own, the students should then place the words inappropriate positions in their living place.

In pairs, they look at each others' placings and discuss them.

ln one class, a girl put perplexed in the garage because her mother couldnever understand why her car would not start. She putfurious outside thehouse because her parents would not allow expressions of anger inside,and do an exoerimenf in the kitchen.

Variation 1

Each student draws a clockface: the words to be reviewed are placedon the clockface according to temporal associations.

Variation 2

Ask the students to write down twenty times of day when regularthings happen, for example:

8.r5 Wife leaves for work.8.3o Postman comes.9.1o I finish washing up the breakfast dishes.


r They should then write the words to be reviewed against the times,as they find appropriate.

Variation 3

Ask each student to draw a map of their district, and to mark on itone or more of the routes they regularly follow (for example, to work,to school, to a friend's house). On this map they should then place thewords to be reviewed.

Comments

Placing words or ideas to be remembered in your house or along yourhigh street is one of the oldest memory techniques known. It was thisthat was used by Shereshevskii, the prodigious memory man studiedinA. R. Ltsria.TheMindof aMnemoni.st. Penguin, t975.

11.5 Leaping wordsLevel Beginnertoadvanced

Time 10-15 minutes

Aims To get students to'draw'words as a simple but creative way ofrememberi ng vocabu lary visual ly.

Procedure

1 Ask the students to choose r5 words they flnd hard to rememberfrom the last few pages of their vocabulary notebooks. They shouldcheck them through with a neighbour or you and/or a dictionary.

2 They should now rewrite the words using the shapes and sizes of theletters to bring out the meanings.

3 Ask them to get up and move around the room to show their designsto as many people as possible, explaining why they see particularwords thus.

Example In one group spif was written

/FJ PIT

by one studenl, andjealousy as a spiral by another.

,A EtJ

-og5Y

Acknowledgements

We first learnt this technique from Michael Legutke, Germany.


Words

rage

awell

hostility

forger

guilt

sprocket

Pictures

a policeman violentlycarrying off a small childa man drowning undera br idgepeople in a poor quarterjeer ing at an armedpolicemanplush, sh iny cushionson a setteea girl running acrossa streetmother holding twoyoung chi ldren

11.6 Find the word a picture

Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Examples


20-40 minutes

To get students to link words and visual images.

Word cards; a collection of magazine pictures (see Preparation).

Preparation

Select 6o words from the work done during previous classes thatneed revising. Put each word on a separate card. Select roo pictures orparts of pictures from magazines. (Rather than select the pictures oneby one, it is much more effective, as well as less time-consuming, tokeep a box ofunsorted pictures (or parts ofpictures) cut frommagazines etc., and then grab a handful whenever you need them.Try to get your students to add to the box: that way your own tasteswill not restrict the variety.)

Procedure

Give out the word cards to the students: if you have twenty students,each will get three cards; if thirty, each will get two.

Spread the magazine pictures on flat surfaces round the room. Askthe students to get up and circulate. Their task is to find a picture thatsomehow matches each of their words. It is up to them to decide how.Tell them that the picture doesn't have to illustrate the word directly'but may symbolize it, or be suggested by it through association withcontext or setting. You should be available to help students who don'tremember their words.

Ask the students to explain to each other how they have matchedtheir words and pictures. Each should talk to at least five otherpeople.

Here are some examples of links students found between words and picturesand the explanations they gave:

Explanations'lt makes me angry.'

'Because the leather looks false.'

'Because she feels guilt. '

'They look as close as a sprocketis to a wheel . '

@


@ 11.7 Rhyming reviewLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 20-30 minutes

Aims To provide a simple auditory review of vocabulary, which alsofocuses on pronunciation and spelling.

Materials Word cards (see Preparation).

Preparation

Choose ro-r5 words and put each on a separate card.

Procedure

1 Each student is given a word card and asked to think of a word thatrh5rmes with it. Suppose the word on the card is mess. StudentA mightchoose guess. A then says: 'The word on my card rhymes withguess.'

2 The other students in the group then have to discover what the wordon A's card is. They do this by asking questions, rather than simplyshouting out the words they think of, for example,B: Is it sometling a girl w ears?A: No, ittsn't dress.C: Is it something peoyie who live in cities feel alot?A: No, not stress.D: Isitwhat apriest does?A: No, notbless.

3 Repeat steps 1 and z as often as you wish, grring a new card to adifferent student each time.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this activity came from Hurwitz and Goddard. GcnnestoImpr ov e Your Child' s English. Kaye and Ward, r9 72.

1 1.8 Draw the wordLevel Beginnertoadvanced

Time 5 minutes in the first class, 15-20 minutes in the second.

Aims To get students to visualize words as a means of rememberingthem.

PreparationChoose the words you want the students to review. There is no reasonwhy these should only be ones that can be easily drawn.

Procedure

Lesson 1

Put the words on the board, then tell the students to draw a picturefor eachword as homework.


Example

Lesson 2

Ask the students to work in pairs, simultaneously, showing theirdrawings to each other and explaining why they feel the drawings flt

the words.

tnterre9num

replacementto receiveto reoch

emphasizedesire

exclusiveskillobservationtodevelop

Variation

Write the words on the blackboard in arbitrary pairs.

Ask the students, working individually, to draw pictures linking thewords in each pair.

Either askthe students to show their pictures to one or twoneighbours and explain the links shown; or form groups of four tofive students. In each group, all the pictures should be pooled, andone by one individuals should take a picture from the pool and try toguess the words represented and tJ'e links between them.

Comments

Students who 'cannot draw' may benefit more than those who can, asthey will need to find words to explain their drawings'

One king dead on the ground and another alive, about to be

crowned.One person handing a bag to another.A bricklayer receiving a brick from a helper.

A person trying to get something from the top of a high

cupboard.A teacher at a blackboard underlining two words.

A cyclist gazing at a van. (The student explained that this was

the cyclist 's desire for the van.)A house surrounded by high walls and locked gates.

A potter making a vase on a wheel.A fire-watching tower in a forest.A child at various stages of growth f rom infancy.

1

2

11.9 Matching words

Level Elementary to advanced

Time 15-30 minutes

Aims To review words, focusing on meaning and context.

Materials 30 word cards and 30 definitions cards (see Preparation).

Preparation

Select not more than thirtywords that need reviewing. Put each oneon a separate card. For each word flnd a slmonym, opposite,dictionary definition, or'groping defi nition' (see honesty below) andput one of these on a card, so thatyou endup with thfuty cards thatmatch the thirtvword cards.


@ Here are examples for fourwords:

word cards matching cardstactoraveryeregance

honesty

diplomacycowardicethe quality of beingrefined or gracefuli t begins wi th 'h ' -

but the 'h ' isn ' t sounded-you can trust someonewho has it-they won'tl ie to you

(synonym)(opposite)(dictionary def i nition)

(groping definition)

Procedure

Give each student one or two of the word cards and one or two of thematching cards (depending on class size) and ask them to get up andmill around the room trying to find cards to match their own. Askthem to note down who has the cards corresponding to theirs, andwhat is on them (this reduces chaos).

Ask a student to call out one of theirwords: the personwith thematching card then calls out the matchingword or deflnition.This goes on until all the cards have been matched.

Variation

The preparation outlined above takes quite a bit of time. Why do ityourself? Simply choose the words you want revised (or ask thestudents to choose) and ask a more advanced group to provide thesynonyms, opposites and deflnitions to put on card. Theywill bedelighted to know their work is being put to a directly practical use.

Acknowledgements

Mike Laverygave us the outline of this exercise. The idea ofusing'gfoping definitions' has been used in M. Berer and M. Rinvolucri.Mazes. Heinemann, r98r.

Gift wordsBeginner to advanced

20 minutes

To review vocabulary and at the same time to establish or improverapport within a group.

Procedure

Ask the students to pick out 20 words they feel need reviewing fromrecent work and to check they know what they mean.TeIl them to put the words each on a slip of paper, and to write oneach slip the name of a person in the group for whom the wordwould be an appropriate gift.

1 1 . 1 0Level

Time

Aims


11.11Level

Time

Aims

3 Everyone now gets up and mills around giving the words away. If thereceiver of a word does not understand it, the giver should explainthe meaning, and the reason for the gift.

Variation

Half the class sit with their word slips spread out in front of them.The other half move round taking the words they feel they would likeand explaining why.

Acknowledgements

This exercise is a transposition of an activity used in therapy andpropo s e d by Te d S aretsky in Aaiv e Te chrn que s and Gr oup P sy chother apy .

Jason Arons otr, a977 .

Forced choiceElementary to advanced

15-25 minutes

To generate conversation by a fast and energetic review of words.

Preparation

Choose half a dozen pairs of words from a vocabulary area to berevised, so that there is an opposition within each pair. If, forexample, you want students to review'water words', you mightchoose these pairs:

spring-wellestuary -waterfalldrownrng - floatingstarfish-whalelake -river

sprntkler - gogg;les

Procedure

Get all the students standing in the middle of the room. Tell themyou are going to offer them a choice: they are going to have to choosewhich thing they think they are most like. If you are working withwateryolJmight say:

P e ople who think they ar e like a spring must go to that end of the r oom-people who think they are like a well must go to the other end of the room.

Oblige any fence-sitters to choose one end of the room.

Now ask the people to talk to their neighbours in pairs and explainwhy they chose as they did. Insist that theywork in pairs, not clustersof three or more. Set a time-limit of no more than one minute foreach exchange.

Ask students from one end of the room to go over and talk to thepeople who made the opposite chorce.

Repeat Steps r, z, and 3 with a newpair ofwords.


11.12Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Acknowledgements

We learnt this technique from S.B. Simon, Howe and Kirschenbaum.Values Aarifi cation. Hart Co. l97 9.

Question and answerElementary to advanced

15-25 minutes

To practise the vocabulary under review interactively and in newcontexts.

One word card for each student (see Preparation).

Preparation

Select 3o-4o words that need reviewing. Prepare cards withten words on each. Every student will need to be given oneten-word card.

Procedure

Pair the students. Give each person a card and ensure that partnershave different cards.

Student A must not show their card to student B. Student A looksat the flrst word on the card and asks B a question aimed at gettingB to say the word. IfA's question does not elicit from B the wordon A's card, A fires more questions until B says the word. This ishowit can go:

The first word on A's card is invasion.A:\Mat did the Americans do to VietnamTB:Bombedit?A: Yes ... and whathave the Israelis often done to Lebcmon?B:Attackedit?A:lNhat do you say when one country moves an anny into another?B: It irwades it.A:What's the nounfor thatTB:'lnyasion'.

B does the same to A. They alternate until all the words on both cardshave been dealt with.

Acknowledgements

We found this technique in Byrne and Rixon (Eds.). CommtnicationGames. EIT Guide r, Second edition. NFER Publishing Co. 1982.


1 1 . 1 3Level

Time

Aims

11.14Level

Time

Aims

Materials

Words to story I@


20-30 minutes

To use oral storytelling to review words.

Preparation

Choose 3o-4o words that need revising.

Procedure

Put up the words on tfre board or overhead projector. Ask thestudents to check any words they don't remember the meaning of.

Ask individual students to pick six or seven words from those on theboard.

Each student then makes up a story (mentally, not on paper)suggested by the words they have chosen.

The students pair offand tell each other their stories, then explainhow they chose those particular words.

Word rushBeginner to intermediate

10 minutes

To review words in an energetic, non-wordy way.

Word cards (see Preparation).

Preparation

Put zo words to be reviewed each on a separate card.

Procedure

Divide the class into two teams, A and B. Have t]'e two teamsassemble at one end of the classroom. Go to the other end yourself.

Call out a member of each team and show them one word.

Each team member rushes back to their team and draws or mimes t}reword. They must not write, speak, or whisper! The first team thatrecognizes the word from the drawing and shouts it out correctly getsa point.

Acknowledgements

The activitycomes fromViola Spolin's goldmine of dramaideas,InT rovisation for the Theatre. Pitman, 1963.

2

3


@ 1 1 . 1 5Level

Time

Aims

Comparing random wordsElementary to advanced

5 minutes in the first lesson; 15 minutes in the second lesson.

To provide a somewhat surreal way of reviewing'hard-to-remember'words.

Procedure

Lesson 1

For homework, ask the students to go back over the last five units ofthe coursebook, and each pick out ten words they find it hard toremember the meaning of. They should put each of these words on aseparate slip of paper and bring the slips to their next class.

Lesson 2

Check that the students do knowthe meanings of the words theyhave put on their slips of paper. Spread all the slips face down overthe teacher's desk.

Take two slips at random and make a comparative sentence aboutthem and put it up on the board. If the two words are beyond andcamel,yor might write:

The camel fe eb further aw ay than b ey ond.OI

The ccnnel is more real thoLnbeyond.

Ask the students, one at a time, to come to the front, pick two words,make a comparative sentence about them and put the sentence up onthe board.

Stop when the board is full.

Comments

If students cannot remember a word, then the chances are that eitherthe word or the context(s) in which it has been met failed to engagetheir attention.

Acknowledgements

We learnt this activity from a Chandler and Stone article we found onthe Web at http ://wrruwetprof essi o n a l. com/

11.16 Multi-sensory revisionLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 30-40 minutes

Aims To get students to choose whether to revise linguistically,kinaesthetically, auditorily or visually.


Procedure

Ask the students to go back over the past three units in thecoursebook and each pull out ten words they find hard to rememberor have already forgotten the meaning of.

Have a secretary come to the board: the students dictate their wordsto the secretary who writes them here and there over the board.

Propose these four ways the students can revise the words:

a Write the words out in a sequence so that the last letter of word I isthe same as the flrst letter of word z, for example egg... go. -. otter.. -etc. Add extra words if really necessary.

b Think about each word and imagine it through your body, forexample:

rain:yotfeel the wet on your skinbetrayal:you get the feeling of emptiness turning to anger.

Write down the word and the association.c Associate the word to be remembered with a word of similar

sound, so if the phrase to remember isfootballpitch,yott mightcome up vmthfoolishwitch.Do this for all the words. Jot down thesound-associated words.

d Get a picture in your mind of the idea behind each word to beremembered. Write down one word to remind you of each picture.

Allow the students ro-r5 minutes to work their way through thewords, whichever way they wish.

Ask the students which way they chose to work on the word (a' b' c'or d). Group all the a's, all the b's, all the c's, and all the d's' andwithin these groupings have the students work in threes or fours todescribe what they did with the words.

The first time you use this exercise, allow time for plenary feedback.

Comments

This activity allows the student to choose whether to reviselinguistically, kinaesthetically, auditorily, or visually. (See theintroduction to Chapter 6.) If you use the exercise more than once,encourage students to try more than one way.

Acknowledgements

We came across the above fourways of revisingwords inWilliamHolden's article'Learning to Learn', in Modern Fnglish Teacher 812, 7999'


11.17 Writing to ruleLevel Elementary to advanced

Time 30-40 minutes

Aims To encourage students to extract as much meaning as they can fromwords by limiting the number they are allowed to use.

Procedure

1 Tell the students they are going to be writing a 5o-word story. Askthem to decide whether t-Iley prefer to work alone or in pairs, and tosit accordingly.

2 Now tell them that they are to writ e exactly 5o words and that noword may be repeated, not even the articles, helping verbs, etc.

3 As theywrite, help, when requested, with the language problems the'no repetition' rule imposes.

4 Group the students in sixes to enjoy listening to each other's stories.Tell them to listen criticallyjust in case there has been an unwittingrepetition.

Variations

Experimentwith differentword counts: is 3o words too short,or roo words too lonfl

Relax the restriction on articles, common verbs, etc. Does this makethe activity more or less creative?Invent, or get the students to invent, other restrictions, such aslimiting the number of times speciflc words, sounds, or letters maybe used, or banning (or insisting on) specific words (and,I, not, . . .\.

Comments

Rules, even, or perhaps especially, arbitrary ones, can stimulate andencourage as well as restrict a writer. If, for example, your studentsblock when you ask them "v\hite three sentences using these words',tell them to make the sentences exactly eleven words long.

Acknowledgements

We found this activity in Michael Lewis (1993). The parlour and radiogameJust aMinute asks players to speak on a theme for exactly oneminute 'without hesitation, repetition, or deviation'. The 'mini-sagas'

popularized in Britain by theDailyTelegraph are stories of exactly 5owords, but may include repetition.


nnotatedbibl iog raphy

Aitchison, Jean. 1994. WordsrntheMind: An

Introduction to the Mental Lexicon Second edition.Oxford: Blackrvell.

Words andhowwe learn, remember,understand, and find the ones we want. Theauthor discusses the structure and content ofthe human word-store or 'mental lexicon'.

Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. t963. Teacher. London:Secker andWarburg.

Experiences ofa teacher in New Zealand,with remarkable insight into children'smotivations to learn.

Augarde, Tony. 2oo1. Oxford Guide toWord Garnes.Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Examines twenty-six forms of word game

including Scrabble and Spoonerisms,crosswords and chronograms, riddles andpuns, describing their history and socialcontext.

Ayto, John. :999. Twentteth-Cenhtry Words.Oxford: Oxford University Pres s.

Aunique retrospective of the twentiethcentury providing insight into thedevelopment ofthe English language decadeby decade, with around 5ooo new words andusages.

Ba ke r, Mo na. :992. In Other Wor ds : a Courseb ook on

Tr anslation. London: Routledge.Addresses the need for a systematic approachto training in translation studies by exploringvarious areas oflanguage and relating thetheoretical findings to the actual practice oftranslation.

Bandler, Richard and John Grinder. r97s.The Struchtre of Magic.Palo /Jto: Science andBehavior Books.

Subtitled'Language and therapy', it definesthose predictable elements that make changehappen in language-based transactions.

Bateson, Gregory. 7973.Stepsto anEcologr of Mind.

Boulder, Co.: Paladin Books.Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry,

evolution and much else that goes to make up

Bateson's view of the mind as a network ofinteractions relating the individual with hissociety.

Bateson, Gregory. t99t. ASacredUnity: FurtherStepsto anEcoTogt of Mtnd. London: HarperCollins.

A second volume ofcollected essays.

Burbidge, Nicky, Peta Gray, Sheila Levy, and

Ma rio R i nvof u qi. :'996. Letters. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. (in this series)

Campbell, Linda, Bruce Campbell, and DeeDickinson. :998.Teaching cmd Learning Through

Multiple Intelligences. Second edition. New YorkPearson. Allyn and Bacon.

Practical, workable ideas based on Gardner'stheories. The second edition containsmaterials based on the 'latest intelligences'.

Co | | i ns Cob u i I d. t998. Gr ammar P atterns r Verbs.

London: HarperCollins.Based on the the Cobuild corpus.

Delf er; Sheelagh and Mario Rinvolucri. zooz.U sing the Mothe r Tongue. ETp-Delta.

Provides ideas and guidelines on when and

how to use the mother tongue not just for

convenience but as a real, living, and vitalresource.

F re i re, Pa u I o. r97 z. Cultur al Action for Fr e e dom.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.The cultural and political power of words, in

the context of adult literary prograrnmes.

Gairns, Ruth and Stuart Redman. t986.Workrng w ith Words. Cambridge :Cambridge University Press.

The flrst systematic theoretical treatment of

vocabulary acquisition.

Bibl iography | 165

Ga rdner, Howard. rggga. Intelligence Reft amed:Mullryle Intelligences for the 27st Century. New York:Basic Books.

A progress report on how the theory ofmultiple intelligences has evolved since itwas flrst set forth in Howard Gardner's 1983bookFrcLrnes of Mind.

Gard ner, Howard. t999b. The Disciplined Mind:What Nl Students ShouldUnderstand. New York:Simon and Schuster.

A synthesis of Gardner's ideas aimed atparents, educators, and the general publicalike. The book explores the larger questionsofwhat an educated person should be andhow such an education can be achieved.

H a I ey, J ay. ( ed. ). r g 8 S. C onv er s ations with Milt on H.ErickonVolumes r-3. NewYork: Triangle Press.

Volume t Changing lndniduals, Y ohtme zChangingCouples, and Volume g ChangingChildr en an d F amilie s all explore Ericks on' scontribution to therapy as various kinds oflinguistic intervention to bring about change.

Knowfes, Elizabeth (ed.). 1997. The OxfordDictionary of New Words. Second edition. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

The story ofaround zooo words and phrasesprominent in the media or the public eye inthe r98os and r99os.

Lewis, Michael. rggg. The Lexical Approach. Hove:Language Teaching Publications.

The book's main principles are that languageconsists of grammaticalized lexis notlexicalized grammar. Methods, materials andteacher training are discussed.

Meara, Paul. t997.'Towards a new approach tomodelling vocabulary acquisition' in Schmitt, N.and MJ. McCarthy (eds.). Vocabulary: Desription,Acquisition and Pedagogt. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Discusses the KeyWord approach.

McCarthy, M ichael. 1998. Spoken Langtage andApplie d Linguistics. Cambridge : CambridgeUniversity Press.

Gives a central role to the spoken language inthe syllabus. Itbrings together a number ofseparate studies by the author, based on tltecANcoDE spokencorpus.

O'Conno[ Joseph and John Seymour. r99o.lntroducing NLP. London: HarperCollins.

Describes what good communicators dodifferently, and enables the reader to learnthese patterns of excellence.

166 | Bibl iography

Orage, A. R. 1998. OnLow andPsychologtrcalExercises. YorkBeach, Maine: Samuel Weiser.

A collection of essays fiom the long-timeeditor of the magazine NewAge. Firstpublished in London, r93o.

Ra u dsep p, E u g e ne. t977. Cre atfu e Gr owth G cLrnes.New York: Perigee Books/Putnam.

A collection of 75 games to expand creativityand make you think.

Silver, Harvey F., Richard W. Strong, andMatthew J. Perini. zooo. SoEachMayLearn: lntegrattng Learning Styles and MultipleIntelligences. Nexandria, Va.: Association forSupervision and Curriculum Development.

Rationales and research-based principles oflearning that support integrated learning tohelp educators process ideas and analyse theircurrent practices; includes instruments foridenti$ring style and intelligence proflles.

Spof in, Yiola. 196g. Irnprovisation for the Theatre.London: Pitman.

Spolin worked with students andprofessionals in the theatre, but extended thisto elementary and secondary education-fiom gifted students to children with severelearning disabilities.

Stevick, Earl. :1996. Memory, Meaning and Method.Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Particularly good as a survey ofviews onmemory and vocabulary retention.

Stevick, Earl. rg8o. AWay andWays. Rowley,Mass.: NewburyHouse.

An excellent suwey of 'new' methods inlanguage teaching.

Wah f , Mark. gg9. Math for Humans: Teaching MathThrough I Intelligences. Langley, Wash. : LivnlernPress.

An introduction to and many practicalexamples of using a broad, multipleintelligences approach to the teaching ofmathematics.

Wright, Jon. 1999. Dictionaries. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. (in this series)

Makes learners aware of the wealth ofinformation in most ELT dictionaries.Practises reading skills, memory training,and encourages learners to 'have fun withdictionaries'.

Concordance softwareand online resourcesColl ins Cobuildhttp:/ / t i ta n ia.cobu i ld.col I i ns.co. u k

Offers a free trial use of a section of the 'Bank

of English'corpus, with concordances limitedto ao hits.

Coyternic query engine. http'.l lwww.copern ic.comPowerful, generalized search and query

software.

Dodd, Tony. SAM-32. Search software for the

Bntish N ationaT C or pus, World E dition. Humanitie s

Computing Unit, Oxford University.http://www. hcu.ox.ac. u k/B N C

Free trial available. Will give you 5o hits fi:omthe roo million-word British National Corpus.

[ee, David. http://devoted.to/corporaFrequently updated corpus website reportingon new developments in corpora andconcordance software.

Scott, M i ke. Wordsmith Tools.http://www. ou p.co. u k orhttp://www.oup.com/elVglobal/cata logue/multimedia

Probably the most powerful, versatile andlearner-centric corpus tools available.

Watts, R. J. C. Concor dance.http://www. rjcw.freeserve.co.uk

Text analysis and concordancing softwareused in a wide range ofsubject areas.

Dictionaries and thesauri onlineANd CD-ROMS

Collins bilingual dictionaries (Spanish, German,

Italian, French):http ://www.wo rd ref e rence. co m/

Lexical FreeN et Thesaurus: http://www. lexf n.com

O xfor d English Dictionary O nline.htto://www.oed.com/

Oxford Phrasebuilder GenLe. cD-RoM. OxfordUniversity Press.

Collocational dictionary which integrateswith your word processor and web browser.

Pf u m b Desi g n . Visual Thes aurus.htt p ://www.vis ua lt h esa u rus. com

Roget'sThesaurus.http://www ba rtl eby.com/thesa u ri

Crossword softwareBeresf o rd, Ross. TEA & Symp ailty.http://bryson.ltd. uk

Casson, Henry. Crossword Utility.http://home.f reeu k. neVdha r risonl puzzleslutility.htm

Crossword Compiler 6. httpl lwww.crossword-puzzle-maker.com

Crossword Maestro. http://www.geni us2000.com

Bibl iography | 167

I ndex

In the general index references are to page numbers; in the Topics and

Language indexes references ate to activity numbers. Some terms may

appear in more than one index.

General index

Aitchison, Jean 11o, 165

association 7Bateson, Gregory 8r, t55

collocation 3,5concordances 3,11,65context 28

corpora 3,10,65Erickson, Milton 8r, e3z

Gardner, Howard 81,166

Gategno, Caleb r+9

Intemet 11,78

learning styles 3, r3

lexico-grammar 3memory 81

mother tongue 3, 8, 52multiple intelligences 3, 7, 8r

neurolinguistic programming

(NLP) 3,7,9, ro

perception 6,42,81,

prototypes 1o8, 11o, 165

sensory preferences 9, 82

Shereshevskii e54

wordflelds 7o1,71r

Topicsassociation (see also memory) r.4,

1.7, 2.9,2.r2, 4.1, 4.7,6.8, 6.9,

6.t5, 7.7, 7r.4, 11.6, 11.8, 11.16

categories of words 11.7,17.2

collocation s.s, 2.4, Z.sconcordances 5.2, S.3, 5.4, S.S,5.5context a.2, 2.7, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.8,

2.15, 8.2, 9.8, r1..9, a1..a2

corpora 5.2-5.7crosswords 9.4dictation 4.8,6.9,9.3email z.r4

history ofwords 2.r.3, ro.5,

70.6, ro.7

learning by heart 2.ao, z.ra

memory (see also association)

t.6, 2.9, 4.5, 6.10, 7.2, 7.3, 9.L0,71.4,77.5

peer teaching 6.4, 6.12, 8.7

perception 6.r

auditory 6 1 6.9, 6.tt, r:..7

kinaesthesic 5.9, 6.s, 6.:il^, 6.t4

multi-sensory 4.L, 6.L, 6.5, 77.76

spatial 6.6

visual 4.5, 6.2, 6 3, 6.5, 6.7, 6.8,

6.9, 6.t2, 6.t4, 6.15, aL4, 71.5,

11.8

prediction L1, 1,.2, 7.3

prototypes 7.8relaxation 6.15,9.2

sensory preferences 6.1, 6.14,

t:..t6

storytelling 2.8, 2.3, 8.4, ::l..t3

thesaurus ro.8

translation 4.ro

Languageabstract vocabulary 6.5, 6.t5

ambiguous words 4.8, 9.5adjectives 6.13

animals 6.5,7.7o

colour 6.8

conceptwords 6.2

definitions 2.7, 8.j, 9.3, 9.7,70.a-4o,4,11.9

femalewords r.5

foodvocabulary 7.8gender r.5

homonyms 4.8homophones 4.8,6.9male words r.5, 7.8opposite meanings 7.6parts ofspeech 4.8,9.5preflxes 9.2synonyms 5.5trees 5.5

verb phrases 5.rweather vocabulary 5.5, 7.8word hierarchy 7.tword order 4.2

168 | Index

R E S O U R C EB @ K S F O RT E A C H E R S

series editorAlan Maley

This series gives teachers, trainers, and trainee teachers practicalguidance in key aspects oflanguage teaching. Each book includesan introduction and up to roo classroom ideas, materials, andtechniques. The activities are clearly presented, and ofFer teachersall the information they need about appropriate level, time,preparation, materials, classroom management, monitoring,variations, and follow-up activities.

OXFORD ENGLISHrsBN 0-1 9-4421 86-4

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