ix)Level: Beginners upwards.Suggested procedure: Find or make a set of pictures of items of everyday

objects (e.g. newspaper, envelope, aspirin, toothbrush, stamps, apples,meat, bread). Picture Cue Cards, (]. K. Y. Kerr, 1979) are ideal forthis type of activity, but yon can of course use your own flashcardsor rcalia.

Revise the vocabulary first and then, beginning with a picture whichyou show the class (e.g. aspirin), practise a short dialogue on thefollowing lines:

A: Where are you going?B: To the chemist's.A: Why?B: To get some aspirins.

Give each student a picture and ask the class to stand up and performsimi la r dialogues with each other. Tell them that once they havefinished their conversation with a student, they should swap cardsand find a new partner.

('.oniiiicnt: This is quite a standard and conventional exercise whichprovides valuable controlled practice; there are many useful and enjoy-.iblc activities of this type in the book which accompanies Picture('.lie Cttnis. With this particular example, it is possible to revise twolexical areas at the same time: the objects and the shops.

Further reader activities

I I )esign a word field diagram like the one on page 104 or the bedroomone on page 97 for one of the following:height and bodywcight of a persontypes of accommodationcontents of a living roomjumpers (colour, style, material)

2 Write a text to accompany any wallchart you use frequently, to encour-age contextual guesswork on the lines of the exercise on page 105.

J Design a scale or cline to illustrate one of the following: liking/dislik-ing, big/small, adverbs of frequency.

I (Collect together a set of paired magazine pictures which have similari-t ies and differences, and group them according to topic. Use themin the way suggested on page 112.

1 1 4

8 Using authentic reading texts

Written texts are often one of the major sources through which languagelearners meet new vocabulary, so it is only logical that they should beused extensively in classroom teaching. They have the great advantageof contextualising new language items for the learner, and an interestingtext also serves to make that language more memorable.

Nevertheless texts are not always the ideal vehicle for vocabulary de-velopment in the classroom. One practical problem is length: interestingtexts are often far too long for intensive study and can lead to consider-able vocabulary overloading. The new lexis in a text will also be a veryrandom selection, frequently defying any clear systematic organisationon the teacher's part, and containing many new items of marginal valueto the students.

Perhaps the most barren feature of vocabulary exploitation in textsfrom published materials is the absence of exercises that activate usefullexis from the text. Questions testing receptive knowledge are commonenough but productive practice activities even for useful high frequencyitems are rare. In our examples we have tried to include activities whichwill enable the teacher to integrate the new lexis with other skills work,and provide the students with productive language practice. The textsand accompanying tasks have also been chosen to illustrate and empha-sise different types of exploitation, which include scanning, intensivestudy, prediction, contextual guesswork and word building.

i ) F O C U S I N G ON KEY V O C A B U L A R Y IN A TEXTLevel: Intermediate.Suggested procedure: Elicit from the students some of the things that

can go wrong with holiday travel arrangements. Apart from generatinginterest for the text to follow, this will give you an idea of the vocabul-ary the students already know and an opportunity to introduce severalnew items they will meet in the text. The students then read the textand complete the true/false exercise individually or in pairs (with thehelp of a dictionary if necessary). Each question is designed to focuson particular target items, and those we have selected for attentionare:

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