Issue 10 - Summer 2005
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Issue 10 - Summer 2005 |
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A very big thanks goes to everyone involved in the creation, organisation, delivery and smooth running of this hugely successful event. It was good to see so many VTTN members out of the 350 or so participants and 50 speakers. Almost every province in the country had a representative at the conference and it was a great opportunity to talk, meet, share ideas and network. The pull-out section contains 8 summary sessions from this year’s conference – a mixture of practical activities, research and presentations. Apologies to speakers not represented in this special supplement or on these pages – there simply is not enough space to include everyone! One of the highlights of the conference was the prize draw for the Pilgrims Teacher Training Course in the UK, presented by our plenary speaker, Mario Rinvolucri. The lucky winner was Phan My Loan, from Ho Chi Minh City. Congratulations to her! She will be flying off to the UK in July for a two-week Teacher Training course in Canterbury, Kent, and in a future issue of English Now, you’ll hear all about her trip.
Use a text to raise awareness of word combinations. Put the following numbers into the text below: 1,000,000 25 3 53,000,000 59 100,000,000 5 Traffic jams in Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand, are so bad that a normal journey to work takes about (a) ……hours. People in most countries drive on the right- but people drive on the left in (b) ……countries, including Japan, India, Australia and the UK. More than ( c )…… people in the world ride a bicycle. Everyday more than (d) …… people travel into the centre of London: 35% go by underground, 30% take the train, (e) ……% travel by car, 7% catch the bus, and 3% walk to work! In Tokyo, people never wait more than (f) ……for an underground train. (g) …… people fly to and from O’Hare Airport in Chicago every year ( that’s about 100 people every minute). Follow-up to this could be to focus on verb/noun combinations:
Peter gave the follwing tips for teachers:
1. collocations (common word combinations) including: 2. fixed phrases: such as: Never mind! On the other hand.., If I were you …, etc 3. semi-fixed phrases: (that is phrases with variations), such as: a friend of mine/hers/etc; both of us/them etc; the second/third/tenth biggest in the world, etc 4. whole sentences which act as phrases: such as: How are you? He’s gone home; I’ll give you a hand; I agree to some extent. Make your students aware of phrases and collocations They should know about the importance of such phrases. Feed in phrases on a “little but often” basis. Try to ensure that your lexical input is useful – teach phrases relating to a particular activity as you go along. For example, in a grammar practice activity, instead of simple Yes, I do or No, I haven’t, feed in phrases like it depends or I don’t really care. Introduce phrases in context, but drill them as short chunks. Phrases can be difficult to understand and specific to certain situations, so it is important that they are introduced in context. However, students may retain them better if you drill just the phrase e.g. go for a walk rather than a whole sentence.Point our patterns in phrases. Pointing out patterns can help students to remember phrases.Keep written records of phrases as phrases. Get into the habit of writing word combinations on the board rather than just isolated words. The more students see the words together the more they will remember them as a unit. E.g. rather than writing up degree, write up get a degree. (adapted from Cutting Edge Resource Bank , Pearson Education 2001) |
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Peter Moor, co-author of the Cutting Edge series and sponsored by Longman Pearson Education as a plenary speaker, gave some good ideas and advice for activating vocabulary. He focused on word combinations in his workshop.
Become aware of phrases and collocations yourself. Until recently, little attention has been given to the thousands of phrases and collocations that make up the lexis in English. Start noticing in pieces of text how common these “pre-fabricated chunks” are in all types of English. Such phrases blur the boundaries between grammar and vocabulary – in teaching these phrases you will find that you are helping your students with many problematic areas that are traditionally considered to be grammar, from the use of articles and prepositions, to the use of the passive and the present perfect. Many common examples of these structures are in fact fixed or semi-fixed phrases.