Classroom Research: ELT Methods, Lessons 4-5 Topic: Learning and teaching vocabulary and grammrar

1. Learning & Teaching
Vocabulary & Grammar
Lessons 4 and 5: Classroom Research
14 September 2016
21 September 2015
Adapted from:
Communicative Language Teaching in Action, Klaus Brandl, 2008

2. Activating your background knowledge
1. What techniques did your English teachers use to teach vocabulary?
2. Which strategies of vocabulary instruction have worked best for you
as a student?
3. From what you observed in your practicum, how did the teachers
teach vocabulary?
4. What does it mean to “know” a word? Do you know just the
meaning of the word, or is there other knowledge associated with
“knowing” a word?

3. “Knowing” a word
• Definition(s) of the word (denotative meaning)
• Attitude/ emotion connected to the word (connotative meaning)
• Relationship to other words
• Synonyms
• Antonyms
• Collocations
• a long road or a tall road?
• the dog barked or the dog roared?
• The use of the word in idioms
• an open hand; a hand-out

4. What does it mean to know a word?
1. What does the word translate to in Thai?
2. What does the word look like? (recognize its written form)
3. How do you spell the word?
4. How do you say the word? (pronunciation)
5. What other words “go” with the word? (collocations, concepts)
6. What are words with a similar or opposite meaning? (synonyms,
antonyms)
7. What are the other meanings of this word?
8. Can you use the word correctly in context? (spoken or written)

5. CLT Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary
• Introduce vocabulary through:
1. Multisensory and multimedia input
2. Using real and authentic language “in context”
3. Thematic units
4. Interactive presentation
5. Cognitively engaging practices
6. Techniques for presenting vocab

6. Multisensory/ Multimedia
• Present both words (written or oral) and picture (visual/ graphics)
• Illustrations
• Graphs
• Photos
• Maps
• Animation
• Video
• Helps the learner make a connection between new English input
(written or spoken words) and an existing concept (background
knowledge) through a visual representation (picture)

7. • Supports “retention” process (remember the vocabulary later)
• Neural network– connections in the brain give meaning to the sounds
of words
• “The human brain is a system of neural networks that keep organizing
themselves. During a learning activity this means the activation of not only
once connection, but a network of connections.” Brandl, 2008
• Visual memory: people remember visuals better than words; if words
are associated with visuals, people remember them better

8. Introduce vocab thematically
• Word associations
• Mind maps
• What do you see at the park?
• Describe a type of fruit
(senses, colors, textures, etc)
• Sorting
• List-making
• Positive emotions vs. negative emotions (adjectives)
• Putting word cards into baskets
• Animals in the air, land, and water

9. Present vocab in an interactive way
• An interactive presentation means the learner cognitively engage
with the input: they do something with the input
• Students mark off words they recognize
• Answer questions about the vocab
• Sequence words in order or on a cline
• Creates a slower pace, which avoids overloading the memory with
information
• Depth of cognition (more than just repeating a word)
• Providing the opposite word (antonym)
• Using the word in context

10. Make lesson cognitively engaging for students
• Spatial contiguity: Putting written words next to the picture
• Promote a deeper level of processing
• “Discovery learning” activates background knowledge

11. Discovery Learning Activity
(show p. 101: Vida y Estilo)
• To experience a discovery learning activity from a speaker’s perspective,
look at the excerpt from a Spanish magazine. See if you can figure out the
names of the days of the weeks in Spanish (hint: October 1 is a Wednesday)
• Which strategies did you use to fulfill this task?
• Did this activity encourage higher-level cognitive thinking skills? How?
• (show p. 93: Personal Information)
• Which words are you able to derive from the context? How?
• Remind students they do not need to know every word, they should use the context
to guess the meaning
• If you used an English version of this activity in class, how would you introduce the
activity to your students? What would you say? How would you explain it?

12. Vocabulary Presentation Techniques
• Use Realia
• Use Pictures, photographs, drawings instead of word lists/translations
• Present words written next to pictures
• PowerPoint
• Involve students’ features and belongings in the vocab presentation
• Use body language
• Create scenarios that can illustrate the vocabulary word, and students
act them out
• How do you teach the word, “embarrassed”?

13. Remember:
• There is no one correct way to teach vocabulary
• The choice of HOW to teach or which strategies to use depends on:
• The objective / purpose of the vocabulary lesson
• Is your aim for students to produce the vocabulary, or only to recognize it (productive vs.
receptive)
• Available materials (pictures, Realia, resources for creating materials)
• The proficiency level and background knowledge of the students
• The teacher’s and students’ personalities
• The teaching approach used
• The nature and content of the vocabulary

14. Engaging Activities
• For end-of-term review
• For primary school

15. End of unit/ End of term review
• Taboo
• In pairs, write down one keyword with 4 taboo words
• Split class into two or three teams
• Opposite team plays referee while the other team gives clues to teammate
• Scattegories
• Make lists in groups based on a topic they have learned already
• Timed by teacher
• Groups take turns giving teacher one word each, until no new words remain
• Jeopardy/ vocab lists
• Partners make lists for each other with 5-10 vocab words and a definition or
example of each word
• Read the definition/ example and other partner guesses the vocab word
• Teacher takes students’ vocab lists and makes Jeopardy game for next lesson

16. Homework:
Example lesson plan– “Fruit”
• Read the 9 steps of this vocabulary lesson introducing names of fruit
• List all the different ways the activity engages the learner. What different
senses and modalities does the teacher make use of?
• Modality: through gestures, physical actions, pictures, sounds, etc.
• In the comment/rationale boxes, list the strategy/strategies of
vocabulary instruction used in each step
• There may be more than one right answer, so your answer might be different
from your classmate’s
• If you cannot identify the technique, write the “pedagogical rationale” for
how or why this is an effective strategy for teaching vocabulary

18. Grammar Teaching
• Explicit grammar instruction:
• Teacher provides full explanation and definition of a grammar point
• Teacher provides examples of grammar point
• Students should listen to teacher and practice using grammar in class
• Students memorize grammar rules and perform their knowledge on a test
• Implicit grammar instruction: (Krashen, 1982)
• Implied but not directly explained
• Exists in language, but not made apparent
• Students learn from comprehensible input, through exposure
• No memorization or test needed

19. Argument for explicit grammar instruction:
• “Explicit knowledge serves to:
1. Monitor language use and thereby, to improve accuracy
in output
2. Facilitate noticing of new forms and new form-function
mappings in the input
3. Make possible “noticing the gap” (comparing what is
noticed in the input with what learners are producing
themselves).”
--Ellis (2002)

20. Noticing
1. Learners pick out specific features of the language and pay
attention to them
• Criteria for being noticeable:
• It occurs frequently
• It relates to the learner’s common sense about basic functions of language
• Its functions are something a learner would pay attention to
2. After something in grammar has been noticed, and the
relationship between form and meaning are understood, the
grammar becomes part of intake into the learning process
3. Learners analyze the forms (intake) to figure out how they fit in
the existing knowledge of the languge.

21. Example: don’t
• Learner hears “don’t” often: “Don’t talk so loud” “Don’t forget to turn
in your homework” “We don’t have class next week” “I don’t know
the answer to that”
• Directions, warnings, advice, expressions
• Learner notices that when people say “don’t”, they shake their head
wave their hands slightly, or make a frown.
• Learner understands the form-function connection, that don’t means
something like “no”, used as a negation of something

22. Structuring and restructuring
• What do leaners do as they notice features in input?
• They continue to revise their understanding and use of the feature
• Their rules might be different in the interlanguage, but they continue
to change them
• Stage 1:
• No and not are alternated with don’t
• I don’t can sing; No have any money

23. Structuring/ restructuring in interlanguage
• Stage 2: Learner begins to place the negative element after
the auxiliary verbs (are, is, can)
• You can’t go there; She don’t like rice
• Stage 3: Learner uses ‘Do’ with marker of tense and person:
• It doesn’t work ; We didn’t have dinner
• However, learners might still mark tense on both auxiliary don’t
and verb:
• I didn’t went there; She doesn’t wants to go.

24. Principles of learning grammar:
1. “Readiness to learn”: learners pass through developmental
sequence
• Developmental sequence is determined by the complexity of processing
involved
• Teacher cannot expect student to acquire the grammatical structure if
learners are not ready
2. Learners take various amounts of time to acquire the same
structure
• Recycle structures throughout the course, each time presenting new
functions and possible uses

25. • 3. As the interlanguage system develops and restructuring occurs,
learners may start to make errors in grammar they used demonstrate
correctly
• Teacher has to be patient with learners; this is part of the learning process
• 4. Learners are able to learn inductively, drawing on the knowledge of
English they have already acquired, to formulate hypotheses, test
these out, and gradually restructure and refine grammatical
knowledge.

26. Inductive approach: Discovery learning
• Learners discover the rules of a grammar point through looking at
examples and figuring out their different meanings
• Learners are engaged in raising their own awareness of how language
works
• “Grammar consciousness raising” (Rutherford, 1987)
• Learners test hypotheses in a controlled setting

27. Homework
• Read worksheet & Complete worksheet
• Find example of “inductive grammar teaching/instruction/approach”
and print it out
• Write 3 questions to quiz your classmates about the reading