Lesson Plan, Outcome, Methods, and Alternatives
Dear Moslem Teachers. This is a useful article for us to improve our style in teaching vocabulary.
There are many ways to teach vocabulary to second language students - here is an example of one vocabulary lesson highlighting the specific teaching methods used.
Lesson Plan
The teacher in this lesson introduces vocabulary through the theme of illness and other physical impairments. Under the superordinate of ‘illness’, co-hyponyms such as ‘flu’, ‘cold’, and ‘indigestion’ are used as examples by the students and teacher to answer the question, ‘Why did you go to the doctor’s office?’This new vocabulary is then used as an opportunity for role-play in order to provide experience in making appointments, and obtaining and giving detailed information about health matters. The class time is divided into presentation (demonstrative techniques to present vocabulary followed by oral repetition) and practice (role-play work in pairs using vocabulary)
Outcome
The students are asked to look at a picture of a hospital in their textbooks. The teacher then starts asking questions to the class such as:- Have you ever been in hospital for some reason or the other?
- Why did you go to the doctor’s?
- How about your family if not you? Fathers, mothers, uncles, grandmothers?
After the pronunciation work, students are split into pairs to guess the docto'rs prognosis in a doctor/patient role-play recorded on a cassette. Then the teacher chooses two people in the class to act out the doctor/patient roles. The original pairs from the previous exercise then have to do their own role-play.
Methods
There are many techniques for the teaching of vocabulary but words such as ‘sore throat’ and ‘stomach ache’ need "a physical demonstration, using mime and gesture, as it will create a visual memory for the word." [1] Once the word is presented the teacher then proceeds to describe the meaning of the word, the written as well as spoken form of the word, and attention to collocation, i.e. ‘sore throat’, ‘stomach ache’, ‘tooth ache’.This recycling of the particular vocabulary throughout the lesson is integral to the [2] production of language. Since learners need to comprehend a great deal more than they can produce, a large part of listening and reading skills involves recognizing the main lexical content of the text.
Alternative
Since this class was presented with vocabulary not only for passive recognition but for active production, an alternative would have been to provide more vivid contexts for each keyword instead of just a physical demonstration.It could of also been helpful for the learners to introduce vocabulary learning schemes; the origins of some of the vocabulary used in the lesson is Latin so it would have been perfect to emphasize the importance of mnemonics, or relating the word to some previous learner knowledge [3] (for example indigestion-English, indigestión-Spanish).
Since only cognitive strategies were employed, an alternative would have been to immerse students into particular cultural media dealing with the specific vocabulary (television- medical programs, music- feeling the ‘blues’, and magazine articles- health issues) in order to utilize metacognitive learning strategies.
[1] Tricia Hedge, ‘Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom’.
[2] Graham Workman, ‘RSA Dimploma Correspondence Course Material. Unit 3:2- The nature of meaning, visual aids, vocabulary teaching’.
[3] Anne Burns and Helen de Silva Joyce, ‘Teachers’ voices: teaching vocabulary’.
The copyright of the article Teaching ESL Vocabulary in ESL Programs/Lessons is owned by Edurne Scott. Permission to republish Teaching ESL Vocabulary in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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I hope this article can make our learning more powerful in order our students can take the effects so that they are able to understand any materials.
Rewrite by Abu Adil