Vocabulary 1 and 2

Main aims: Quality versus quantity

These two lessons will concentrate only on new words that participants have come across during this
week. Those words will be live examples from which participants will learn to draw the maximum
benefit.

We will learn how to record each new word so it is ready to boost our language skills in as many
different ways as possible.

We will learn what exercises and research may be applied to each word so that we derive the most
language power and flexibility from each new word we learn.

●      Maximise benefit for each new word

○      Recording for full exploitation

○      Extracting every last drop

○      Powerful and flexible language


Method:

All work takes place in teams, unless otherwise arranged. Learning will be experiential. This means
that everything you will learn, you will discover for yourself, under my guidance, using your own
material. Our first class will be on Monday afternoon, and our second on Wednesday afternoon.


Preparation:

Please read this text and view this video. Should any words in either of these resources be new to
you, please list them and bring them along to class. If all the words in both resources are
familiar to you, then please bring along five words that you’ve been unsure about for a while and
would like to have clarified.


Monday afternoon class:

Recording new words:

●      Spell the word as you see it or assume its spelling if you heard it

●      Record your pronunciation of the word on your phone or similar

●      Write down the sentence in which you saw or heard the word

●      What do you assume or suspect the meaning to be? This is the most important part.

●      Look up the real meaning in an academic dictionary (not a pocket dictionary or a
multilingual electronic dictionary)

●      In your own discipline or personal life, what can you associate the word with?

Extracting the benefits I:

●      Why is the word spelt the way it is? Are there variant spellings?

●      Why is it pronounced this way? Are there variant pronunciations?

●      Are there different ways of using this word in a sentence?

●      Does this word look like or sound like it should mean something different? Why do I think
that?

●      Does this same word have different meanings?

●      What other words are connected to this word or to its meaning?

Free discussion of the two exercises.


Wednesday afternoon class:

Practice:

Working in teams of three or four students, each member contributes one new word that they’ve
learnt since the last class.

●      Record each of the words and extract the benefits from each, as we have done on Monday


The power of what you already know: extracting the benefits from little words.

Which are more powerful, little words or big words?

●      Research five single-syllable words (any number of letters). Do you notice any pattern to
these words? Discuss.


Working as a whole class,

●      Amalgamate all the words into a single list

●      Divide the words into two categories


[T equalises the categories, if necessary]


Working as two groups, each group takes one category.

Consulting a thesaurus, look up each word:

●      Do you notice any pattern?


Working as a whole class,

●      Describe the differences between what the thesaurus reveals about each category.

●      Pick one word and drill down

●      What did today’s exercises reveal about little words and big words?


Free discussion:

●      What did these two lessons, Monday and today, reveal about English vocabulary?

●      What is the difference between a dictionary and a thesaurus? When would we use one and when
the other?