Page 129 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

NOUNS ANDTHE NOUN PHRASE 115
STRATEGIES AND TACTICS FOR TEACHING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES
Incidental learning of vocabulary (see chap. 3 for a discussion) represents the least labor-intensive way to expand vocabulary. The learning goals of the teaching suggestions and activities presented next are developed to promote:
• Noticing the uses and meanings of nouns (see chap. 3)
• Incidental learning of words (see chap. 3)
• Discussing contextualized occurrences of nouns and their lexical
substitutions
It is crucial that the teacher follow up on the assigned exercises and vocabulary learning tasks. As mentioned in chapter 3, learning 10 new words per hour is not an unreasonable rate, and it is through the discussion and activitiesthatthewordsareactuallylearned. In-classdiscussionsand/or follow-up work with nouns and other words provide the most important benefit because they give students additional opportunities to:
• Focus their attention on specific vocabulary items
• Use them in speaking and listening
• Negotiate meaning of nouns and other words
• Refine contextualized meanings and syntactic properties of items
• Develop classroom interactional skills
All teaching activitiesexemplified in this chapter and others have been used for decades with many types of academically bound students with vari- ous levels of proficiency, from beginning to advanced. Although books on teaching academic vocabulary often call for constructing exercises and tests for each lesson, these are laborious and time-consuming. The teaching sug- gestions presented here are based on using texts easily obtainable from print and written media sources such as advertisements, book cover de- scriptions, and news reports. In the days of the Internet and Web site prolif- eration, example texts can be easily obtained in many geographical locations and can be chosen to suite all types of learners—from beginners to highly advanced writers.
As a general rule, if text simplification is needed, it is best to eliminate rare rather than common words, even if they are lexically and structurally complex.
Prefixes and Suffixes—Dictionary Work and Practice
English-English dictionaries are alphabetically organized, and a photo- copy of one to three dictionary pages with words that begin with a specific prefix can allow learners to figure out its meaning. For example:
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