Module 12: Vocabulary

Google: drive, docs, pub 

For this assignment, I looked through the ideas in the pre-reading, and decided that “Dictionary Use” would be the best one to try.

There are several reasons why I thought “Dictionary Use” would be the most effective.  

The first reason is that it aligns perfectly with the instructions from the textbook.  The textbook always selects 12 vocabulary words from each reading, and presents these words to the students in a vocabulary box before the reading.  The students are instructed “Use a dictionary to define any new or unknown words.”  However, despite this being the standard instructions in every lesson, I actually have so far avoided just sending my students off to the dictionary.  I was worried that this would be seen as lazy teaching, and so I have always adapted this instruction into some sort of worksheet in which I provided the correct definitions, and the students just had to match the words.  But it occurred to me that with some effort made towards dictionary training, perhaps the textbook instructions could be used after all.

The second reason is that the 12 selected words do not fit any lexical field.  They all come from the same reading text, but are otherwise unconnected. So it was very hard to devise any meaning based communication activities around them.

Because this was an online class, I did the dictionary training by means of sharing my screen.  I showed the class one monolingual dictionary (Cambridge) and one collocation dictionary (Oxford).  I then showed them a Google Document in which the 12 words from the reading were put in a table, with columns for “part of speech”, “meaning”, “collocations”, “example sentences”, and “related word forms”.  I worked through all the columns using the first word as an example, showing the students how I was finding this information in the dictionaries, and explaining what I was doing.  

In retrospect, this is something I would change about the lesson.  I should have elicited more and explained less.  I should have first asked the students what online dictionaries they were familiar with, or asked them to provide what kinds of things can be looked up in a dictionary.  Perhaps I could even have had them create the columns on the Google Document themselves.

Next, the students were put into groups, and instructed to complete the remaining words on their own using the dictionaries.  (The dictionaries I had shown them were linked into the Google Document.)

Given that participation in these online classes can often be variable, I was pleasantly surprised to see that participation was high on this activity.  Each Google Document was a flurry of activity as students began filling out all the columns for each word.  

I was also surprised to see students making up their own example sentences instead of copying from the dictionary.  I was initially concerned that they would create wrong example sentences, and indeed a number of them did, but this actually proved to be a teachable moment.  I made comments suggesting changes and explaining the nuances in meaning, and students reacted positively to this with thumbs up and messages of thanks.

At the end, I asked the students if they would like to repeat this activity the next time we had new vocabulary, and they said that they would.