Grammar, Vocabulary and Everything in Between
Introduction for teachers
A lot of language teaching revolves around presenting and practising grammar and vocabulary. This happens in lessons dedicated to vocabulary and grammar, and in lessons which develop the four or five or six skills and which often involve pre-teaching and feedback. Sometimes these things extend into homework tasks, projects and self-study practices.
A lot of language teaching revolves around helping students make better language choices. This means more than showing them that one word, phrase or structure is better in the given context than another one – it means providing them with criteria for making choices. Everybody has had the experience of not knowing what aspects of a problem to consider before making a choice, whether it concerns using a question tag, investing money or voting to leave the EU.
This book takes what students know about grammar and vocabulary and develops their thinking about aspects of grammar, aspects of vocabulary and the relationships between them.
A lot of language teaching revolves around helping students make better language choices. This means more than showing them that one word, phrase or structure is better in the given context than another one – it means providing them with criteria for making choices. Everybody has had the experience of not knowing what aspects of a problem to consider before making a choice, whether it concerns using a question tag, investing money or voting to leave the EU.
This book takes what students know about grammar and vocabulary and develops their thinking about aspects of grammar, aspects of vocabulary and the relationships between them.
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Grammar, Vocabulary and Everything in Between trains teachers and students to learn language from texts of their own choosing. In this book, the students are constantly tasked with answering language questions using VersaText, SkELL and the Collins online dictionary.
VersaText shows some of the language features and patterns in a text that you or your students provide. This allows you to explore the language of a reading or listening text from your course material, thus the students will already be familiar with the context. SkELL is an online resource which gives you examples sentences, collocates and words related to the word you look up. The examples come from a very large sample of authentic language, i.e. a corpus. Since neither of these tools provides definitions of words, nor their pronunciation, a good dictionary is essential. The Collins Online dictionary has been chosen mainly because the definitions are written in full sentences which contain words that have valuable semantic relationships with the target words. A lot of language learning revolves around answering comprehension questions, filling in gaps, doing multiple choice quizzes and memorising lists. While these are useful, some might say 'necessary evils', students can be challenged to learn more creatively, critically and conceptually. Higher order thinking skills are not beyond most of our students. Remember that if the teacher does all the work, the students …. well, what do the students do? And what do the students not do? |
This book guides students to discover the patterns and peccadillos that make English what it is. In the process, the students learn what questions are worth asking, and how to arrive at answers. This equips them to make better choices. This is a skill for life.
For classroom teachers, the contents of this book can be integrated into a standard English course: the index shows where in the book specific language points can be found. This book teaches more interesting and valuable language features than many standard language courses, e.g., grammar patterns, word templates, foreign words in English, bound prepositions, delexical verbs. And it uses these features to make the study of articles, phrasal verbs, topic-based vocabulary and many other aspects of language more systematic, more “study-able”. This book can be used in classrooms where the students are online, including on their mobile phones. For private teachers, working and talking through the book’s tasks one at a time stimulates much dialogue. It opens doors to new ways of thinking about English, and new ways of spending one-on-one time with private students. For private students and for school students alike, homework should be interesting, motivating, valuable and productive. The tasks in this book make excellent homework. |
Beware the PARSNIP
Being published independently, this book does not shy away from references to politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, -isms or pork. See Scott Thornbury's article Taboo, and his readers' comments, for a discussion. And Luke Meddings' piece in the Guardian, Embrace the Parsnip.
Being published independently, this book does not shy away from references to politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, -isms or pork. See Scott Thornbury's article Taboo, and his readers' comments, for a discussion. And Luke Meddings' piece in the Guardian, Embrace the Parsnip.
