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Licungo University

Beira-Extension

Faculty of Letters and Humanity

DIDACT OF ENGLISH I 2nd Year

Lecturer: M.A Pedro A. Sumila

Name: Selemane Paulino Paqueleque

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My future plans and expectations

I often wonder about my future as I am about to finish Secondary School. The number one
question on my mind is which profession should I choose? I want a profession that will satisfy
me, challenge me, and bring me joy. I believe that a job should be like a hobby. I want to love
my work. First of all, As soon as I finish Secondary School, I will take the first important exam
of my life - the final graduation exam. I will be tested in four different subjects: the English and
German languages, biology, and chemistry. After my graduation, I will study at the Medical
University to become a doctor. But now, I am focusing my attention on finishing my studies.
Also, before I have a family, I would like to travel overseas. I want to see countries like Japan,
Finland and travel through the African continent. After I finish my education and travels, I plan
to get married and have a family. I would like to live with my future family in a quiet, natural
countryside setting.

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Selecting active and passive vocabulary

Active Passive

Future Profession

Believe Joy

Graduation Overseas

Family Countryside setting

Doctor Challenge

Exam Hobby

The list above is of vocabularies extracted from the text being the essential vocabularies which

are intended to be taught the students Doff (1988:12) states that active vocabulary have to do

with words which students will need to understand and use themselves. In teaching active

vocabulary it is usually worth spending time giving examples and asking questions so that

students can really see how the word is used. So basing on the explanation above, me as a

teacher a will show them how to use the words in appropriate way in some contexts giving

examples

Eg :

1 What do you want to be in the future?

2 Tom do you believe in your religion?

3 People when they are finishing their degree at university they are submitted to a ceremony

called graduation

4 Tom is the tallest child in our family

5 People who take care of others at hospital are called doctor

6 Everybody finishing grade 12 in secondary schools are submitted to take Exams

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So it is through this way that the students will understand the active vocabulary through the

examples given above. On the other hand, the passive vocabulary will be understood by the

students but they won’t use themselves.

2. Six (6) or more activities that may foster de learning of vocabulary in teaching English

vocabulary.

To foster the students learn vocabulary

a) Get the class to repeat the words in chorus;

For instance the teacher may write a word which is considered passive vocabulary for them
and get them to repeat, be it in chorus or individually.

b) Translate the words into the students’ own/official language;

This is done when the teacher does not find useful the direct translation which most of the
time lead to misunderstanding of the words when teaching the students. For example the
teacher may write the following word “Overseas” if the teacher says that overseas is defined
as being across an ocean obvious that the students won’t be able to understand directly unless
they translate the word in their own/official language.

c) Ask the students to translate the words;

This is one way of getting students to learn a new lexis (i.e vocabulary) by translating the new
words the students will keep in their mind the vocabulary learnt previously. As Harmer
(1985:86) thinks that it seems silly not to translate if by doing so a lot of time can be saved. If the
student does not understand a word and the teachers cannot think how to explain it, he can
quickly translate it.

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d) Draw a picture to show what the word means;

By pictures we mean photos, blackboard drawing, wall pictures, chart and flash card. If the
teacher is intended to teach words like vegetables, clothes and markets the use of pictures will be
very important because it will be very difficult and time-consuming to explain them. Pictures can
also be used to create a situation or context (Harmer 1985: 85). In this situation teachers can use
e.g. a city map, school map and then try to introduce the item in question.

e) Give them an English example to show how the words are used.

Let’s imagine that a teacher has just presented the word “market”. Now, she is asking questions
using the new word, for example:

 Does your mother go to the market?


 Do you live near a market?
 When does she go there?
 What do people sell there?

f) Giving Examples
Giving examples is another way (technique) of showing the meaning of a new word, these
examples should contain the meant lexical item McCarthy (1990, p. 108) believes that new
vocabulary knowledge is most efficiently absorbed when it is assimilated to the already known
words by using it in a context, Complex explanation of a vocabulary item will lead to a narrow
scale understanding, for the case that a meaning can be shown with very simple sentences.

g) Ask students to say the words clearly and write them on the board;

The students may read a word after practicing/ repeating in chorus and so on then the teacher
might tell them to go to the board and write the word if it is a drawing to draw.

3. Defining mental lexicon

According to Ur (1987:74), mental lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains


information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. The
mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual

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speakers' lexical, or word, representations. However, not all scientists agree as to the utility of
the mental lexicon as a scientific construct.

4. Knowledge organization

Knowledge Organization is a field of research, teaching and practice, which is mostly affiliated
with library and information science. KO is first and foremost institutionalized in professorships
at universities around the world, in teaching and research programs at research institutions and
schools of higher education, in scholarly journals.
Knowledge Organization is about describing, representing, filing and organizing documents and
document representations as well as subjects and concepts both by humans and by computer
programs (cf., Hjørland 2008). For these purposes, rules and standards are developed, including
classification systems, lists of subject headings, thesauri and other forms of metadata. The
organization of knowledge into classification systems and concept systems are core subjects in
KO. The two main aspects of KO are:
 Knowledge organization processes
 Knowledge organization systems.
 Knowledge organization processes (KOP) are, for example, the processes of cataloging,
subject analysis, indexing, tagging and classification by humans or computers.
 Knowledge organization systems (KOS) are the selection of concepts with an indication
of selected semantic relations. Examples are classification systems, lists of subject
headings, thesauri, ontologies and other systems of metadata.
On the other hand, Hammer (1985 :23) states that Knowledge organization systems include a
variety of schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information. They range from authority
files to classification schemes, thesauri, and ontologies. Libraries and other information
management organizations have developed KOS to organize and retrieve information.

5. How can a language teacher test vocabulary

A teacher can use a lot of types of techniques when testing vocabulary. As we can see the

following criterias :

 Multiple choice

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There is a good _________ at the Odeon tonight.

A) screen B) film C) showing D) acting

Cloze test

Another way how vocabulary can be tested is cloze test. This type examines active vocabulary

because students are not given any options, they just have a text with gaps (Thornbury

1978:133). It is not exactly clear if it belongs to testing vocabulary or rather to testing reading

and again there is a problem with more possible answers. To prevent this, we can use C-test

where the beginnings of words are already given.

Word formation

Students have to change the form of word so that it fits to a particular sentence. They have to

show that they understand the context and that they know various forms of a word (Thornbury

1978:134).

Matching

Through matching we normally test the meaning of words, usually words of the opposite

meaning. Students do not produce any vocabulary, they only match given 32 words. This type of

exercise is easier to design than multiple choice but Ur stresses that the last pair of words, if the

student has matched the pairs correctly, can be matched without any knowledge because they are

left. This can be prevented by giving more options in one column than in the other one

Put these words into the correct column: apple, grape, carrot, banana, cauliflower, spinach,

strawberry, potato, cherry, melon

Fruit Vegetables

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Odd one out

Students have to determine which item does not belong among the others. The amount of items

can be various. This kind of exercise is easy to prepare, however, the teacher must know which

words her students know so that they could find the odd one. It also test only the meaning of

words, but it can be both useful and interesting for the students (Ur 1986: 72). Example: Find

the odd word: parrot hen eagle cow penguin goose sparrow

There are so many ways of testing vocabulary namely:

Dictation Essay

True/false Information transfer

Questions and answers Translation

Gap-filling Rearranging words

Transformation Rewriting

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References

Doff, A. (1988). Teach English: A Training Course for Teachers.

Doff, Adrian. Teach English. Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Harmer, J. (1985). The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th ed.). Pearson Longman

Hjørland, Birger. 2017. "Classification". Knowledge Organization 44, no. 2: 97-128. Also

available at http://www.isko.org/cyclo/classification. Error correction

Mc Carthy, M. (1990). Vocabulary (Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education).


Oxford: OUP.

Thornbury, Scott. How to Teach Vocabulary. England: Longman, 2002.991.

Ur, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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