Page 121 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Vocabulary Focus

Animals

Are loyal to their master
Cats Dogs Eat other animals
Bark

German
Beagle Labrador Poodle
Shepherd

Protective Large Sociable Small Medium- Friendly Tiny Playful
size
Figure 7.3 Example of Categorising Dogs

about objects (for example that a triangle has three sides and may take on
different angles), about people (that Ann is a nurse, she’s friendly, likes green
tea, and always wears sandals), about events (such as the typical features
of a wedding or a Christmas dinner), and about social groups (we call these
group schemas stereotypes). Schemas are important because they help us
remember new information by providing an organizational structure for it.
Our existing knowledge can help us organize new information, and this or-
ganization can improve encoding, storage, and retrieval.
When children start learning an FL, they have already constructed a num-
ber of such schemas in their L1 and they are likely to map their L2 mental
lexicon onto the existing structure, thus creating links that resemble those
used in their L1. These schemas are culture specific and when we learn a for-
eignlanguage,wemayencounterproblemswhentheschemasdonotmatch
(Lakoff, 1993; Cameron, 2001). For example, the word ‘sports’ will activate dif-
ferent schemas in different languages and cultures: while football may be
at the very centre of the category for both Slovene and British people, ski-
ing and rugby will hardly share the same place in the two cultures (Bratož &
Kocbek, 2013).

YLs’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies
Pupils need to be taught strategies which will help them acquire new vocab-
ulary items. The best strategies are those which encourage learners to fig-

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