Page 122 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary

Table 7.2 Vocabulary Learning Strategies
Strategies Examples
Encouraging learners to guess the meaning A game by showing the pupils only one part of
of new words by providing visual scaffolds. the picture.
Encouraging prediction in stories. What do you think will happen, will the Gruffalo
eat the mouse?
Helping them notice links to similar words in Does the word ‘giraffe’ look like a Slovene word
L1. you know?
Teaching them to use graphic signs. Create diagrams, mind maps, word trees, etc.
Teaching them to sketch the words. Making quick sketches that connect the words to
something personally meaningful to them.
Teaching them various mnemonic Choosing a keyword that cues you to think of the
strategies. foreign word, such as ‘cloud’ in English and the
name ‘Klavdija’ in Slovene, and then imagining
a connection between them (e.g. a cloud over
a girl called Klavdija), visualizing a familiar path
and mentally associating vocabulary with spe-
cific locations or objects along the way, creating
rhymes, etc.

ure out meanings of words on their own by using contextual clues or guess-
ing the meaning from context. This will also help them deal with unfamiliar
words outside the classroom. By encouraging children to look up words in
dictionaries and build their own glossaries, they will become more indepen-
dent and will be able to deal with new vocabulary also without the teacher.
A good idea is also to teach children to create picture dictionaries by draw-
ing or cutting/pasting pictures from newspapers or magazines (Linse, 2005).
Table 7.2 presents some useful classroom activities aimed at developing YLs’
vocabulary learning strategies.

Content and Function Words
Words of language are split roughly into two groups according to their role in
constructing sentences: content words are those that carry lexical meaning,
while function words are mainly used for linking and syntactic purposes. In
the sentence

The little house in the street was built when my mother was a child.

the content words are nouns (house, street, mother, child), verbs (was built,
was) and an adjective (little). They are an open set which means that new

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