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    Intensive Reading - The Vocabulary Question

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    Sure Locks
    The document discusses balancing students' desire to understand every word with developing reading skills. It suggests giving students general comprehension tasks before specific vocabulary questions. To limit time spent on vocabulary, the document recommends a five minute time limit for word inquiries and limiting questions to eight words. It also proposes techniques for students to work together to communicate about and learn vocabulary, such as grouping students to agree on important words to look up and explain to others.

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    Intensive Reading - The Vocabulary Question

    Uploaded by

    Sure Locks
    21 views1 page
    The document discusses balancing students' desire to understand every word with developing reading skills. It suggests giving students general comprehension tasks before specific vocabulary questions. To limit time spent on vocabulary, the document recommends a five minute time limit for word inquiries and limiting questions to eight words. It also proposes techniques for students to work together to communicate about and learn vocabulary, such as grouping students to agree on important words to look up and explain to others.

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    The document discusses balancing students' desire to understand every word with developing reading skills. It suggests giving students general comprehension tasks before specific vocabulary questions. To limit time spent on vocabulary, the document recommends a five minute time limit for word inquiries and limiting questions to eight words. It also proposes techniques for students to work together to communicate about and learn vocabulary, such as grouping students to agree on important words to look up and explain to others.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    21 views1 page

    Intensive Reading - The Vocabulary Question

    Uploaded by

    Sure Locks
    The document discusses balancing students' desire to understand every word with developing reading skills. It suggests giving students general comprehension tasks before specific vocabulary questions. To limit time spent on vocabulary, the document recommends a five minute time limit for word inquiries and limiting questions to eight words. It also proposes techniques for students to work together to communicate about and learn vocabulary, such as grouping students to agree on important words to look up and explain to others.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 1

    6.4.

    Intensive Reading: The Vocabulary Question


    As teachers we encourage our students to read for general understanding (top-
    down), so it is paradoxical that our students are often desperate to know exactly
    what each word means.

    We need to reach a compromise between our student’s natural urge to understand


    every word’s meaning (bottom-up) and our attempt to develop our student’s
    reading skills. To do this it is important to give them general ‘gist’ comprehension
    tasks before specific language/vocabulary questions.

    Time limit
    If the focus of our lesson is on reading skills, we need to limit the amount of time
    we dedicate to the explanation of word meanings as we may find the majority of
    the lesson being taken up with this. We can limit the amount of time spent on
    vocabulary-checking in the following ways:

     By giving a time limit of five minutes for enquiries into vocabulary. This can be done
    through dictionary use or questions posed to the teacher.
     We can limit the amount of questions to up to eight words or phrases.

    Communicative vocabulary learning


    When students work together to share vocabulary, we find that they develop a
    keen interest in discovering the meanings of words, plus, as always it gives them a
    reason to communicate verbally. There are different techniques that can be used
    for this purpose:

     Group students together to agree on three to five words from a selected text that
    they want to know the meaning of. Each of them is then paired up with a student
    from a different group, where they have to once again agree on the five most
    important words to look up. Then, as a pair or a group they can use their
    dictionaries or we can as teachers answer any questions they might have about the
    words decided on by the group.
     Assign groups of students different words to look up. They then have to form new
    groups and explain to the other students in their group the words they now
    understand.

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