FWW-Day

Well,what do you know? Even teachers can have the "teachable moment." It happened to me.

On Friday I introduced vocabulary study to my juniors. I know that the approved (for this decade) manner for teaching vocabulary is teaching vocabulary in context - which is fine if your students are avid readers, and if you have "oodles" of time to waste, and if you don't mind that much of the enjoyment of a story is fragmented by word study. However, I don't feel that my classes meet any of those criteria so I use word lists and sentence context clues. As a former language teacher I believe that in many ways studying English (even at the high school level) is like studying another language. So, I use many of the same techniques teaching English vocabulary as I would have teaching a foreign language - that includes oral repetition, memorization, word elements, contextual meanings, oral sentence construction, etc. I'm also using vocabulary to prepare students for the SAT's, to encourage vocabulary acquisition and us and, more importantly, to realize that often, they know more than they think. I'm constantly encouraging them to "Get full credit for partial knowledge" (Princeton Review) by using their language experiences to help them figure out what an unfamiliar word may mean. I urge them to try to figure out what the words mean before looking them up in the dictionary. It's a class project and all the students are encouraged to participate orally.

For example, if BELABOR is one of the vocabulary words, a student may recognize that "labor" is part of the word and relate that "labor" is work and that BELABOR must have something to do with work. Then I'll encourage them to read the supplied definitions to see if one of those definitions has anything to do with work. Or, if the word is CONGEAL, a student might observe that in Spanish "con" means "with" and I might ask what "-geal' might mean... and if that gets no response, I might add "gel" and then "jelly" and then, "Jello". By that time one (or more) student gets the idea that CONGEAL has something to do with liquid turning into a solid and there's one more word that they don't have to look up in the dictionary.

I must add that I love language - especially words, wordplay, word formation, word pronunciation, etc. As a result, the lesson is usually presented in a pretty dynamic manner with many puns, bad "teacher" jokes, double-meanings, mistaken meaning, word origins - all done in a rather rapid-fire manner. I feel that the jokes, bad as they are, often create an additional device for the students to remember the word. For example, the definition of LARGESS might be generosity or what Superman wears on his chest. There are usually many BOO's after this atrocity but if they remember the joke, they'll remember the correct pronunciation of LARGESS. Of course, the verbal wordplay usually gets a raucous response - but I remind them that I've had an ear operation that alters my hearing so that all boo's sound like loud guffaws. And, anyway the response is part of the fun and I do believe that often students learn more and better if they are enjoying themselves.

This post has become more involved then I anticipated... (to be continued)