This Saturday I am making a presentation on learning vocabulary to a group of high school students. They are coming in to look over some area colleges, and this university asked me to make some kind of presentation. The title is ”簡単な単語の覚え方、” or in English, "An easy way to learn vocabulary." It isn't exactly an honest title, because it really isn't that easy, remembering vocabulary is just hard work. What is easy, I guess, is that there is a system involved. Rather than remembering random words, focus on really mastering the "most important 2000." That would be the most frequently used 2000 words. You can find gobs of vocabulary stuff at Rob Waring's site, the Second Language Vocabulary Resource Page.
I am also suggesting that students work on building word families from the head words that they find in any word frequency list. In addition to simple lists of words, I am going to point out that collocations may also be useful, not just remembering a word, but the environment where it lives, too. Finally I will discuss extensive reading and listening.
Even though it is only 45 minutes, I feea lotot of pressure going into this. It is important to me of course, but it is also important to the school that I deliver an interesting presentation. We'll see how it goes.
3 comments:
Good luck :-) and tell us how it went later on.
Sorry, I wrote a detailed explanation of what happened on Saturday before I saw your comment. I'd say that the results were mixed. I enjoyed the process of preparing for the presentation, and it went off well. I was disappointed by the turnout.
Well...if things in Japan are like here in Sao Paulo, high school students are not exactly the most motivated group to attend a conference on how to learn English vocabulary on a Saturday morning.
I am glad you enjoyed the process though. Do you know Will Mc Culloch's Word Surfing site?
Check it out at:
http://www.wordsurfing.co.uk/4598.html
Post a Comment