Job Discussion Forums

[Glenski]

[spiral78]

Yes, I work with very high-level students and the texts they need to work with are in-field, and therefore the vocabulary is relatively specific and narrow in scope. Further, courses are short and focused on a small set of texts.

We don't 'practice chunking' (sounds like some sport) but we do identify new words along with the few words around them that make a phrase. This means that, when students encounter a word they don't know (assuming that we find it appears often enough to be relevant) instead of writing the single word, they write the phrases in which they find it.

I have access to U.Birmingham's concordance, being an grad. I don't know if it's available to the general public.

So far as guessing in context, there are some strategies that often work. Identifying the 'root' of the word (enabler, for example), making a judgement from context about whether the word is likely to be positive or negative, removing the word from the text, substituting a known word, and then checking if the logic remains. There are others, but not on the tip of my typing fingers at the moment. Obviously not all apply to every situation!

I also have had great difficulties getting Asian students to apply guessing strategies, even when they really have to read complex texts in tight time limits for real reasons (some of our MA/Phd students, for example). It just seems really difficult for them to get beyond the idea that they need to know every word. In our teaching context, this is just an occasional problem, and these classes are mixed nationalities, so I can (have to) just kinda let them sink or swim
I agree it would be quite challenging to devise strategies for getting Asian students to accept and apply strategies

[Sashadroogie]

Can someone explain how to actually teach students to practice chunking?

I'm not sure that is a question of getting students to do this themselves, at least initially. But the teacher should always present vocabulary in chunks. For example, it is not enough to just teach the word 'listen' on its own. It needs to be presented with its preposition, as we all know. Otherwise learners will almost certainly produce "I listen music", not altogether unfairly if they have not been told otherwise. We can, however, directly teach them to record their new vocab in chunks in their notebooks - assuming they keep any.

Some more practical teaching strategies using texts and chunking are as follows:

1. Take a given text. Do all the usual reading comprehension exercises etc. Then, on a separate handout, list 10 or so selected chunks from the text, but with part of the chunk gapped out, e.g. 'by hook or by______'. From memory, learners must try and reproduce the original phrase. Did they notice it? Did their partner? Students read original text again to confirm guesses.

2. Having completed the 10 phrases in the gap-fill, a really nifty activity is for the learners to then try to recount the original text using only the 10 selected phrases as a framework to help them. Care needs to be taken here in the selection of the chunks, obviously, so that the overall narrative is retained by the highlighted lexis. Students can even take turns around the class recounting the text until all the phrases have been used. Learners are then already producing target vocab.

At least, that's what I do in class sometimes. Doesn't always work if learners are not very well-trained. For instance, I've used these strategies successfully with low-level learners but yet seen them fall flat with high-level uni students who couldn't be bothered.

Takes a bit of prep time, but at least materials can be re-cycled for other groups.

Hope that helps.

[J.M.A.]

[quote="Glenski"]

[Sherri]