Feedback on using pictures to teach vocabulary.

[Sivagami Muthusamy]

Dear forum participants,

I am conducting a research to find out about the effectiveness of using pictures to teach vocabulary for 9 year old pupils. I would be very much obliged if I could be given some feedback or opinion about this matter as it would help me in conducting my research. Thank you very much in advance for all your feedback and opinion.

Your's truly,
Sivagami

[mesmark]

I use pictures only for all ages starting as beginners. It's very effective and gets students speaking and keeps them interested. I approach reading and writing through a seperate phonics curriculum and the 2 merge 1 year to 4 years down the line depending on the age.

So, I would say using pictures to teach can be done successfully if you have the right pictures enough of them and you teach with a purpose, not just show Ss pictures and teach vocabulary.

ex:
Fruit: target language - I like... / Do you like..?
Insects: target language - I don't like ...
Sports: target language - Have you ever ...? I have ... for 2 years.
Nature: target language - There is.../ There are ...

If you can be more specific about your questions regarding this i can give you more information from my experience.

Mark
www.mes-english.com
ESL/EFL Resources for Teachers

[Sivagami Muthusamy]

I posted a question earlier asking about the effectiveness of using pictures to teach 9 year old students new vocabulary in English. I am actually conducting a study to find out the effects of using pictures to teach English in Malaysian classrooms. I am still not so sure as to whether this particular approach would benefit the students especially students from rural schools as most of them are not so well exposed to English and are still very uncomfortable in using them even in the classroom. I have decided on using interesting and attractive pictures to teach a particular topic accomanied by word cards and sentence strips to further enhance the understanding and usage of the new vocabulary as well as providing the students with some simple worksheets to further enforce what they have been exposed to. I would be very much obliged if the forum participants could provide your feedback and opinion. Thank you very much.

[Sally Olsen]

You could develop the pictures into a picture dictionary. Young children love the challenge of learning 10 words a day for instance, especially if there is some kind of document that recognizes the words they learned, say a road drawn on the paper with squares for the words and when they get ten, they get a star or sticker. They add this to their homework book and have a record of all the words they learn. There are some excellent picture dictionaries for you to copy but I would take pictures of their own surroundings and label the pictures from 1 to 10. Everyone learns things that go together more easily e.g. bread and jam, doctor and nurse. You can do animals, houses, different rooms in the house, transportation and so on. Add in a few appropriate verbs at the bottom or a question at the top such as those Mark suggested and they will be able to write simple stories for each picture. You can post the stories on a bulletin board so they can read each others or you can type them out for a homework book to be taken home to read to the parents. You can play all sorts of games with the 10 words or have them timed by parents or siblings to see how fast they can say them. They can make flash cards with the words. I would suggest using different colours for the different parts of speech - blue for nouns, red for verbs, green for adjectvies and so on. Then they can combine colours to make a sentence. Later on you can get to them to think what is the same about blue cards, red cards and they begin to see the functions of the parts of speech and how they can be transferred to other parts of speech - noise to noisily, etc. You can then show them picture dictionaries from other countries and compare transportation in various places and so on. You can extend it further by making pictures of a small story that they are familiar with - they can act out a local myth or fairy tale or scary story and write the story underneath or compose dialogue to go with a small play or a homemade film. This is usually called a storyboard in film circles. The more you include the children themselves in the pictures, the more they are interested. You can even do funny, trick pictures and make up stories or captions - e.g. He's climbing the wall. showing someone on a brick floor pretending to climb. Give the children a small cardboard frame and ask them to go around "taking pictures" of things they would like to know the name of in English and this will help them learn to take photos and save your film or your card from some mistakes.