Teacher Discussion Forums

i work with a school that offers a variety of english courses. our clients primarily come from the business world. and while many of them start with basic or intermediate english, most are anxious to learn additional words and phrases applicable to the business world.

i recently shared an intensive english class with a non-native english speaker . the other teacher taught the first few days and i brought up the rear. the teacher made a few mistakes. one of which was, teaching the more obscure definition of words. perhaps the teacher did this primarily because he/she is not familiar with some words and so he/she reaches for the sound alike definitions. --also known as false friends. i find that the majority of germans i meet who believe they speak excellent english, don't. most tend to make very basic mistakes (learned in gymnasium and reinforced by speaking english with other germans)

basically, my question is when those of you who teach BE teach it, do you focus primarily on the most widely used definition of vocab. words, or do you try to teach all 5 definitions of a word? --this i think is confusing and a bit intimidating for the student. i always try to teach student the most widely used definition of a word followed by commonly used phrases.

The problem with definitions is that they are never perfect, and there is rarely 100% uniformity regarding divisions of meaning-use/function (as can be seen by comparing any two learner dictionaries); the main objection to overusing ("overgiving"?) definitions to my mind, however, is that they do a lot of "lazy" work for the teacher; that is, the information contained in the definitions should be being given less directly - in a word, it should be CONTEXTUALIZED properly in the form of a reasonably authentic text (dialogue, written excerpt, even isolated but well-chosen example sentences). If such contextualization is the exception rather than the rule, it is likely that the students will be somewhat but never totally familar with or competent in the language...that being said, good definitions can pack a lot in and probably make reasonable "thumbnail sketches" from which to hang more details later, and COBUILD-style ones are almost like a substitute teacher for students who are studying by themselves.

As for which definitions to concentrate on, yes, go for the most frequent, but to really know a word one probably has to look at all the definitions and get an overall "fuzzy" kind of idea of its overall range and semantic scope.

I'm not sure of the role of definitions in BE, however (re. specialized vocabulary): the students probably know what most of the terms mean well enough, and don't need to know how to express their meanings to anyone (except maybe their English teachers!).

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 5764#15764

I only teach the definition of a word in that particular context. As you give more input, verbally and written, other definitions for words come about and can be discussed at that time.

I also teach the definition for the context used. However, if it's a false friend, I will point out what the correct translation for the false friend is. Also, if there's another fairly different definition for a word other than the one we are learning, I'll teach that too.

As an example, I will teach "engaged" to mean "busy" when we are talking about telephoning, and I'll teach the phrase "the line is engaged". However, I'll also teach that engaged is a state between two people before they get married. I emphasize then that it's important to say that the line is engaged, not the person.