Using E-resources to Support the Teaching of Grammar and Vocabulary

<The images/ videos/ partial content are from the internet. These materials are for educational reference only. >

Outline

●What can technology offer in the teaching of vocabulary and grammar?

●Evaluation of various online e-resources for supporting the teaching of vocabulary and grammar

●Making a video dictionary

●Workshop on Bookwidget

What can technology offer in the teaching of grammar?

While there is a place for technology-supported grammar teaching, it has to be said that there is a great deal of poorly designed material on the internet.

●Textbook drills transposed online

●Offer only sentence-level practice

●Lack of opportunity for meaningful production

(Chapelle and Jamieson 2008)

Choose carefully!

●Does the material fit the intended learning outcomes/ objectives?

●Does the material reflect sound learning theories?

●What knowledge/ skills will students need to engage with the material?

●Will students be able to interpret the input provided by the electronic material? What sort of guidance/ training will be needed?

Activity 1: evaluate the following e-resources and state your opinions

1. Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/grammar

2. Explanation and activities on 48 grammar topics written by Dave Willis http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar

3. An academic English site created by PolyU https://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/grammar/#Grammar guides

4. Grammar Bytes http://www.chompchomp.com/

5. The Englicious Website, an online library of English teaching resources created by a team of linguists at UCL http://www.englicious.org/

6. Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals http://movies-egmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/

Needs in the learning of grammar

●Hinkel (2004) argues the lack of “intensive, individualised help with sentence-level syntax” has failed to prepare ESL/ EFL learners for success in academic writing.

●What is needed is direct instruction coupled with explicitly pointing out mistakes in essays made by learners.

●Question: how might technology meet these needs?

How has technology been used to achieve previously impossible outcomes?

1. Concordancing programme by Lextutor http://www.lextutor.ca/conc/eng/

Find out what ‘anxious’ is typically preceded or followed by. In what ways can concordancers help us learn a language which were previously impossible?

2. Grammarly www.grammarly.com

Contribute examples of typical mistakes made by your learners here. How effectively can ‘Grammarly’ help to correct these mistakes? Would you recommend this resource to your students?

What can technology offer in the teaching of vocabulary?

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9 principles underlying effective vocabulary instruction (Xu 2010)

1. Build a large sight vocabulary

2. Integrate new words with the old

3. Provide a number of encounters with words

4. Promote a deep level of processing

5. Facilitate imaging and concreteness

6. Use a variety of techniques

7. Teach independent learning strategies

8. Teach vocabulary in context

9. Provide opportunities for incidental learning of vocabulary

Activity 2: evaluate the following e-resources and state your opinions

1. BBC Learning English ‘The English We Speak’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/the-english-we-speak

2. Flocabulary (an online learning programme using hip-hop to engage students) https://www.flocabulary.com/subjects/vocabulary/

3. Academic phrasebank http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

4. Using AWL http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/alzsh3/acvocab/

5. An online thesaurus http://www.thesaurus.com/

6. Visuwords https://visuwords.com/

7. Etymology dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/

8. Collocation dictionary http://www.freecollocation.com/

9. TED Corpus Search engine: https://yohasebe.com/tcse/

10. Make a word web using Popplet http://popplet.com/

Activity 3: Making a gif dictionary

1. Work in groups and choose a word your group wants to learn.

2. Together, act out a short scene in which the meaning of the word can be conveyed visually and in a dialogue.

3. Alternatively choose a suitable video clip to illustrate the word. You may like to make a gif image out of the clip using a gifmaker tool: https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

Discussion: do you think the video dictionary activity is a good vocabulary learning activity? Why? Which e-resource(s) do you think is/ are particularly suitable for making the video dictionary?

Using ‘Quizlet’ for vocabulary learning

●While there is more to learning a language than simply knowing the vocabulary and the rules of grammar, drill-and-practice programmes still have a place.

●For example, learners can use such programmes for independent revision and learners often feel secure and reassured by drill-and-practice activities.

●Apps like Quizlet also come with the function of authoring, allowing teachers and learners to create interactive activities to meet their own teaching/ learning needs.

●These programmes also enable rapid formative feedback and personalised differentiation between learners.

Recycling, revision and memory

Chance for retaining a word from one exposure: only 5-14% (Nagy 1997)

‘One of the great mistakes many teachers make is to focus on a new word only once, leading to a high probability of that word being forgotten and the time spent on teaching it wasted.’ (Schmitt 2007, pp.831-832)

Pattern of forgetting with expanded rehearsal (Schmitt, 2000, p. 131)

Steps for creating a vocabulary study set

1. Create a set.

2. Adjust the setting (e.g. language and who can view and edit your set).

3. Give your set a title and description.

4. Enter term and definition.

5. Customise setting of learning activities (e.g. audio on/ off; English/ Chinese first, choose question types for ‘Test’, etc.).

6. Share the set with your students.

Steps for using ‘Quizlet Live’

1. Pick a set to start ‘Quizlet Live’.

2. Share the join code with your class.

3. Student will be assigned teams.

4. Teams sit together and start playing.

5. Team race each other to win.

6. Learn how to do better from ‘end-of-game review’ .

Workshop on making a word sort activity using‘Bookwidget’

●Go to https://www.bookwidgets.com/

●An example of vocabulary learning activity I created using Bookwidget (Top 10 Hong Kong dishes): https://www.bookwidgets.com/play/LED8FM?teacher_id=6011766611902464

Steps

1. Create a new widget.

2. Go to ‘Quiz’ and click ‘add question’. Then choose ‘text drag drop’.

3. Enter question (e.g. Put the following words into different categories based on their meanings.)

4. Create word groups (e.g. taste, method of cooking and texture)

5. Add items to each word groups (e.g. sweet, sour, salty, spicy → Taste)

6. Go to Title/ Reporting to choose what info Ss need to provide when submitting their answers.

7. Go to ‘General’ to adjust ‘correction’ options (e.g. whether to show correct answers when a quiz is done).

8. Name your widget.

9. Preview

10. Get shareable link.

Add items to each ‘word group’

You can add more than one widgets in a quiz. Go to ‘Examples’ (in the left hand side tool bar) and have fun exploring other question formats provided by Bookwidget!

References

●Chapelle, C., & Jamieson, J. (2008). Tips for teaching with CALL : practical approaches to computer-assisted language learning. White Plains, N.Y. : Pearson Education.

●Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching academic ESL writing: Practical techniques in vocabulary and grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbau

●Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press.

●Schmitt, N. (2007). Current perspectives on vocabulary teaching and learning. In J. Cummins & C. Davison (Eds.). The International handbook of English language teaching (pp.827-841). Boston, MA : Springer Science + Business Media, LLC.

●Xu, Z. (2010). Vocabulary Studies: Lexis, Morphology and Semantics. Singapore: Pearson Education South Asia.