Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera

Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching

Grammar & Vocabulary

Grammar & Vocabulary

Erwin Santana Ortega

 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
Observation:

This action research will be carried out with a group of 30 students coursing

B1 English from a training for teachers school (Escuela Normal) located in Teteles

de A.C., in the state of Puelba, Mexico.

After looking in detail to my teaching context, I have found different areas of

opportunity that need improvement in order to make it beneficial to my students’

learning. Self-regulated studying from my students is one part of my context I

intend to excel. Generating places outside of the classroom to exploit my students’

knowledge of the language and find it useful for life is one more problem I wish to

resolve. However, narrowing the situation to the realm of grammar and

vocabulary I have observed that the lack of vocabulary from my students needs

important attention. I have noticed they know vocabulary in the way of isolated

words, but find it hard to link them with other words most of the time. Literature

supports what I plan to change in my teaching practice for improving the way my

students learn vocabulary. First, Wilkins (cited in Lewis, 2002, p. 109) mentions on

the role of vocabulary: “without grammar very little can be conveyed, without

vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. Second, because I have recently realized that

memorizing nouns is not the only way my students can increase their vocabulary.

In fact multi-word expressions, collocations and idioms were missing in my

vocabulary lists. If only nouns are asked to be learned as part of their vocabulary,

hardly they will be able to use those nouns without the support of grammar

embracing those “new” words. This ideas are central for the Lexical Approach.
 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
“Institutionalized expressions will be a help to any non-native learner. Clearly a

repertoire of such phrases is an important part of fluency for the intermediate and

more advanced learner” (Lewis, 2003, p. 95). And last because Celce-Murcia

& Larsen-Freeman point out that “When teaching vocabulary, it’s good not to just

teach words but to teach clusters of information that will help students to use the

words correctly” (1999, p. 56).

Hypothesise:

The main problem I will focus this intervention on is the following: students

of EFL from this institution learn new vocabulary words, mainly nouns, but then

forget most of those words by the time they need to use them in the following

sessions and whenever they want to express their ideas in English.

The institution where I work is a training for teacher’s school (Escuela

Normal) for only female-students located in Teteles, in the state of Puebla, Mexico.

I will be focusing on one group of students who are at this institution to become

elementary school teachers. They take 5 EFL courses (A1, A2, B1-, B1, B2) and I will

be focusing on the B1 course.

I intend to make my students plan, elaborate, learn and practice chunks of

phrases instead of isolated words for vocabulary improvement and for fluency at

speaking. I have asked them to come up with presentations where they present the

vocabulary they will be using on a daily basis.

 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
Three main actions will be implemented to help my students retain and use

vocabulary when they need it:

1. PPT presentations developed by students will be displayed at the beginning

of each lesson to minimize the probability to forget vocabulary presented in

chunks. (e.g. I get along very well with my _____ instead of just get).

2. Youtube videos will be displayed in class. These videos are voiceless, but

they give serve as input for students, who latter will have to build whole

phrases out of the scenarios and ideas presented in those materials. This

activity has worked for me before because students feel the necessity to use

vocabulary to express what they watch in the short-film. Here is one

example of the type of videos I use in class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz-tf49stHw

3. Students are asked to utter one sentence from the previous lesson in order to

enter the classroom as part of one permanent activity. In one lesson,

students read animals in the city; in order to enter the classroom for the

next time, they will be expected to pronounce sentences from the reading

such as baboons are strong animals.

My hypothesis is the following: in the same measure that my students start

implementing those three activities mentioned above (at least) inside the

classroom, they will be able to assign meaning to words and lexical items, thus

making it easier for them to remember and use.

 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
Experiment:

During the last 2 weeks I have been implementing the three activities to

improve the way my EFL students learn English in the classroom. I started by

assigning one semantic field to each one of the 30 students in the class, so that they

were able to plan and elaborate 5 different utterances related with that semantic field

and also find a picture to go along with it. They made a presentation out of it with

interesting and useful utterances.

Towards the beginning of action 1 students were struggling in class because

they were used to pronounce isolated words for vocabulary learning instead of

chunks of utterances. Nevertheless, soon they managed to find their way. In fact they

felt the messages were easier and clearer to convey by using chunks of sentences.

Darling, you make me so happy and other examples were used in the classroom

from time to time in a silly way, making it more enjoyable for them and perhaps that

is one of the reasons why vocabulary has been interiorized in their system.

For action number 2 students mentioned that watching a video, making

sentences and then have other students and the teacher to correct them was a new

and enjoyable way or learning vocabulary. Since I was not going to pronounce and

write every unknown word for them in the whiteboard, I recommended to bring their

own English-Spanish dictionary to class every day. What I found remarkable of this

action is the fact that, unlike other activities, watching a video (even without any

speech) provided my students with lots of input. I noticed they had so much to say,
 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
the difficult part here was to use the words in the correct order. It was especially here

where I helped them construct language. “Our knowledge of a language determines

which strings of words are well-formed sentences and which are not. Therefore, in

addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules

for forming sentences” (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2013, p. 11).

For action number 3 students were allowed to pronounce any sentence or

utterance at first. As the day passed by, students were directed to express utterances

related to the material studied in the previous class. If they had read a text, then they

had to show proof of their understanding by producing a message in an oral way.

Those same sentences were used to make clarification about any part of the language

(grammatical structures, phonetics, examples of use) before starting a new lesson.

Findings

While my intention at the beginning of this intervention was to have my

students improve their knowledge of English vocabulary by implementing three

main actions inside the classroom, in the path I was able to identify situations that

had escaped to my mind and give me a deeper understanding of what needs to be

improved. I knew that something could be improved, but then I kept observing my

classes and reflecting about them, I keep thinking about improving more and more

parts of my teaching.

The fact that verbs were best internalized by students when inflecting them

rather than only using them in their base form is one insight I had to understand
 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary
after constructing my hypothesis. However, I knew I had to use inflections for

better understanding of the simple present. E.g.

1) The bear comes to the city to find food, and

2) Baboons come to the city to find food.

If I had not explain examples such as 1) and 2), then my students would have had a

narrower understanding of the verb come.

My conclusions are presented next:

 Students learn and retain vocabulary when the lexical approach is followed,

mainly because they are understanding a sentence full of meaning, not just

one part of what can be said to convey meaning. “Language consist not of

traditional grammar and vocabulary but often multi-word prefabricated

chunks” (Lewis, 1997, p. 3).

 Input plays a major role in learning vocabulary, because it can provide not

only information, but also the need to express what they read in a text,

watch in a video or listen in a conversation.

 The teacher needs to adapt to this new approach that has been implemented,

that is why more activities that can make my students use in a more real way

the vocabulary chunks they are learning will make significant progress in

their knowledge of ESL.

 Maestría en Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Linguistic Description for Foreign Language Teaching
Grammar & Vocabulary

References

Celce-Murcia, M. & D. Larsen-Freeman (1999). The Grammar Book: An

ESL/EFL Teacher's Course. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Duarte, S. (Producer). (2013, June 6). There’s something in my foot [Motion

picture]. Canada: Vancouver film school.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2013). An introduction to language

(9th Ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Lewis, M. (1997). Implementing the Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and

a Way Forward. Hove, UK: Language Teaching Publications.