| A Message for
Teachers
Teachers, welcome to my on-line activities page. The exercises I have developed, using Hot Potatoes software, are meant to accompany Looking Ahead 3: Developing Skills for Academic Writing by Elizabeth Byleen (1998, Heinle & Heinle). Hopefully the following pages will give you some insight as to how to approach using these activities as well a little background on how I came up with them in the first place. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact me at trachtova@yahoo.com. I wish you and your students the best of luck. Vocabulary Activities – Idiomatic English Vocabulary Activities – Working with Word Families My Own Journey Through Hot Potatoes The chapter in the textbook I specifically focused on was Chapter 6 – Arguing/Issues in Grading. Even though this is a writing textbook, I purposely stayed away from involving writing instruction in the activities. The IEP teacher/advisor our group worked with made it clear that she would cover writing-oriented processes in class. What she suggested was giving the students more practice with grammar and vocabulary. Thus, the activities fall into two categories – grammar and vocabulary, the vocabulary having two sub-categories: idiomatic English and academic English/word families. Vocabulary Activities – Idiomatic English The first three vocabulary activities come from two of the readings – Learning and Grades (Survey) and My Turn: Hold Your Horsepower. I focused on the idioms from these readings because idiomatic English can be difficult for students to understand, learn and use with confidence. They may come across idioms in the readings and understand them at the time, but I wanted to isolate them and give the students practice with usage. Repeated exposure to vocabulary, according to Decarrico (2001), helps students learn vocabulary more efficiently. When designing the activities I included the context in which I found them, when possible. Guessing meaning from context is another strategy mentioned by Decarrico (2001) as effective in vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary Activities – Working with Word Families Decarrico (2001, p. 287) wrote, “Learners with special goals, such as university study, need to acquire a further one thousand high-frequency words beyond the initial two thousand base, plus the strategies to deal with the low frequency words they meet.” One effective way to approach this problem is using Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000). Using corpus research, Coxhead developed a list of words outside the most common 2000 words in English, but found in academic writing. She found 570 word families and divided them into 10 sublists by frequency (Coxhead, 2000). A word family consists of a headword, plus its various inflections and derivations – Example: from sublist 1: method (the headword) + methodical, methodological, methodologies, methodology, methods. I found this to be a wonderful way for students to expand their academic vocabulary and therefore developed four different activities around word families. Again, I chose words that appeared in the first two readings, Learning and Grades (Survey) and My Turn: Hold Your Horsepower. Chapter 6 is peppered with references to the GLR, or Grammar and Language Reference, which is found at the back of the textbook. The grammar points are all related to the academic skill emphasized in this chapter – argumentation. The purpose of the Hot Potatoes grammar activities is to provide support for these grammar points, since the chapter itself does not provide repetitive grammar exercises. The activities provide a focus on use (Sentence Scrambles, Working with Past Time – Ode to Activity 6-18, Adverbs of Frequency, Modal Quiz, Should/Must/Have, Controlling Strength of Generalization), and meaning (Modal Matching, Modals Controlling Strength of Generalizations). Some activities emphasizing use follow Larsen-Freeman’s (2001, p. 260) advice that “relevant practice activities will provide students with an opportunity to choose from two or more forms the one most suitable for the context and how they wish to position themselves. Others look more towards the discourse context emphasis – choosing which form is most appropriate for the situation. The activities that emphasize meaning can use associative learning, where the students must “associate form and the meaning of the particular target structure (Larsen-Freeman, 2001, p 260). These examples come straight from the grammar description provided by the authors and are purposely limited to a smaller amount of items within one activity to avoid overloading the student with associations to remember. The most important thing to remember is that these are activities, not tests. They are meant to be used in conjunction with the textbook. I have provided page numbers from the textbook for each activity so students can easily find the original source of each item. It is my recommendation that the activities be used after covering either the grammar item or the readings as added support. They can be done in-class, if the students have access to computers, or at home. I don’t recommend using the scores the students receive as part of their grade but I do recommend monitoring their progress. The use of software is new for many students and therefore careful observation of how they are getting along with new technology is wise. One of the downsides of using computers is the lack of verbal interaction or chance for negotiated meaning. Computer activities tend to be solitary activities. However, this need not be the case with the activities I have developed. Many of them can be used for pair work. Some examples: Idiomatic English – Place a barrier such as a folder between the two sides of the screen. One student can work with the gap filling side; the other student can read the idiom in context. They can discuss the meaning and choose the correct answer. Word Families Crosswords – This one would work with students on two computers One student can finish the crossword quickly without care for points (using hint to get the answers quickly for example). The second student then has to ask the first student “what is 1-down?” and the first student must then describe the answer, either using the prompt or his/her own ideas. Should/Must/Have to– Have the students create the sentences using both Should and Must or Have to. They discuss the meaning of each sentence and then provide the correct answer together. As you can see, with a little adaption, computer activities can be communicative. Hot Potatoes is the program I used to produce the activities. It is an easy-to-use software package developed by the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre in Canada especially for ESL teachers. They provide computer templates for developing six different types of activities 1. Multiple Choice Exercises
For more detailed information you can visit their website at: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hotpot/ My Own Journey Through Hot Potatoes Not being much of a computer techie, I was very nervous about using Hot Potatoes. Though I felt quite used to developing activities for the classroom, I have never explored writing for the computer. The first step was decidedly un-high tech. I read the chapter and considered input from our group’s discussions as well as the needs expressed by the IEP teachers and students, in order to more closely target my activities. I wrote out exercises based on the points I felt needed to be emphasized, involving either vocabulary, or grammar. Then I played around with the different types of exercises that seemed to work the best with the software, considering the theoretical underpinnings or simple logic. After posting the exercises, the time came for revision, which still seems to be a never-ending process. Students in the IEP as well as fellow group members have reviewed this set of 15 activities and provided feedback on the effectiveness of the activities. In terms of design, I used the same colors as my website to create unity, and added pictures for interest when appropriate. Instead of giving students instant feedback, I decided to provide them with the tools to find the answers they seek, either through grammar links or dictionary links or by simply providing them with extra information. Sometimes texts were added to provide context. Helpful and informative links were added. Though the activities you have now are the final product, there is still, and always will be, room for revision. That’s why I’d love to hear both positive and negative feedback from teachers and students who try these activities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this process, it’s to seek the opinions of others, because often the writer is blind to the successes and failings of his or her own work. I’d appreciate any and all comments sent to trachtova@yahoo.com. There are many avenues for learning in the world of ESL today. As teachers it is our responsibility to give our students the widest range of experiences possible. By providing you with this activity set, I hope I am allowing you as instructors to step down a “path less traveled” with your students. Good luck. Carolyn Trachtova
Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213-238. Coxhead, A. (1998). An Academic Word List. (English Language Institute Occasional Publication No. 18).Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. Decarrico, J.S. (2001). Vocabulary learning and teaching. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3rd ed., pp.285-299). Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001). Teaching grammar. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.),
Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3rd ed., pp.251-266).
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