It’s All about Learning Vocabulary

Acá dejo mi primer artículo "académico" publicado por la escuela de español donde trabajo en Londres.

It is widely believed that in order to speak Spanish or any other foreign language fluently, you first need to have a repertoire of words, expressions and phrases at your disposal which will enable you to speak confidently about a certain topic.

Learning and remembering vocabulary has been a life-long struggle for language learners. But, maybe, it was just a question of getting to know how to do it properly, rather than an I-just-don’t-have-a-good-memory sort of problem.

Source: linguistics.ohio.edu

Along the years, education and beliefs on how to educate have been changing for the better. And with these changes, there came the new idea that the way in which we learn vocabulary and the techniques our brain uses to store this lexicon should be revisited and improved.

            For sure, many of us can look back in time and remember being given long lists of vocabulary to memorize. Maybe it proved to be an efficient technique for the following day, in which the learner was still able to retrieve these words from their memories. However, there is no doubt that, after some time, a lot of these words are not available anymore. The issue is that our brain wasn’t developed to remember isolated words. We absolutely need to learn them in a context. Our mental lexicon is organised in a specific way, which enables us to recognise and use certain units of vocabulary very fast. These units are stored by way of all sorts of associations (such as graphic, morphologic, semantic, discursive, to name just a few).

            It has been scientifically proven that the units that appear in a meaningful context are better incorporated into our lexicon. Also, it is widely believed that if these units bear a relation with the person’s interests or needs, or are associated with a strong stimulus for him/her, then the chances of acquiring this new vocabulary increase considerably. The mental lexicon “(…) is never actually ‘finished’. Connections in the brain between words are constantly made and re-made, strengthened and solidified” (McCarthy, O’Keeffre and Walsh, 2010: 105).

            One of the greatest difficulties for the language learner is how hard it is to be able to systematise vocabulary. We have come up with a list of three useful ideas to help you:

   1) Learn vocabulary through chunks

A chunk is a combination of words that is used as one unit. To put it simpler, chunking means learning phrases by heart. However, these chunks shouldn’t be too long or complicated.

Just like Alex Owen-Hill puts it in his article Split It Up: The Top Technique for Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, which you can find here, a chunk may be made up of a few chunks. To use his example, two chunks could be found in:

¿Qué película te gustaba mucho cuando eras niño/a? — What film did you love as a kid?

Te gustaba mucho — You really liked/loved
Cuando eras niño/a — When you were a boy/girl

So now, the learner has learnt two phrases that sound natural and could be used in many different situations. Moreover, one can mix and match these phrases with others to form new sentences. As a Spanish language learner, you need to “get into the practice of combining the words into little phrases”, like Owe-Hill suggests.

It is important to bear in mind that some chunks are self-contained, which means they only make sense in their chunk, as a unit.

2) Build vocabulary webs:

Another great idea to memorise vocabulary is to set yourself a theme per week. Say on week number one you will try to memorise vocabulary related to holidays. You can, for example, create a vocabulary web that could look something like this:

Copyright © 2016 Friendly Spanish

Of course, you will need the Spanish version, which would look something like this:

Copyright © 2016 Friendly Spanish

You can create your own webs according to your needs and interests. Just find something that you would like to talk about and write it in the middle bubble. Then, you have to think about all the things related to the big theme that you may want to mention when talking about it. Find all the words, expressions or phrases that you could use related to the topic. Then, memorize some useful chunks.  

3) Create your own phrasebook

Think about the topics that you would normally like to talk about when you are in the company of a Spanish-speaking friend or colleague. It may help you to think about the words and expressions you normally use in your mother tongue and then find out how to say them in Spanish. For example, you could create a section of your phrasebook to talk about your specific job and things related to it. Another section could include your hobbies and interests. The main idea is to find the Spanish words, expressions and chunks that you could use on each occasion and then try to learn them in context.

Source: www.tagxedo.com

In conclusion, it is widely believed by teaching experts, linguists and scientists that learning vocabulary is entirely in the learner’s hands. As a Spanish language student, it is greatly beneficial to become an independent word learner to increase your vocabulary knowledge according to your special interests, likes, dislikes, life experiences and motivations. In this way, once your mental lexicon is expanded, your fluency will also have become better and that’s when you will feel rewarded when engaging in a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker. So, what are you waiting for?

By Florencia Mantoan, Friendly Spanish Team’s member.

Foreign Languages: How to memorise Vocabulary

Still on the fascinating art of vocabulary building. Another very interesting article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationadvice/9816185/Foreign-languages-how-to-memorise-vocabulary.html

5 Steps to Become Conversationally Fluent in Spanish

Loved this interesting and useful article

http://www.fluentin3months.com/fluent-spanish/

Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class

Ideas para empezar las clases de una forma más dinámica.

Sacadas de un articulo publicado en: http://chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-The/234869 

Open with a question or two:

 Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting."

My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day.

Those questions are also available to the students in advance of class, to help guide their reading and homework. But having the questions visible at the start of class, and returning to them at the end, reminds students that each session has a clear purpose. So consider opening class with one or more questions that qualify as important and fascinating. You might even let students give preliminary answers for a few moments, and then again in the closing minutes, to help them recognize how their understanding has deepened over the course period.

What did we learn last time?

 A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported by the idea that we don’t learn from single exposure to material — we need to return frequently to whatever we are attempting to master.

But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?

In the teaching-and-learning world, the phenomenon known as the "testing effect" has received much ink. Put very simply, if we want to remember something, we have to practice remembering it. To that end, learning researchers have demonstrated over and over again that quizzes and tests not only measure student learning, but can actually help promote it. The more times that students have to draw information, ideas, or skills from memory, the better they learn it.

Instead of "testing effect," I prefer to use the more technical term, "retrieval practice," because testing is not required to help students practice retrieving material from their memories. Any effort they make to remember course content — without the help of notes or texts — will benefit their learning.

Take advantage of that fact in the opening few minutes of class by asking students to "remind" you of the key points from the last session. Write them on the board — editing as you go and providing feedback to ensure the responses are accurate — to set up the day’s new material. Five minutes of that at the start of every class will prepare students to succeed on the memory retrieval they will need on quizzes and exams throughout the semester. 

Students should do all of this without notebooks, texts, or laptops. Retrieval practice only works when they are retrieving the material from memory — not when they are retrieving it from their screens or pages.

Reactivate what they learned in previous courses:

Whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.

The accuracy of students’ prior content knowledge is the foundation on which new knowledge is built. If students’ prior knowledge is faulty (e.g., inaccurate facts, ideas, models, or theories), subsequent learning tends to be hindered because they ignore, discount, or resist important new evidence that conflicts with existing knowledge."

Asking students to tell you what they already know (or think they know) has two important benefits. First, it lights up the parts of their brains that connect to your course material, so when they encounter new material, they will process it in a richer knowledge context. Second, it lets you know what preconceptions students have about your course material. 

Here, too, try posing simple questions at the beginning of class followed by a few minutes of discussion: "Today we are going to focus on X. What do you know about X already? What have you heard about it in the media, or learned in a previous class?" You might be surprised at the misconceptions you hear, or heartened by the state of knowledge in the room. Either way, you’ll be better prepared to shape what follows in a productive way.

Write it down:

All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge — and not just the students most likely to raise their hands in class.

You don’t have to grade the responses very carefully — or at all. Count them for participation, or make them worth a tiny fraction of a student’s grade. If you don’t want to collect the papers, have students write in their notebooks or on laptops and walk around the classroom just to keep everyone honest and ensure they are doing the work. Limit writing time to three to five minutes and ask everyone to write until you call time — at which point discussion begins.

Use the first few minutes for writing exercises. Not only do they offer learning benefits, but also they have both a symbolic value and a focusing function. Starting with five minutes of writing helps students make the transition from the outside world to the classroom.

Let a writing exercise help you bring focus and engagement to the opening of every class session. Build it into your routine. Class has begun: time to write, time to think.

In writing, as in learning, openings matter. Don’t fritter them away.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, in Worcester, Mass. His new book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, will be published in March of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.

Autoevaluación: Dos estrellas y un deseo

La estrategia Dos estrellas y un deseo anima al alumno a que refleje tanto su propio aprendizaje como el de sus compañeros. Asimismo, promueve la evaluación entre dos compañeros, ya sean dos alumnos o el profesor y el alumno.

Las dos estrellas representan los comentarios positivos (feedback positivo), mientras que el deseo indica lo que debe ser cambiado, mejorado, qué habría que repasar o estudiar más. El alumno puede dar dos estrellas o sólo una; en cuanto al deseo, si quiere, puede no escribir nada.

Los alumnos evalúan su propio aprendizaje o su propio trabajo dándose a sí mismos dos estrellas y un deseo. También pueden evaluar a un compañero (o, incluso, al profesor).

Esta estrategia es muy flexible porque da mucho juego.

Aparte de servirnos de autoevaluación, otro uso puede ser el siguiente: los alumnos pueden decirnos dos cosas que les han gustado de la clase o de lo que va de curso y un deseo, algo que quieren cambiar o que quieren incluir en la programación. Estaría bien usarlo cada dos semanas, por ejemplo.

http://unrinconenlaclase.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/autoevaluacion-dos-estrellas-y-un-deseo.html?spref=fb 

Las palabras más bonitas del español

ALBA: primera luz del día antes de salir el sol