My philosophy of learning and by extension of teaching can be condensed
in two words: word anchoring. This
can involve different approaches depending on what you need to anchor, and the
process is lengthy though not necessarily tedious—on the contrary it could be
stimulating and inspiring.
Most of the time we try to teach words by simply providing a mother
tongue equivalent and/or paraphrasing the word in English and illustrating
meanings with examples. However, when this is feasible, we should be fortifying
understanding by creating meaningful
context in which the students should place the words taught. I regularly
create gap-filling exercises for practising vocabulary which was presented in
context before. It is at this stage that most questions regarding the use of
the words arise, and it is the answers to those questions that solidify
learning.
An alternative way of making words memorable is by looking into their origin. This sometimes leads to fascinating
discoveries not only for the student but even for the teacher as we all learn
so much by teaching.
Another powerful method of anchoring words is by rendering them multifaceted. The science behind a concept, a poem
or literary extract focusing on this particular concept can result in a network
of related words/concepts which allow for more profound and lasting connections
to be created.
And, of course, images can
speak volumes sometimes and further enhance our perception of words.
The
diamond project
To illustrate what I have said, I will use a lesson I built around a recent
news story about a diamond which will soon be sold at auction and might fetch
as much as 350,000 pounds for its owner. The level of English for this project
was B2 or, if this doesn’t mean anything, the students have been studying
English for about 6 years.
Origin of
word
The main word is “diamond”. It comes from the Greek word αδάμας, which
is made up of α (can’t)
and δαμάζω (tame).
Facts
I asked my students to prepare a short presentation about what diamonds
are, which led to discussing carbon allotropes, properties
of diamonds and covalent bonds between its atoms which makes its melting and boiling point so high. We also explained that there
are no electrons in diamond, which means it does not conduct electricity.
This may sound rather ambitious and too hard to follow but the point is
my students in this particular group are in High School and could easily
understand the terms because they were familiar with them in their first
language and, I must say, keen on science, which made things much more fun.
History
Next I wanted to introduce some technical details about how diamond used
to be cut in the past and how it is cut now as prior knowledge of
this would facilitate their understanding of the news story and would require less
mediation on my part when they were exposed to it. So the terms dull and brilliant
came up and weight maintenance at the cost of brilliance in the past in
contrast with weight loss as the price for brilliance in the present.
Images
To illustrate mount and mounted as opposed
to loose
diamonds as well as cushion-mounted
I provided some images. I did the same to explain car boot sale as the idea
is foreign to my students.
 |
| shallow and deep cut |
 |
| cushion-mounted diamond |
 |
| loose diamond |
Post-reading
competition
After having read the story and getting everything clarified, the
students were divided into groups and wrote some questions for the other group
to test their memory of detail. While they were at it, they were not allowed to
look in the text. This gave rise to quite a bit of animation while at the same
time it served as the perfect motive to concentrate for the sake of winning.
Here is the link for the news story:
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