One of my teaching principles is incrementally bracing a word: I start
with its foundation, which -- more or less -- corresponds to its literal
meaning, and proceed step by step at different stages of learning – with the
figurative meanings, which I introduce when the students’ mental maturity can handle
them.
I call it the layer method because this is what
really happens: the learner adds one or more layers of meaning to the existing
one(s) thus enriching and broadening their scope. The method may not apply to all words as some
are quite straightforward, and those are usually the words that refer to
tangible objects, but it does apply to the majority of words that an adult
speaker will need. However, an adult speaker, in my experience, is rather
reluctant to draw or mime words, which a child will be only too eager to do.
Therefore, when I teach children, I make a point of imprinting the foundation meaning of the word on their minds by
encouraging them to use their bodies or produce sounds or mime and, wherever
this facilitates learning, to draw. It is a long-term strategy for building up
vocabulary, which pays dividends.
I will illustrate with one
of my favourite poems for teaching: Raymond
Wilson’s The Grateful Dragon.
When I present a poem to
my students, I vary the way depending on the poem and the level of my students.
This poem was presented to a level B1 class with particularly sharp children
who adore stories and storytelling. So I teased their brains a little by asking
why a dragon should be grateful. The responses were varied from “There are no
dragons really” to “They are grateful to be alive at all”.
·
How did
the dragon get to the castle door?
·
How big
was it?
·
How weak
was the dragon? (They didn’t know the word “eyelid” so I just mimed not being
able to move more than one eyelid.)
·
What did
the princess do when the enemy appeared before the castle? (I had to mime
“wept”, which was easy.)
Most of the times, when I
use a poem or literary extract, I focus
on some, not all, unknown words -- though
not randomly. The main criterion often is the frequency of the word though this may not always apply. Sometimes I
choose words which the students can draw
or illustrate, but I don’t normally provide the first language equivalent;
instead I refer them to their (paper) dictionaries
and ask them to look up the word(s)
and make a drawing. Their minds are more actively engaged, and images do
reinforce the memorisation of words.
In this case I divided the students into pairs
and asked different pairs to illustrate different phrases from the poem, which
I chose for them.
The first one was from the
second stanza: “… to lash its tail”. “Lash” is
a flexible word that can be used in many different contexts both literally and
figuratively.
The “skinny harvest mouse”
in the third stanza was too attractive a choice to ignore! I instructed my
students to illustrate how “harvest”
and “skinny mouse” related to each other.
The next one was from the
third stanza: “a blade of grass”. They knew “blade”
but not in this sense. I hardly ever miss the chance to point out a countable
vs uncountable noun.
The next one was “bundles
of hay” in the sixth stanza, which
was quite straightforward in terms of drawing.
The last item, however,
was a metaphor and more of a challenge: “a whirlwind of thunder and fury”
in the penultimate stanza. They actually did quite well with this one as the
drawing included angry faces swirling and thunder.
By selecting in particular
“lash”
and “bundle”,
I was aiming at establishing – at
this stage of learning -- a basis for
building up the figurative uses of the words later on. A mental image can
help understand and appreciate the figurative uses of a word more easily and
directly, effectively saving the teacher and the learner a lot of time while
the word is assimilated or “anchored” in the student’s mind.
Thus, from a “bundle
of sticks” we can then move to “Her friends managed to
get her out of the pub and bundled her home” or to “The company offered customers a single
computer solution, bundling together hardware and software.”
Or from “He lashed
the horses to go faster” to “Democrats lashed Republican plans, calling
them extreme.” and even further to “In
his speech, he lashed out at
his enemies.”
