Transcription
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. Claire, I believe you're on mute. I don't know if you wanted to say something, but, um, we have just started the session and, uh, we're just waiting a few more minutes before Claire introduces our guest speaker today. Um, so please bear with us. Thank you.
Emily, I'll let you tell me when you think is the right moment because I can't see the numbers going. Completely okay, people are slowly coming in. Okay, let's, let's give this. Actually, it's, it's 28, so we should wait a moment. We do have a few more minutes. Yep. Yes, feel free to use the chat box to say your, tell us where you're from. From all over the place. Welcome, Morocco, Ecuador. Oh, wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Malta. So nice to see so many teachers from all over the world. Welcome, everybody. How many have we got now, Emily? Um, still people coming in. We were at that 57, 45 teachers. So I would still wait a little while considering the number of registrations we've had.
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Um, welcome everybody. We're just going to give it one more minute before we kick off. That was a very nice comment, Penny. I don't know if you were able to read that in the chat box. You're at the source of them many teachers becoming teachers, I guess. So, yes, everybody, you are muted. If you have questions, you can put them in the Q&A box. You can post comments in the chat box. But if you put questions in the Q&A, we will deal with them at the end. Uh, well, Romania, Scotland, goodness, UAE. Gosh, what a lot of people we've got with us today. Well, Claire, people are still coming in. We're at, um, 820, um, teachers. I don't know if you wish to start now.
Yes, I think we, um, we won't keep everybody waiting any longer. Um, so welcome everybody. I should say good evening to some of you, good afternoon, good morning. Um, it is a, is a great, uh, privilege for us to have so many of you, uh, join us this afternoon. Here, here, I'm here in Cambridge and, um, this is the first of four webinars that we're running every, every Wednesday. And the first one will focus on vocabulary today, as you know. And I'm absolutely delighted to introduce, uh, Penny to you. Many of you will know Penny. I can see by some of the, the chats that, chat messages that many of you are familiar with Penny's work. Penny has 30 years' experience as an English teacher in elementary, middle, and high schools in Israel, where she lives. And now, although Penny's now retired, she has taught MA courses at Oranim University Academic College of Education and Haifa University. She's presented papers at TESOL, TEFL, and various other English teachers' conferences worldwide. And of course, Penny has a huge number of publications with Cambridge University Press, some of them many of you will have used, such as Five-Minute Activities, Grammar Practice Activities, A Course in English Language Teaching, and more recently, Penny's 100 Teaching Tips, all published by Cambridge. And there are many others. So, um, without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Penny and, and let you hear some of her top tips.
Thank you, Penny. Thank you very much. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay, great. Um, terrific. Well, thank you very much for your welcoming messages. Okay, some of you we've already met in various countries, so it's nice to have you back. Um, so this, um, workshop today, all webinar, is on vocabulary teaching, which is something I've been really, really interested in in the last few years. Um, and it's called 20 Tips on Vocabulary Teaching, sort of a miscellany of different kinds of practical tips that I hope will help you teach vocabulary, uh, effectively, um, at various levels in different kinds of schools that you're working on. So, um, mainly, they are to add to rather than replace what you're doing already. So if you're already doing something which my tip may contradict or, or say something different, then consider adding, adapting, or even ignoring what I say and keeping doing with what you're doing. But at least my ideas, I hope, will provide some optional enrichment. Okay, so I have to get through 20 tips in 30 minutes, which means about a minute and a half a tip, which is a lot. I may run over time a little bit, Claire. I hope you'll indulge me, um, but I'll try to keep to time as much as I can. Okay.
Tip number one, and really, really important. I spend a lot of class time practicing and teaching vocabulary because they need to know an enormous amount. This is simply what research has told us over the last two decades is the amount of words and phrases that students need to know is incredibly large. It runs into the tens of thousands. Uh, they don't usually just pick it up. I remember when I first started teaching, uh, my trainer said to me, "Don't worry about teaching them vocabulary, just teach them grammar. They'll pick up the vocabulary as they go along." Well, they won't. Not unless that's they're completely immersed in an English teaching environment, which most of our students are not. They won't just pick it up. We need to teach it. Uh, the research tells us you need about 3,000 word families at in order to get to B1 level, and 5,000 to get to advanced, and it goes up to something like 8,000 in order to cope with unsimplified text at an academic level. So it's a lot. Um, and if you do your arithmetic, if, and those of you who are working in high schools or elementary schools, if your schools teach 30, 40 weeks a year, and most countries they teach English for eight years, maybe a bit more, um, then you need to teach at least 11 new words a week to reach 3,000. And if you want to get that 5,000, then 18 new words. And that doesn't include review, which I'll be talking about later, and multi-word items. So it's an enormous amount, and it's really almost near impossible. But we need to get as close as we can to this sort of target. We'll be talking about ways in which we can perhaps approach or help our students to reach, um, the maximum number of every item they're capable of mastering as quickly as possible. This means teaching a lot of vocabulary lessons and reviewing it. I'll come back to that in a moment. Students don't just pick it up. The research tells us that picking up vocabulary from extensive reading is very slow. On average, they pick up about one word per 1,000 read. And our students don't read that amount of English. If they read, they read mostly in their mother tongue. How much do your students read in their own language, let alone English? So it's all together a big challenge.
Tip number two. I said I'd talk about this. The importance is not only to teach new items but to make sure that they review again and again. Research indicates we need to encounter a word 6 to 16 times. So that's a lot of times. It's not enough just to teach it once or do it once or twice. You need more. Recycle as many times as you can in class. And some useful routines. Here's where the practical tip comes in. Um, remind students at the end of the lesson of vocabulary you taught at the beginning. So it's a good idea to leave it up on the board if you've taught at the beginning and then come back at the end of the lesson just to jog their memories or to challenge them to translate or to recall what you taught. And start the next lesson by asking to recall, "What can you remember the vocabulary we learned last verse?" and "What was it?"
Tip three. Teach multi-word items, not just single words. If you ask, um, teachers, "What is vocabulary?" some of the less experienced teachers are likely to say, "Well, it's words." It isn't just words. It's words and phrases, phrases being multi-word items that are defined by all sorts of definitions in literature, phrases, lexical phrases, chunks, lexical chunks, expressions, etc., etc., etc. Um, and about 10% of the vocabulary students need to know are in fact not single words but phrases of this kind. Um, for example, prepositional phrases like "of course." Now, you couldn't guess the meaning of "of course" if you know what "of" means and "course" means. You need to notice a global phrase. By the way, same thing. Other kinds of lexical phrases are the phrasal verbs, "look after," "get on with." Again, you couldn't guess the meaning from analyzing the single words. Um, what's called binomials, words joined by "and" or "or," "to and fro," "now and then," "more or less."
Tip number four is rather like lexical phrases in the sense that what I'm saying is a single word is some is not usually enough. You need to teach it together with the word or words it goes with, what's called collocations in the literature. Like teaching just "angry." Um, if I teach my Israeli students "angry," they will follow it with "on" because that's what it is in Hebrew, "angry on." Or "afraid," they'll say "afraid from" because that's what it is in Hebrew. And I'm sure you've found the same with, uh, speakers of your different languages that they add the wrong preposition. So it's quite important when you're teaching words like "angry," teach them with "as well." Or "tall" and "high." "Tall" and "high" very often is it translated by the same word in many languages, French, Spanish, Russian, I think. But in English, there's a difference between "tall" and "high." Only relating to the kind of noun they tend to, um, to associate with. And so you have to teach them "tall" when you think about a person, but "high" when you're talking about a mountain. Um, same with "fast" and "quick." Same with some of the adverbs. You can "sleep soundly," but you can't "work soundly." You "work hard." And they need to know that these adverbs "hard" sorry, and "soundly" go with these particular, um, verbs. Um, just let me pause a second and say, I'm glancing at the, um, chat box as I'm speaking. If you have any, um, comments or questions, firstly, put them into the Q&A. But if you have things that occur to you as I'm going, you want to put in the chat box for everyone to see, please feel free. I'll glance at it occasionally and see if I can answer. In any case, yes, this is being recorded. And at the end of this presentation, I will give you my email address so that if you want me to send you the presentation or answer any particular questions, please feel free to do so. So you don't have to take notes as you're going. Um, just sit back and enjoy what you, what you, uh, can get from this. And, um, look at the recording later to get details if you need to. Um, another example of collocation here is "dead," which goes with "right," but you can't say "dead correct." So you need to know what "dead" goes with.
Tip five. Um, I'm often asked, "Should I teach British English or American English?" And the answer is, that's the wrong question. It doesn't matter whether you teach British or American. What does matter is whether you teach international vocabulary. Because most of our students are learning English these days, not in order to talk to Americans or to study in the UK, but in order to use English as an international language for business purposes or for academic publishing processes, all sorts of other reasons, which has nothing to do with native British or Americans. So what they need is an English which they can use for international communication. Will this word or expressions I'm teaching be understood by other people using English as an international language?
Okay, here's some questions for you. Um, which of these two possibilities each time would you teach? A fortnight or two weeks? Billfold or wallet? Fall or autumn? Program do you have or have you got? You don't want to teach them all because you've got enough vocabulary to teach anyway. You want to make choices and teach the ones that are most useful. Two weeks? Yes. Um, you teach "fall" as I say, to advanced classes. But if you have to make a priority, which would be your priority? American way. Okay, I've got some nice answers here. Let me give you my answers. Fortnight, two weeks. I would not teach "fortnight," although it's the word which comes most naturally to me because I'm from Britain. But "fortnight" is not understood in a lot of American contexts. I remember using "fortnight" the first time I went to the States, and people really didn't understand what I was talking about. It sounded like sort of quaint Jane Austen type English to them. Teach "two weeks." Don't bother about "fortnight" unless you're teaching students who you know are going to be in a British English-speaking environment. Billfold and wallet. I certainly didn't know what a "billfold" was till I went to the States. Well, it is far more useful. Fall, autumn. Fall is the American, but it's also American informal English. And the Americans also use "autumn" in more formal contexts. For example, the English teaching journal TESOL Quarterly has four issues in the year: right, winter, spring, summer, and autumn. The autumn issue of TESOL Quarterly, and TESOL is an American publication. So "autumn" is used in the States, um, in formal contexts. And it's also not ambiguous. "Fall" is arguably ambiguous. So I wouldn't teach "autumn" in preference. Um, the spelling, I think, is becoming increasingly American in this case because it's simply simpler and it's less keystrokes if you're typing. Finally, do you have, have you got? I was surprised to find that even in the modern elementary school books published in in England, they teach "have you got" right from the beginning rather than "do you have." Whereas "do you have" internationally is actually a lot more common and a lot easier because it has a past tense and a future tense, whereas "have you got" doesn't. Um, so if I have a choice, if my textbook doesn't dictate things for me, I would rather, um, teach the international form. Okay, I prefer teaching British, as Tatiana, yes. But if you're teaching for international purposes, you need to teach, as I say, the version which is most likely to be internationally acceptable. And therefore, although I too have a bias towards British, obviously, because of my background, I have tended to move on to international versions. A very useful tool here is a corpus of global web-based English, a corpus of English from all over the world, an enormous number, enormous database. And they analyze by, um, by frequency in the different areas of use of English. So if you look, you can put in a, a term in that little white window at the top there and click "chart." It'll tell you which is more common. So let's have a look at a couple of the articles, the ones I've just shown you. Um, here is, for example, uh, different thing, "billfold" and "wallet." And the pale blue oblongs, the, the columns show you how much a word is used in a particular area. And if you look at the overall amount of blue column, okay, there's much, much more in the bottom one that is in the top one. In other words, "wallet" is worldwide used a lot more than "billfold." If you look at "billfold," the two places where it is used predominantly are the US and Hong Kong. It's not used very much anywhere else. So I would go for "wallet" as a much more, uh, useful worldwide, um, term. "Do you have," "have you got?" The same thing. Okay, very much. "Have you got" is used in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Sri Lanka. These places where it's basically British English. Everywhere else, "have you got" is not used very much. And if you look at the top, um, chart there, you'll see that there is much, much more simply volume of blue oblong. In other words, "do you have" is much, much more used worldwide. So it's a useful tool and it helps us to make decisions like this.
Reading texts. Okay, let's, uh, move on to this. Um, you don't always have to pre-teach vocabulary. It's moving on to something much, much more specific. We're always told, "Pre-teach vocabulary before you teach text." And what I'm saying now is, you don't have to. You can. You don't have to. If you teach 10 or 12 new words immediately before reading a new text, they probably won't remember what they mean when they encounter them because you can't keep them in your mind that long. And there is some evidence that teaching vocabulary after encountering it in context brings about better learning. So if you pre-teach only a few key items and then make sure that you have time to review them before you engage with the text, but it's fine to teach the new items as they come. Don't feel guilty if you don't actually pre-teach. It's good to teach them within a meaning context. That meaningful context, they immediately contribute to text comprehension. And of course, as I've said before, essential to review later. Lucy says, "Some life thousands can do haven't have you got very confusing." You're quite right, Lucy. And that's why I would actually myself forget about "have you got" and just find teach "do you have" and go with that. Sorry, I haven't had time to answer all your comments. There's some really interesting ones up, but, um, I'm, uh, I'm limited in time here.
Tip seven. Don't usually ask students to guess means of words from context. A very popular procedure, not a very good one in most cases. They get it wrong, they get frustrated, they feel failure, they're not learning. Most cases because it runs, it's based on the research and it's time-wasting. But let's do it ourselves. Have a look at this. Take some time off and just for a couple of minutes, how many of these can you guess? How many of the missing words here could you guess the meanings of? And I'm not saying guess the exact word, but guess more or less what it means. Okay, I'm going to give you a minute to look at at least three of them and see if you can guess. And in a second, I will show you the filled-in answers. I'll ask you to write in the chat box how many you got more or less right. Okay, not maybe the second word, but more or less right. Okay, here you go. How many did you get more or less right? None, one, two, three? Gosh, yes. Um, okay. And it's not because you don't know English, and it's not because you're not good guessers, and it's not because you don't, um, know how to infer from context. It is simply because in 90, not 90, but well beyond 50% of the cases, in a natural context, the meaning of a word is not, in fact, um, revealed by the context. So when we ask students to guess a word, we're giving them this submission, impossible. Guessing from context is not usually very useful. Ask students to guess only if you're fairly sure they can do successfully. And if in a, um, minority of cases, it is possible to guess. And where it is possible to guess, of course, ask them to. But only if you're sure that they can, that the context is in fact pregnant. Otherwise, just tell them what the word means and use the time you've saved for review and using context and so on and so on. So, yes, you are asked to ask, told to ask your students to guess from context during your CELTA training. I think that was wrong. So come to grips with your, with your CELTA trainer and, uh, argue with them.
Text eight. Tip eight. So I use profilers to help you decide which vocabulary to teach. This is a very useful web-based tool, um, where you can feed in, um, a text to any of these. And you don't need to write them down now because either I'll send them to you or you can see from the recording. And you've put in your text, and it will immediately tell you, here's the text I showed you before, it will reveal to you which are the most common. Okay, in this case, the turquoise-colored ones, which are the medium, um, medium frequency words, and which are the infrequent words, which is very helpful when we come to teach text and we want to know what level the text is and which words are most essential to teach.
Tip nine. It's okay to practice words out of context. Whereas in, I was always taught as a teacher, "Always teach English less words in context." Ain't necessarily so. There's a place for teaching out of context. Single word review is also useful, or brief phrases. For example, single word review like recalling, uh, single words as I suggested earlier, or translating single words, dictating single words. Yes, no is a procedure where you give the students a page full of words and ask them to tick all the ones they know and ask you the ones they don't. A nice little review and enrichment and, and, um, opportunity to remind students the words they didn't know. Words and phrases. So questions. Who do reply to the word "question"? Not give an entire sentence with the word "question," but you mean adjectives that could apply to "question." A hard question, a funny question, an easy question. Or how many phrases can you think of using a word? Make it an exercise interesting. There are simple strategies to make vocabulary exercises more interesting. And here's where I start going a little bit over time. I'm afraid I'm only halfway through with four minutes left, but I'm going to take, uh, 10 or 15 minutes. I just started late, so that's also.
Don't worry, Penny. Don't worry. It's absolutely. Thank you, thank you, Claire. Um, uh, manic exercises are interesting. Simple strategies to make vocabulary exercises more interesting. I'm going to give you some examples. Um, here's a typical, um, matching exercise, not particularly interesting. Okay, and you can easily do it. I'm sure. The way we can make it, one way we can make it interesting is by deleting one column. To delete the second column, and you say to students, "Okay, what things can you think of that you can have, um, a pile of, other than linear?" And you say, they brainstorm, "a pile of plates," "a pile of chairs," "a pile of books," whatever they like. And you get much more, um, practice of the word "pile" as well as a much more interesting exercise. Or gap fills. "Complain," "threaten," "beg," "confess." "Both, I'm the one who broke the verse." He bars, he, and they're expected to say "confess," which is pretty boring. I mean, it's okay, you can do it. All right. But much more interesting if, again, you use this strategy of deleting. Simply delete the word bank and ask them to suggest what words they could put in instead of, um, the gap there. So, "I'm the one who broke because of us." He confessed, he whispered, he admitted, he shouted, he wept. All sorts of things they can put in there. And it becomes much, much more interesting. Another possibility is to do the exercise and just leave the words and tell them to write a sentence about yourself, a true sentence about yourself using any of the verbs above. Gives them lots of practice using the verbs that you want, the target verbs, and is much, much more interesting. In principle, what I'm saying is you have to be ready to de-, to mutilate the textbook. Okay, do it the way they normally do it first, but then feel free to delete things, change things, and open up the sentences to make it more interesting for the students. Make them open-ended responses, which in turn produce creativity, human unpredictability, higher order thinking. Yes, thank you to me to accompany these those with dramatic expressions. Lovely. Higher order thinking, thinking about where something would contextualize or what it connects with. Um, and personalization, making the word relevant to myself. Um, we've got scaffolding. Yes, but I won't get into that.
Tip 11. Avoid word games like Hangman. Hangman is very physically incorrect at the moment. I forget what they call it these days, but everyone knows what I mean. Anyway, the thing is that they're mainly a waste of time. If you are guessing a word using Hangman, they are only actually engaging with the target word during the last few seconds of the process. And the rest of the time, they're just suggesting random letters, which get less and less random as they go on, but certainly at the beginning, random. And, um, they do not use time well for vocabulary learning. Same thing with word search. Students tend to spend most their time searching rather than finding. And fruitless searching does not produce learning. It's the finding which produces the learning. They're useful as time fillers. I'm not saying never use them, um, but use them sometimes and not too often because they don't teach very much.
Tip 12. Use L1 as well when introducing the meaning of a new vocabulary item. There's lots of ways of introducing, uh, vocabulary items. Pictures, for example, which give a lot of impact. But a picture may be ambiguous, and not all items can be depicted. "Happy," for example, you can introduce using this. But then the students might think it means "smile" or "face" or whatever. And you really need to reinforce the picture with the translation. Not, not use the picture. Yes, use the pictures for the impact, but use the translation to make sure they've understood what the picture means. Really. And "mind" the same sort of thing. They also may be ambiguous. Synonyms, quicker, but, oh, you can use it for higher levels because it means they need a lot of vocabulary, uh, and maybe an accurate explanation tends to take a lot of time. Okay, added exposure to English, which is a good thing. But for example, explain the word "disappointed." Okay, you explain it with this long explanation here. And what happens in my classes, anyway, someone shouts out the L1 equivalent, and everyone breathes a sigh of Cyprus relief. And you ask yourself, "Well, why didn't I just say that first?" Say, "Disappointed means," and given the mother tongue equivalent, and then give the English explanation to back it up. When they know what it means, examples are helpful in some cases, not all. Use in context is also helpful, but not necessarily completely unambiguous. If you're using exact, as I said before, guessing from context does not always produce the right answer. And finally, translation is usually accurate, pretty accurate. It's quick, it's natural because students are naturally looking for the mother tongue equivalent, um, and it saves time for, um, for time you can use to put the word they know into an English context. Doesn't give the context of also impact. And my bottom line here with regarding to L1 is use pictures, explanation, mime, and so on and so on and so on. And use translation as a backup. And most important, don't feel guilty about it. There's no reason to feel guilty. Use both.
Tip 13. Don't teach lexical sets all together for the first time. Colors, pants, the body, prepositions, action verbs. And the problem is that a lot of the elementary textbooks do this. It's a very convenient way of grouping items, but there is very substantial evidence they aren't learned very well when taught together because one word interferes with the other. Um, it's better to teach items which naturally co-occur in a given context. So, for example, instead of teaching "blue" together with "red," "yellow," "green," teach "blue" together with "sky" because it goes with it, and it's more likely to help you remember it. Simply, if you're teaching the theme of "home" or "family," not just teaching a list of relationships, but all sorts of words that go together with the theme of family and home. Note that the same probably applies to any pairs of groups of words that could be confused. It's not a good idea to teach words that sound the same together for the first time, or opposites and synonyms together for the first time, or words that rhyme together for the first time. And just a reminder, I am talking about the first time of teaching. It's fine to use groups like this for practice or using one in one that they already know in order to teach a new one which is linked to it.
Don't spend ages taking vocabulary homework in class. If they've done a vocabulary exercise at home, don't usually go through the exact science class. And I've seen teachers do this, and half the lesson is lost going through the vocabulary exercise before they've even had time to teach any new material. Get to all the other things they wanted to do in the list. So better either just to provide the answers on the board or on the screen, or attempt to check each other and just ask you if there's anything they didn't understand. Um, or a combination. The best, of course, of all the saving class time is, and if you have time, which is a big if, if you have time to take in their notebooks and check at home. Um, so this is something we need to do as much as we can, but we're limited in time, particularly if we have a full schedule and large classes.
Tip 15. Get students to present new vocabulary. Word of the day or phrase of the day. Make it, tell them, "Find a word which you've learned from a movie or learned from a friend or learned from your parents. Come to school and tell the others about it." Phrase of the day could be, "It's really nice to have them teach each other." But make sure you have a reserve in case they've forgotten to do their homework and prepare a word.
Tip 16. Get students to design vocabulary tests. Um, if you want to test all the vocabulary learned over the last month, it's a very good idea to get students to design test questions. Tend to do it in pairs. Then you take it home and correct it, and you design the test based on the questions they've designed. And the big advantage of this is that the test preparation is in itself review, plus it lowers test anxiety because, in a sense, the students own the test items. They've actually prepared them themselves. So it's, it's quite an important point in making them feel better and less stressed about doing the test.
Tip 17. I'm getting towards the end. Use gathering time in an online lesson for vocabulary practice. It's really a nice little tip if you're using Zoom to teach English. As they enter, tell them to answer a question you deliver orally or show on the screen share or chat box, and read classmates' answers as they appear. For example, um, "How many words can you think of beginning with a letter?" And they write up in the chat box as many as they can think of as they are entering the room. Or "How many words can you think of ending with?" Or "How many foods or animals, etc., etc., can you think of?" Or "What are your favorite?" Whatever. "What are some things you like doing? Hate doing? What can you do with a pen? Your hand? A stone?" They're getting more difficult as they go on. But they write up things in the chat box, um, and share, enjoy what other people are writing as well as their reading. And it keeps them busy and occupied while they are joining the class.
Encourage students to look for new vocabulary outside the classroom. Really, um, important. Give homework assignments, um, to, uh, read. Very important extensive reading readings because they enjoy. Search for new vocabulary in the, in the landscape, the vocabulary landscape, shop signs, road signs, advertisements, whatever. Watch YouTubes, find out things online which they can only do through English or using English to do so.
Tip 19. Don't overuse the dictionary. Sometimes teachers send students to look up words during a lesson. I think this is a bit of a waste of lesson time because the teacher is really the best dictionary they have. They need to know how to use a dictionary when they're on their own, but in class. So it's good to teach dictionary skills in class. If they just need to know the meaning of a new word, you are the best dictionary for them because you know what explanation or translation, um, is most appropriate and what meaning of the word they're looking for. And you are a user-friendly dictionary.
And finally, tip 20. And I'm coming back to something I said right at the beginning here. Never say never. Tips and ideas can often help, but they may not be appropriate to you, or to the culture of learning, or to what your students like, um, or what is done in your situations. So you have to feel free to reject any ideas I've given you which don't happen to suit you, to adapt them, um, to use them sometimes, yes, sometimes no, um, to make small changes. But I think on the whole, there are things which I offer them to you because they're obviously things which have helped me in my teaching, straight from my own classroom. But you need to be selective and critical. And I hope that you will find enough here within the tips that I've provided in this session to be useful and helpful to you in the future. Never say never. And here, as I promised, is my email. Please feel free to write and ask me questions or respond. Thank you very much. And I apologize for going 10 minutes over time, which I warned you I might.
Claire: That's absolutely fine. I think you can, you can see, Penny, that the, uh, the chat box has gone absolutely crazy and it's been so exciting. It's been a challenge. It's been a challenge for Emily and I to actually follow it. But I think that it just speaks to the enthusiasm that there has been for the, for the talk and the tips. So thank you so much.
Penny: Thank you very much.
Claire: Um, we, we have gone over time, but I think we should maybe just address maybe two or three questions if that's okay with you, Penny.
Penny: That's fine.
Claire: Okay. Um, so a frequent question that comes up is about the use of the mother tongue. Um, can we use the mother tongue when we can't paraphrase? What would your advice be about that?
Penny: Yes, in short, yes. Um, definitely. Um, very often using the mother tongue paradoxically saves time for English use because if they've got the meaning of the word through a quick translation, then you can spend much more time contextualizing the word in English, explaining it in English, giving examples in English, and not spending time with your students not understanding what the word means and trying to puzzle it out. Um, I think that the L1, and increasingly you'll find this in the register as well, the L1 is a really, really useful tool, um, to be used where it promotes learning. And it's up to you, the teacher, to use your judgment where it's appropriate to use it and won't be more appropriate to use English.
Claire: Fantastic. Thank you. And then there's another question here about what do you think is the best way to introduce new vocabulary items? How do you usually do that?
Penny: Um, I, I, where I can possibly use realia, real objects or pictures, I do, as I say, backing up with with translation. But I like to use, um, realia and, and, and pictures as much as I can. Um, the more abstract the word, of course, the more difficult it is to do. So any of the other, um, possibilities which I mentioned here, um, are legitimate, I think, with with a backup by translation. I would not use only translation on its own. I would back it up with an English-based or image-based, um, support.
Claire: Okay, thank you. Um, somebody else asking about tips for teaching and learning phrasal verbs.
Penny: Um, this is phrasal verbs. They're phrases. They're the multi-word items I was talking about. I don't know if I have any particular tip diff for teaching phrasal verbs separate from teaching, uh, other kinds of verbs or lexical items in general. I would say not to teach, here's a negative one, not to teach phrasal verbs in lists. All the phrasal verbs with "get," all the phrasal verbs with, um, um, "have," for example. But teach each phrasal verb within its context rather than as groups. This comes under the, the tip about not teaching words that are the same kind of thing. So teach phrasal verbs in context rather than as lists of phrasal verbs. And I'm going to crudely remind people that we have a, a title in our, in use collection, Phrasal Verbs in Use, which is really useful for, for teaching, uh, phrasal verbs.
Claire: Um, and then maybe just one last question. Um, there was a question about teaching dyslexic students, um, and what kind of exercises are better. I don't know whether you're able to answer that one.
Penny: Um, that's a very, very tricky one. Okay. Once, uh, dyslexic, then I would emphasize, um, oral practice rather than written practice because of the problems with reading. Um, and make the reading, insofar as I do use written forms of vocabulary, I keep it within brief texts rather than lengthy texts, and with plenty of concrete, um, oral and, and graphic backup. That's a very brief answer, but that's what I would prefer.
Claire: Thank you so much. Okay, I think, um, we should probably leave it there now as we've kind of over time. But, um, thank you again, Penny, for your superb presentation.
Penny: Thank you.
Claire: Thank you. Thank you everybody for attending and thank you for all the interaction. And please feel free to use my email to write to me. And you'll see as well that, um, Emily has posted on the screen now the next three webinars in this series, which are every Wednesday at the same time for the next three weeks. Next, what, next week will focus on pronunciation. So please, if you haven't yet registered, please do feel free to join us. It'd be great to see everybody again. Thank you so much and have a great evening or afternoon or morning. Bye bye.
Penny: Thank you. Thank you, Penny. Bye.
Claire: Bye.