I teach in France, where students are very concerned about knowing every vocabulary item; they will often have a...

I teach in France, where students are very concerned about knowing every vocabulary item; they will often have a crisis of confidence if there are too many unfamiliar words. There is a true perfectionist culture which is sometimes hard to crack.

As a result, I usually like to pre-teach vocabulary items as a means of keeping the class with me and feeling like they can do it, although I appreciate sometimes this approach can be a little heavy.

It's been really interesting therefore to have some ideas about how to combat perfectionism, and what the idea of 'success' actually means.

If anyone has any specific advice to teaching French students, it would be very interesting to discuss.

Comments

  1. Julia BlinovaNovember 5, 2017 at 8:46 AM

    How do you pre-teach vocabulary? I mean it's one thing if I put up the words on the board and explain/translate them. And it's completely different if I choose to elicit them or suggest them during a pre-listening discussion. As Penny told us today, a one-time exposure doesn't really help, but if I introduce these new words in a more meaningful way and encourage my students to use them before the listening, they - hopefully - become more familiar with the words and can benefit from the pre-teaching. What do you think?

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  2. Giusy FotiaNovember 5, 2017 at 9:52 AM

    Well, first of all only pre-teach keywords, ie those words that are essential for the comprehension and to fulfill the task assigned. How to pre-teach? eliciting: using visuals, synonyms, examples and asking concept check questions.
    For French students: the concept is the same - as Penny remined us today, in real life we do not understand every single word of what we listen to in our L1, why should they do this while listening to English? Explaining this to our students and invite them to reflect on HOW they listen to their native language, could definitely help. Pre-teaching key-words will also contribute to lower their frustration.

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  3. Espace Lingua (Espace Lingua)November 7, 2017 at 8:28 AM

    I completely agree- that's something I tell my students every day and I think they are starting to believe me now!

    For pre-teaching, I sometimes use translation (if time is short) but I do prefer to elicit the vocabulary meaning by using it in context. The keynote national geographic series built around TED talks is great for this!

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  4. Penny UrNovember 7, 2017 at 9:19 PM

    There's nothing to stop you doing both, Laura: use clarification strategies like context, pictures, mime, examples, explanations or synonyms ... and then translation as a quick check that they've got the right meaning. Sometimes context can be ambiguous, as I'll show in the 'reading' session.

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  5. Elizabeth BekesNovember 8, 2017 at 2:43 AM

    If it comes to somewhat complicated concepts, e.g. "jealousy", I ask my Spanish speaking students to either look it up in the dictionary that we have on the table, or if someone knows the word, I ask that student to teach it to me. This works in monolingual groups and they love turning the tables.

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  6. Espace Lingua (Espace Lingua)November 21, 2017 at 10:19 AM

    Thank you for this everyone! It's always helpful :)

    ReplyDelete

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