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In my opinion, teaching vocabulary collocation is one of the important ways to help stusents to study well because the students tend to learn vocabulary with [r]

SangKienKinhNghiem.org Tổng Hợp Hơn 1000 Sáng Kiến Kinh Nghiệm Chuẩn

SƠ LƯỢC LÝ LỊCH KHOA HỌC

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐỒNG NAI

Đơn vị TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG TRẤN BIÊN

Mã số:

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM DẠY TỪ VỰNG THÔNG QUA SỰ KẾT HỢP

GIỮA CÁC TỪ

Người thực hiện: VŨ NGUYỄN MINH NGỌC Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu:

Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn: Anh văn 

Có đính kèm:

Năm học: 2011 - 2012

SƠ LƯỢC LÝ LỊCH KHOA HỌC

I THÔNG TIN CHUNG VỀ CÁ NHÂN

1 Họ và tên: VŨ NGUYỄN MINH NGỌC

2 Ngày tháng năm sinh: 29- 12-1975

3 Nam, nữ: Nữ

4 Địa chỉ: 506 A2 Chung Cư Nguyễn Văn Trỗi - Quang Vinh – Biên Hòa

5 Điện thoại: 061.3826698 (CQ)/ (NR); ĐTDĐ:

6 Fax: E-mail: info@123doc.org

7 Chức vụ: Giáo viên

8 Đơn vị công tác: Trường THPT Trấn Biên

II TRÌNH ĐỘ ĐÀO TẠO

- Học vị (hoặc trình độ chuyên môn, nghiệp vụ) cao nhất: cử nhân Anh văn

- Năm nhận bằng: 1998

- Chuyên ngành đào tạo: Sư phạm khoa Anh văn

III.KINH NGHIỆM KHOA HỌC

- Lĩnh vực chuyên môn có kinh nghiệm: môn Tiếng Anh

- Số năm có kinh nghiệm: 12

- Các sáng kiến kinh nghiệm đã có trong 5 năm gần đây:

Nowadays English has become important and necessary to study A lot of Vietnamese people use it as a tool to communicate at work, on business and in many fields Many new methods have been applied to teach English Although it is a compulsory subject most of the students don’t study well One of the main causes is their incomplete awareness of the purpose of learning English.Many teachers have been teaching words in isolation with synonyms, antonyms or word family and give Vietnamese equivalents without providing students with any other contexts Vocabulary

is essential element in conveying information is taught and learned cursorily In order

to master a language we have to understand and speak it fluently, but we don’t know how to use new words Therefore, motivating students to learn English is necessary I think there are a lot of wayso vocabulary as Teaching vocabulary is one of the ways to help them learn better However, there are a lot of ways to teach vocabulary such as: root; prefix and suffix; synonyms and antonyms; phrasal verbs; collocation; pictures, flashcards, objects etc In my opinion, teaching vocabulary collocation is one of the important ways to help stusents to study well because the students tend to learn vocabulary with word by word and understand the meaning of each word They don’t know that it is impossible to read a text as a whole in this way As a result, they often have trouble in reading For this reason, I would like introduce teaching vocabulary collocation to my students

CONTENT

What is collocation?

Collocations are combinations of words which are used together If we want to use a word naturally, we need to learn the other words that often go with it This can be different from language to language For example, in English we say:

I missed the bus.(= I didn’t catch the bus) ( NOT I lost the bus)

He had to go to hospital; it’s a serious injury (= a bad injury) ( NOT a grave injury)

There are a few ways collocations are used in

Verb + Noun

The meaning of many of these examples may be clear, but did you know these verbs and nouns go together? Are they the same or different in your language?

start a car (= turn on the engine)

a family (= think about having a first child)

tell a story

a joke (= a funny story)

miss a person (= be happy because a particular person is not there)

a lesson (= not go to a lesson)

get on a bus (opp get off a bus)

waste time / money (= use it badly)

Adjective + Noun

a soft drink (= non-alcoholic drink)

voice ( opp a loud voice)

wine (opp sweet wine)

dry weather (opp wet weather)

rain (= raining a lot)

heavy traffic (= a lot of cars on the road)

smoker (= a person who smokes a lot)

a great success (= very successful)

time ( = an enjoyable time)

hard work (= difficult physically or mentally)

a hard question ( = difficult to answer)

Examples:

The conference hard work but every said it was a great success.

Threre was heavy traffic in the city center because of the wet weather.

We had a great time in Brazil – the beaches are fantastic

Adverb + Adjective

The underlined adverbs in 1-3 mean “very”, the adverbs in 4-5 mean “fully/ completely” In each case, we often use these adverbs with the adjectives that follow them Notice also the phrases in bold

1 I’m terribly sorry to bother you (= to disturb you), but is Steven there?

2 She is well aware of the problem (= she knows all about the problem)

3 It is vitally important to make a note of common collocations in your notebook

4 He’s fast asleep (= in a deep sleep)

She was wide awake (= fully awake) a minute ago.

Noun + Noun

package holiday

Verb + Adjective + Noun

have a great time

Verb + Adverb

discuss calmly

Verb + Preposition + Noun

hand in an assignment

How can I help my students with collocations?

I argue that students at every level need to be aware of the importance of collocation I believe that collocation can be used not only to help learners understand and manage lexis but also to communicate ideas more effectively

For example, there is the difference in meaning between “glance” and “glimpse”.

After some contexts in which these words might be used, we produced the following :

glance She glanced at her

watch

Glimpse

He had glimlsed her

through the window

as he passed

I only had time to

glance at the newspapers

I glimpsed a car as

it drove past

It was clear to me how helpful it was to use collocation to highlight the differences between the two verbs I have also found collocation useful in explaining the difference between opposites:

light green / dark green

light suitcase / heavy suitcase

You can give you alternative ways of saying something, which may be more colourful

or more precise For example, instead of repeating it was very cold and very dark, we can say it was bitterly cold and pitch dark.Collocations can improve your style in writing: instead of saying poverty causes crime, you can say poverty breeds crime; instead of saying big meal you can say a substantial meal.

H.Long and C.Richards (2001) mentioned that another advantage of learning

collocations is to help the learners express themselves more fluently than learning individual words When learners memorize vocabulary as chunks instead of isolated words, they can produce language faster and more fluently because they don’t need to think about the individual words but they can produce the chunks as an item For example, learners will speak “ Please close the window”; “ Can I have the bill, please?”; “ Pleased to meet you.” faster and more fluently when learn the whole chunk than learning the individual words as close, window, please

Lewis (2000) states that knowing a word includes knowing its collocations It means that, in any collocations, one word will “call up” another word in the mind of the native speakers In other words, the learners can predict the other word when they hear one word with the various degrees of success That helps the learners understand more deeply what the native speakers spoke and be more understood by the native speakers

Types of Collocation

1 De-lexicalised Verbs

De-lexicalised verbs (get, have, make, do, put, take) are important when teaching collocation although they may have a basic meaning (make = create/manufacture, have = own/possess), they are more commonly used in combinations with nouns or other words as a chunk of meaning:

Examples:

make a mistake

do your homework

take an exam

In my experience, a lot of mistakes in collocations are made with de-lexicalised verbs, probably due to leanrer language interference

2 Nouns

I think that it is very useful to teach learners these collocations with a noun as a

key word because the majority of general nouns usually require further qualification:

Examples:

Good / well-paid / menial / boring / full-time job

Package / luxury / expensive / cheap / good

Nouns are also important because they are usually the words that carry the most meaning within a sentence

Strong/ Weak and Frequent/ Infrequent Collocations

There is also a difference between strong/weak and frequent/infrequent collocations A collocation that is frequent (e.g a warm day) is not necessarily strong, as either word in the partnership suggests a number of other collocates:

sweater Bad blanket wedding

(a) warm

smile (a) Sunny day

breeze glorious

In the same way, a particularly strong collocation may be used very infrequently (e.g bat your eyelashes) The most useful combination for teaching purposes, then, seems to

be a combination of strong (but not completely fixed) and frequent

A strong/infrequent collocation may be worth mentioning to draw the learners’ attention to its existence, but little, if any, class time would need to be spent on collocations at the weak/infrequent end of the spectrum

Nation also makes the point that, in a classroom situation, frequent collocations only deserve attention if: “their frequency is equal to or higher than other high-frequency words.” This puts a greater pressure on the teacher when making the decision about whether to spend time on a particular collocation I feel that if there are enough potential frequent collocations of one of the nodes, it is worth spending some class time on:

take a put (yourself) at run the Risk

With the second two verbs in this example, the unpredictability of the combination is also a factor Most learners at intermediate level or above would be familiar with all three of the verbs, but few would realise that it is possible to collocate ‘run’ and ‘risk’ Moreover, this would be a difficult collocation for learners to work out just by knowing the meaning of the individual parts, so would therefore merit some class time

What problems do learners have with collocation, and how can we help?

1.Quantity/Arbitrariness

A major stumbling block to most learners is the fact that there are so many possible collocations and that the choice of which word to collocate with, say, a noun is completely arbitrary This leads to the question: “Well, why is it have a coffee not drink

a coffee?” and the inevitable reply (hated by teachers and students alike): “It just is.”

If students are encouraged to record collocations as they occur, they have a permanent record of which combinations are possible Class time can be given for learners to revise and practise the collocations they have learnt (see below for suggestions) or to add new ones

There are various ways for learners to record new collocations in their vocabulary notebooks I have found that the most effective is to use a box format such as:

(verb) (adjective) (verb) (adjective) noun (verb) (adjective)

For lower level learners it might be helpful to organise their collocation boxes by topic (in the same order as their coursebooks) – jobs, family, food etc Intermediate learners may prefer to organise by keyword – work, holiday etc – and advanced students by grammatical structure – verb + noun; noun + adjective etc Organisation is really a matter for individual learners, though, as it should be done according to personal preference to minimise the learning burden Learners can leave some entries

in the boxes blank to be completed at a later date with other collocations that they have noticed independently

2.Learner Language Transfer

Many learners expect that because they collocate something a particular way in L1, it will translate directly (and correctly) into English A quick survey of my current learners produced the following verb + noun collocations:

take the car Đón xe (Vietnamese) Car went

Go by car

have a coffee Uống cafe (Vietnamese) Take a coffee

Drink a coffee

do your homework Làm bài tập (Vietnamese) Write your homework

pay attention to Chú ý (Vietnamese) Be attentive

Give attention to

Do attention to

go on holiday Đi nghỉ hè (Vietnamese) Holiday doing

Do holiday Leave on holiday

I think that because of this untranslatable teachers should focus on collocations which can not be translated directly, pointing out contrasts to students instead of similarities

If learners fail to use a correct collocation, even if their utterance is grammatically and contextually correct, their English will still sound unnatural and ‘foreign’, to the extent that their addressee may not understand them at all Compare the following (from

a selection of my learners’ written work):

He survived very strongly

We own a shopping centre

I took a good decision

He knows what he’s speaking about

I can’t see any problem why

If we substitute the asterisked words for miraculously, have, made, talking and reason, these utterances become more natural and nativelike

Collocation grids can be useful in helping learners to understand which words are possible collocates and which aren’t, by simply ticking the correct combination

These grids can be made from the students’ own written (or spoken) work as a correction exercise as well as more general ones in textbooks:

a person a bank money a car a shop a wallet rob

steal

Such grids are also very useful for showing the difference in meaning or use between two or three words that appear almost the same The grid may then be used to contrast with the learner language possibilities for collocation

3.Meaning and Noticing

Especially when dealing with text, many learners (especially those at lower levels) tend to focus on individual words that they don’t know, rather than on the collocation This is because the usual way of noticing and recording vocabulary is to write the word (out of context and without its collocates) in a vocabulary notebook with it’s the learner language translation Alternatively, more advanced learners will say, “I know that word” and move on without checking for any collocates in the text Both of these problems arise from poor learner-training: learners need to have collocations pointed out to them before they can be expected to notice them for themselves

When working with text, it takes very little time to point collocations out to learners – or, alternatively, with higher levels or classes experienced in noticing to ask them to find collocations for themselves In this opening paragraph , six collocations can be identified (my underlining):

When Clifford met Annie, they found one thing in common They both love lists

So together they have written the ultimate list, a list of rules for their marriage

Teprenuptial agreement itemizes every detail of their lives together, from shopping to

sex Timothy Laurence met them in Florida in the apartment they share

Newspaper articles, opening paragraphs of books and videos of TV soap operas or sports commentaries also lend themselves to this kind of noticing activity The advantages of using such authentic material are obvious – the language is used in a natural way and in context However, we should be careful to choose which collocations we focus on in terms of frequency , level and suitability for our particular group of learners