Author : Jen

What do you need to master (=get a firm grasp of)? Here is a checklist.

Parts of Speech
Noun
Verb
Adjective – regular and participal
Adverb
Preposition – movement and location
Conjunction
Interjection
Pronoun

Sentence Components
Subject
Predicate
Dynamic verbs – active and stative
Direct objects vs indirect objects
Linking verbs (also known as copular verbs)
Complement
Sentence, independent clause, dependent clause, phrase
Simple, compound, complex, compound-complex sentences

Concepts
Active vs passive voice – subject of the sentence vs doer of the action
Subject of a sentence vs subject and object of a verb
Tense vs aspect
Modality – grammatical modals and lexical modals
Gerund vs infinitive
Transitive vs intransitive
Participles – verbal vs adjectival use

Syntax
NP (4 part NPs, gerunds, relative pronoun-lead clauses)
Determiners – articles, pronouns, quantifiers
4 part NPs – pre-modification can be adjectives or other nouns
4 part NPs – post-modification can be prepositional phrases, that- phrases, relative pronoun-lead clauses)
embedded clauses
VP
AP or AdvP
PP
CP
Movement rules – yes/no questions vs Wh- questions, helping verbs, negation

Why investing the time and effort benefits you:
1 Fluency increases when you know the anatomy of a sentence.
2 Accuracy improves.
3 Cognitive load decreases, making loading sentences faster when speaking.
4 You can self-correct in real time. I have seen students get way better at self-editing, which is a game-changer when writing under time pressure.
5 More of your passive vocabulary becomes active when speaking; this is a byproduct of a reduced cognitive load at the ‘produce a sentence’ level. That is, you can focus on word choice once producing sentences has been automatized.
6 Corrections from tutors make more sense, and are more likely to be integrated and then produced.

*This post will be added to and refined as time goes on. Phonology and morphology come in a future post.

Transcripts are rich with opportunities for learners to notice features of the target language; both through reading what’s written and by listening to what is spoken.

Videos provide dual input – the audio soundtrack as well as visual clues to meaning, both of which are complemented with a written transcript. With video running alongside audio, word and phrase meaning (bottom-up) as well as overall gist (top-down) can be more easily inferred when background knowledge and contextual hints when both ears and eyes are taking in information.

Podcasts, on the other hand, provide just the audio input. The benefit of audio-only is learners then have the opportunity to listen attentively to capture meaningful chunks before checking their understanding through comprehension checks, or with the transcript.

Unlike purely written word driven approaches, centering video clips is multi-sensory. I believe the intermediate plateau exists because classrooms provide inadequate exposure to actual life, which is multi-sensory. There is a big jump from academic language learning to communicative competency in real life, and working with video clips is the bridge.

As to what learning objectives look like, consider the video below:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU3iOzByOj8

Here is the learning objective I would have in mind for this video:

After several sessions examining this video, the transcript and the real life context, the student will (A) be more familiar with (i) the vocabulary used to discuss re-greening polluted areas (ii) the form, meaning and usage of selected grammatical structures and (B) will have increased their knowledge.

Fair use allows for up to 10% of a work to be used for educational purposes and that’s the rule of thumb I follow. If I use pages from published textbooks in my classes, I own a hard copy. When I use textbooks extensively, I state in my terms and conditions that students should have their own copy; either a hard copy or e-book.

First, here is a dictionary definition:

interlocutor (noun): someone involved in a conversation

And this is how language teachers define it:

sympathetic interlocutor (noun): someone who is perfect for language learners to talk to

A sympathetic interlocutor adapts her word choice and pace to give more opportunity for you to gather your thoughts and speak.

Here are other things a sympathetic interlocutor will do:

1. She will have you tell stories or anecdotes more than once.
2. She ensures you’re speaking most of the time in the unstructured speaking portions of the lesson.
3. She waits patiently while you think but jumps in with a question if needed.
4. She notes mistakes in pronunciation and grammar to come back to later.
5. She uses follow up questions to get more details about what you’re saying.
6. She supports your acquisition of “how we actually say things” by feeding in the right words at the right time.
7. She spends a lot of time transcribing what you say, and her questions and comments so you can see what is being said.

Basically, the sympathetic interlocutor is a speaking partner who knows what to do (and what not to do) to support someone learning to speak in a second language or third language.

So I read a lot of texts in English but how do I equip myself to use it? Here is a checklist of actions to take with new words or lexical items: phrasal verbs, fixed expressions, collocations, prepositional phrases.

1. Can I spell it?

2. Can I say it i.e. does it roll off my tongue with ease? Do I have the vowel sounds in this word correct?

3. Do I know any other members of the same word family, so I can connect the new word to my existing mental word bank?

4. Do I have a sense of how and when and where its used? You can use SKELL or online dictionaries or GPT to find example sentences.

5. For single new words, do I know the most common collocations?

6. Have I written a few sentences of my own where I might actually use this word in my real life? That is, have I made it personal? Have I fit it into my life somehow, and my memory of past experiences?

7. ADVANCED: Have I re-written these example sentences in my own words to get a better sense of lexical boundaries?

8. POST LEARNING: Can I it explain to someone? The Speed Game is useful to practice defining words.

9. STUDY SKILL: Do I have this word learned in conjunction with an article, video or conversation? That is, am I encoding it into a story or memory to make it easier to recall?