A word about copyright…
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.
What is a sympathetic interlocutor?
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:
- She will have you tell stories or anecdotes more than once.
- She ensures you’re speaking most of the time in the unstructured speaking portions of the lesson.
- She waits patiently while you think but jumps in with a question if needed.
- She notes mistakes in pronunciation and grammar to come back to later.
- She uses follow up questions to get more details about what you’re saying.
- She supports your acquisition of “how we actually say things” by feeding in the right words at the right time.
- 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.
What does it mean to really “know” a word?
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?
A glossary of English learning methods and approaches
Here are some language learning terms and concepts that past students found useful to research and understand.
Academic Word Lists (AWL)
Achievement tests vs proficiency tests
Written discourse vs spoken discourse
Prescriptive vs descriptive approaches to grammar
Text as linguistic object (TALO), transcript as linguistic object (podcast, video clip…)
Top down vs bottom up processing
Deductive approach (start with a grammar rule, and see examples) vs inductive approaches (look at examples first, notice patterns, infer the grammar rule)
Task-based learning and content-based language learning
The presentation, practice, production method (PPP)
French immersion programs in Canadian schools
International phonetic alphabet (IPA) used by dictionaries vs the 44 sounds of English as taught to native-speaking kids via the science of reading and structured literacy
Tense vs aspect
Grammar (subject and predicate) vs syntax (NPs, VPs, APs)
Guided discovery vs explicit instruction
Learning about a language vs acquiring measurable proficiency