Vol. 4 Issue 47 – Article: 'Shopping Mysterious Items in an Unfamiliar Language' by Rolf Palmberg

** This article is submitted by Rolf Palmberg, Department of Teacher Education Åbo Akademi University Vaasa, Finland.

Introduction

Prior to inviting foreign-language learners to engage in traditional communicative activities, i.e. tasks that require them to move around in the classroom and ask their classmates specific questions, teachers usually pre-teach the new vocabulary. Common teaching techniques used include mime, pictures, and translation of foreign-language words into the learners’ mother tongue. The meaning of new words are sometimes prompted by using carefully designed sentences that help learners make correct inferences and by encouraging them to look for cognate words that may exist in the foreign language and their mother tongue. Furthermore, learners may be asked to use dictionaries (whether physical or online versions) to find out what the new words mean. (For more examples of ways to pre-teach vocabulary, see Nation 2008.)

But do learners really need to know the meaning of new words in order to participate successfully in communicative activities in a foreign language? As suggested in Palmberg (2011-2012), this may not necessarily be the case. The purpose of this paper is to present the outline of a foreign-language lesson where the above suggestion is taken one step further. Do learners need any knowledge at all of the foreign language in which the communicative activity takes place. Or, to put it differently: How little (vocabulary) knowledge can they get away with to carry out, say, some basic shopping in a foreign language?

Lesson Outline

The learners attending this imaginary foreign-language lesson are presumed to have had no previous contact whatsoever with the foreign language in which they are supposed to communicate. To start out, therefore, the pronunciation rules of the foreign language are introduced. (Finnish, for example, would be suitable for this purpose since there is virtually a 100% relationship between sounds and symbols. If you see a Finnish word in writing you know how to pronounce it, and if you hear it spoken you can spell it – provided, of course, that you are familiar with the Latin alphabet.) As for grammar, only two basic sentences are needed: how to ask, in the foreign language, “What did you buy from the shop?” and how to answer “I bought …”

Each learner is now given a piece of paper that contains these two key phrases and two random items that they have supposedly bought from the shop (for the significance of this kind of “support frames”, see Palmberg 2011). The two items are given only in the foreign language and they are – by definition – unknown to the learners. The learners are next advised to walk around in the classroom, asking each other what they have bought and informing each other of their own shopping items. They are also told to write down their findings on their piece of paper. After a little while, they are requested to check the meaning of the words they have collected so far (their original words as well as the words they have written down) in one of the many bilingual dictionaries that are available in the classroom for this particular purpose.

Having done that, the learners are asked to consider their accumulated information and, individually, try to figure out why the shopper has bought these items. After half a minute or so, the learners are asked to form pairs and compare their findings. Two or three minutes later they are asked to form new groups of three or four and share their conclusions. Since the original items have been randomly selected from among a variety of topics, many solutions are possible (depending on which items the members of a particular group happen to come across), e.g. that the items bought are components needed to prepare a specific dish, clothes to be packed for a week’s beach holiday, things used as decorations for a specific festivity, etc. (For a possible word list, see Appendix.)

The following “loop” activity is used to end the lesson: Two to three pre-prepared cards are handed out to each learner. Each card has two short sentences, for example “I have ‘xxx’ (the learners’ mother-tongue word for ‘chocolate’). Who has ‘xxx’ (the foreign-language word for ‘flowers’)?” To start the activity, one of the learners is asked to read out his or her second sentence in one of her cards (“Who has …”) and the learner who has the matching card has to read out (for example): “I have ‘xxx’ (the mother-tongue word for ‘flowers’). Who has ‘xxx’ (the foreign-language word for ‘t-shirt’)?” If all learners recognise the foreign-language words read out and make no mistakes, the activity will make a full loop. The activity works only if all pre-prepared cards are handed out to the participating learners, so the number of cards to be handed out to each learner will depend on the number of pre-prepared cards. If there is time, the teacher can collect the cards, reshuffle, and hand them out again during the same lesson or, say, even one month later.

Conclusion

When foreign-language learners arrange, categorise, group, or rank vocabulary items according to principles of their own, the words will most probably be stored in their minds in so-called lexical networks (this process is subconscious and will later facilitate the access and production of words at will). As early as in 1976, Earl Stevick pointed out that memory works at its best when the subject matter appeals to the learners and they can organise what they are learning into familiar patterns. The ability to remember new words is further increased when learners are allowed to use their imagination during the learning process.

Depending on the mother tongue of the learners and the foreign language to be learnt, chances are that some of the new vocabulary items constitute so-called “potential vocabulary”, i.e. foreign-language words that are recognisable (and easily guessable) owing to similarities that exist between these words and their translational equivalents in the learners’ mother tongue. When learners realise that not all foreign-language words are necessarily new (and therefore “difficult”) when first encountered, their self-confidence increases and learning is facilitated. The importance of incorporating such words at an early stage of teaching a new language was first suggested in the late 1960s by Russian linguists (cited in Takala 1984; further discussed in Palmberg 1990).

Conscious effort (referred to by Stevick as “depth”; Stevick 1976) is required from learners in order to enable the new vocabulary to be properly processed and transferred from the short-term memory into the long-term memory. The “loop” activity described above therefore represents lesson time well spent, whether carried out as instant review (at the end of a lesson) or continuous review (during a later lesson). (See e.g. the SAFER teaching model outlined in Berman 2002.)

References

Berman, M. (2002). A MultipleIntelligences Roadto an ELT Classroom.Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.

Nation, I.S.P. (2008). Teaching Vocabulary: Strategies and Techniques.Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning.

Palmberg, R. (1990). “Improving foreign-language learners’ vocabulary skills”. RELC Journal 21:1.

Palmberg, R. (2011). Multiple Intelligences revisited. Karperö: Palmsoft Publications. (eBook available for free download at http://www.englishclub.com/downloads/multiple-intelligences.htm courtesy of EnglishClub.com.)

Palmberg, R. (2011-2012). “Preparing for the unknown – a communicative activity”. ELTA Newsletter (December 2011/January 2012).

Stevick, E. (1976). Memory, Meaning and Method. Rowley: Newbury House.

Takala, S. (1984). Evaluation of Students’ Knowledge of English Vocabulary in the Finnish Comprehension School. Jyväskylä: Reports from the Institute for Educational Research Vol. 350.

Appendix

bacon, bag, biscuits, blouse, book, cakes, camera, cheese, chocolate, eggs, fish, flowers, gloves, ice cream, jacket, mincemeat, newspaper, pasta, pepper, postcard, potatoes, salt, salad, scarf, shirt, shoes, skirt, socks, soft drinks, strawberries, sunscreen, swimming trunks, towel, trousers, t-shirt, vinegar.