Tag: Rolf Palmberg

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.)