Meaning: initial training sessions
Sooner, rather than later, on any initial training course, you
have to get to grips with meaning.
The issue is where to stop because semantics is a much-researched
and quite technical area.
The following is somewhere to start and probably about as much as there is time for on a short course. Longer courses may have a bit more time to devote to the area and there are guides in the in-service section of the site to help a little. The link to that section of the in-service guides comes at the end.
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The key ideas |
This section makes no attempt to condense the study of semantics into a short set of worksheets and tasks. What it does try to do is cover the essentials from which people can build a greater understanding.
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The aim of all of this is to give trainees the essential data they need to be able to teach lexis effectively (or at least passably).
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What is a word? |
The purpose here is to alert trainees to the reason we use the word lexeme in place of the anguished term word.
The first task is simple: to identify what for them counts as a word and to reveal the problems with the lay term.
You may like to know that number 10 is a real word (recently
[2012] used in the UK parliament). It means estimating
something as worthless. The reason it is there is to alert
people to what is a possible word in English (compare 9.) with what
is not possible by the rules of English phonotactics.
If you need to pronounce it, it's /ˌflɒksɪˌnɔːsɪˌnaɪhɪlɪˌpɪlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/.
You may need to elicit more examples of lexemes consisting of
more than one word and to remind people of the distinction between
lexical and functional words. You may also have to own up to
the fact that most people in ELT use the word 'word' fairly loosely!
The task does not include any phrasal verbs but you could refer to
them if you feel it's appropriate.
For that, you may like to compare:
He looked at the ship
which contains five lexemes and
He looked up the word
which contains only four lexemes.
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Relationships between lexemes |
The first task here focuses on the meaning of mean. It distinguishes between
- The sense of a word, i.e., its denotation
- A word as a reference, i.e., as representing something in the here and now
- A word's meaning in use, i.e., its connotation
Task 1 is designed simply to alert trainees to the three sorts of
meaning.
Task 2 is designed to establish the fact that synonyms need to have
the same word class, the same connotations, the same styles and the
same varieties. There is also the question of synecdoche (The
White House) and
metaphor (cream of society) to consider.
Task 3 is designed to alert people to colligational issues
(transitivity and verb catenation in particular).
The final worksheet is really just a test of the ability to come
up with synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms from a common superordinate
(or hypernym, if you prefer).
You can't use it until you have introduced the terms, of course.
For worksheet #3:
Task 1 gets people to think about all the issues with synonyms in
the classroom. Individuals should do the task before
cooperating with a partner to discuss the problems which might
arise. Your input will be needed here because novice teachers
have a tendency to use synonyms as a substitute for explanation.
Task 2 works the same way and the problems people should note are
at least that some words have no antonyms, that affixation is
unreliable as a guide to meaning and that shades of meaning are
usually not captured by suggesting an antonym.
Task 3 is designed to raise awareness of hyponymy and its
usefulness in terms of understanding nuance but also to alert people
to the fact that people vary in how they classify the world.
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Related areas |
Lexical relationships are treated at length in the in-service guides to the area but the majority of those are not suitable for initial training course use.
| Related guides | |
| For trainees: | |
| words and vocabulary | the index to the area in the initial plus section |
| lexical relationships | this is in the in-service section and contains much that is too difficult at this level. It does, however, cover the basics, too. |
| For you (as a reminder of what you need to know) | |
| the in-service guides | for the in-service index of the guides to lexis |
| A-Z index | where you can find guides to or containing specific concepts and terms |