I know all of you linguistic purists are going to crap your pants on this one, but I’m facing a very practical issue here and I’d like to get some input.
Starting next week, I’ve got to “teach” 80 GRE students about 7,000 vocabulary words. I’m not teaching usage. I’m not teaching word combinations. I’m not teaching reading, writing, speaking, or listening. I’m just teaching vocabulary. A shload (shit+load=shload) of vocabulary.
The GRE verbal question types include antonyms, analogies, and sentence completion questions. I’m not teaching these question types–another teacher is doing that. I’m supposed to help them memorize a bunch of common GRE words over a 12 session course. One three hour session per week.
I’ve taught such courses before, but to American students. I’m planning to teach my Taiwanese students through the use of word association techniques as a critical mnemonic device.
What I’m wondering is, are word roots worth teaching?I’ve taught a few Latin word root units over the years, and always felt like they weren’t successful. Most students simply can’t grasp the meaning of a word root, let alone how to use it to dissect the meaning of an unfamiliar English word. Anyone been successful using word root analysis to help students acquire vocabulary?
Second question–aside from grouping words by shared meaning and by category, and by teaching synonyms and antonyms, is there any other effective way to teach 625 words in a three hour period? I will use pre and post-tests to motivate them to study. I will assign homework. I will give example sentences for the more important words. Other than that, am I missing anything?
I think word roots are worth teaching. I’ve taught them to kids albeit at a fairly basic level. They seemed to really go for it too, getting a kick out of fairly accurately guessing the meaning of a word without ever seeing it before. As I did this off my own back as an experiment, I was of course able to create my own list of roots and compounds(?)-still, it was quite cool to seee ten year olds working out the meaning of optometry.
As for your situation, that being you are woefully short of time, I think it might be an idea to limit this method to the most salient words in that huge list and then concentrate a little on prefixes…thinking about it, in addition to what you have already outlined, there isn’t a LOT that you can do as most of the onus is on them to put inb the extra work. You could also try to identify areas where they are struggling–common mistakes.
I would hope that they already know a large portion of the vocab already and that this would reduce the pressure a little.
If you can find some way to eliminate the words that most of them already “know” you will be off to a good start. After that I think it depends on the word you are teaching. Some words might seem fairly advanced -philosophy for instance - but in fact are quite simple to teach. If they know it’s translation into Chinese and the more common derivations - philosophical but not philosophically for instance - they will at least be able to have some idea of what is meant next time they come across the word. You don’t have much time so translations will probably be the quickest, most effective route with a lot of words. If the word belongs to a class of words teach that class. If it has obvious synonyms, antonyms teach those. The more dramatically things are presented and the more that that presentation illicits a physical response the easier it will be to remember. If you teach vomit for example pretend to do just that. Stay on an item until they feel that they have it. I find that sentences like v - o m -i -t spells vomit and means outu repeated for thirty seconds or so does wonders for moving new words into holding memory at least. If they start getting groggy have them stand up and stretch or march around as they say it. Set it up like it is basic training for the marines or something and then when you get going goof around like crazy. Use every opportunity that arises to make a joke out of things. Free assosiate like crazy. And I would ask them to bring tape recorders to class. Get them to record the entire class and ask them to listen to the tapes and review their notes as often as possible before the test.