[quote=“Rik”]If you really must insist on memorizing 100 words then choose better ones, famous people
[quote=“Rik”] Taiwan spends so much time trying to learn English, but compared to other countries (i.e. European ones, middle Eastern ones who I have had direct contact with) they might as well not bother.
What is the Chinese for
a corpus can tell you what kinds of words are likely to be encountered in given situations. i find it highly unlikely the aforementioned words are characteristically found in any situation that taiwanese students of english find themselves in. if you can provide some sort of data that suggests they will, then teach 'em.
words that are characteristically found in situations that students are likely to find themselves in (high-frequency words) are better to focus valuable teaching time on initially … if they wish to learn low-frequency words, they can spend their own time to do so. this isn’t to say that teachers can’t help students learn strategies for learning incidentals …
there are word lists that many (most/all?) senior high schools (and some bushibans?) require students to memorize … anyone have any idea how these were compiled? likely intuition, or no system at all, if words like these (swiss chard, calrabi) are being taught.
A good language teacher teaches students to become independant learners, and good independant learners know enough to ignore vocabulary such as was provided in the OP (unless they intend to become chefs). Forcing students to learn material like that does more harm than good. I feel for the poor students whoose teacher is too dumb to understand this.
independant.
persistant spelling mistake, sir.
Independent. Thanks.
[quote=“Vannyel”]Well first off Taiwan doesn’t spend any time trying to learn English, it is a country and can’t speak so therefore can’t learn; however, the citizens of Taiwan spend
Very good points but I learned giraffe, hippopotamus, zebra and quite a few other words that I had no use whatsoever for until I joined the army at 17 and then later went to my first zoo. Sure at a certain level one should be selective with what one studies but as a kid I think it doesn’t matter. You might never see a blowfish but then again what did cost you to learn the word?
Learning more as you are younger also increases you language flexiblity – once you learn a second language it is easier to pick up a third or add more vocab to the second.
Language learning in Taiwan sucks, to put it nicely, but nitpicking isn’t really helping anyone.
you are comparing L1 and L2 when you say you learned lotsa “useless” words, are you not?
given the time constraints here, where students are expected to learn a second language in 1-6 hours a week, often from teachers who can’t use it with any confidence, then word choice is important. spending valuable class-time on high-frequency words is more useful than using intuition to guess at what might be of use to students, or teaching them words that the teacher is interested in.
if they wanna learn more, and i hope they do, then show them how to go about it autonomously, which increases satisfaction and motivation.
independant.
persistant spelling mistake, sir.[/quote]
“Persistent”.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist. People in glass houses, etc. etc.)
I taught high school Spanish one year in the US, and we were forced by the school to use a horrible book. Each unit had loads of vocabulary. I was teaching second-year, and most of the students hadn’t mastered first-year (does this sound vaguely familiar?) and couldn’t, for instance, ask simple questions or make statements like “I’d like a --” fluently.
Because I didn’t really care what the administration thought about me (!) I told the kids we were going to “cover” the book. That meant that they had a quick memorization quiz on the great book words (like “recovery room”, “registered parcel post” and “international direct-dial telephone” – things these 13 year olds had never heard of in English let alone Spanish!) once a week. The rest of the classroom time was spent practicing high-frequency words.
At the end of the year, my kids beat the other kids in the department on all the grammar tests because they’d had so much listening and reading practice. They were approximately equal on the vocabulary tests on the “book” stuff (none of the kids in the department could use those words anyway in real life). By the following year, they were indistinguishable from the other kids in terms of the “book” words (everyone had forgotten 90% or more of those words) but they retained the high frequency words and patterns they’d internalized.
Not that you can do that in Taiwan with the testing culture, but it just goes to show that in most cases, stuffing the goose with vocab to be memorized doesn’t do anything in the long run anyhow, so you might as well spend your time on something either more pleasant or more useful. 