User:Javier Carro/Playground
In browse Mediawiki player[edit | edit source]
- Word samples
The player doesn't work with short files, such as words of different sizes:
a1 syllable long word En-au-caught.ogg
a three syllables long word, En-us-abstinent.ogg
Image:En-us-Albuquerque.ogg
A file with three words such as Image:En-us-George Walker Bush.ogg loose the last word:
- Text samples
However, the player works well with long texts:
Therefore, the records need two or three seconds unspoken spared at the end of the files.
Learning vocabulary activities[edit | edit source]
The meaning is not the only aspect a language learner should focus on when learning words in a second language. Learning vocabulary requires learning many different aspects of the words: spoken and written form, collocation, appropriateness, grammar, frequency, association and meaning. The dictionary is an efficient tool for learning some of these aspects, but there are many other ways for learning vocabulary. In the next activities I explore how the different aspects of word learning can be achieved by using wiki-quizzes.
Listening and comprehension[edit | edit source]
- Receptive knowledge of the activity: how is the word pronounced?
- Productive knowledge of the activity: how is the word spelled and written?
- Incidentally, the learner also acquires receptive knowledge on collocations, such as the appearance at the right size of numeric data of "°F" for temperatures, "percent" for percentages, "times" for comparing sizes and "kms" for distances.
- Listen carefully the first section of the following article and fill in the blanks:
- More information in w:en:Names_of_numbers_in_English
Grammar[edit | edit source]
The same kind of quizzes can be used for grammatical patterns of words. For example:
Fill in the blanks with one of these verbs. Choose either the verb + to or the -ing' form.
Squeal - stick - kiss - work
Find meaning in text[edit | edit source]
This activity trains the learner to use reading strategies for guessing the meaning of words in a cotext. The learner must use contextual clues, such as grammatical class, function of the word, cotextual information and knowledge of the world.
This practice has the difficulty that the learner does not get any morphological information of the word. But, on the other hand, it prepares the learner to be in front of texts containing unknown words. Thus, this activity is very convenient for vocabulary learning because there are numerous evidences of the existence of correlation between reading and vocabulary assimilation (Ferris; Kiyochi; Pitts, White & Drashen; Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988).
Associations[edit | edit source]
- Receptive knowledge: what other words do certain expressions (environmentally friendly, environmentally unfriendly, at home, transportation) make us think of?
- Learning burden: some of the words included in this exercise refer to devices which may not be well known in countries where this technology is not being used. In those cases, the learning burden is higher for the learner because he or she cannot associate the English word to an equivalent word in the mother tongue. Furthermore, such new devices may not have a widespread translation into languages where they are already being used.