English Language/Teaching Facts

Words

It is difficult to know how many words in English language, but it could be from 800,000 to 3 million.

Natives recognise 24,000 (passive vocab).

Natives use 15,000 (active vocab).

Knowing a word means knowing:

Meaning
Pronunciation
Grammatical info
Spelling
Connotation

Frequency: how often a word is used.

Range: the number of contexts a word can be used in.

Familiarity: how much it is part of life.

Usefulness: Motivation for someone to learn a word; e.g. interests, profession.

EFL/ESL SS levels

1. Beginners
2. Elementary
3. Pre-intermediate
4. Intermediate
5. Upper-intermediate
6. Proficient
7. Native



















Teaching Lexis (lexis=the total stock of words in a language)

Teach + or - 7 entirely new words based on how useful they are to the lesson, how useful they are to the
students and how new they are.

Steps to teach vocab

1. Convey the meaning (realia, pictures, gestures, synonyms, antonyms, example, story)
2. Try to elicit the word from ss in case they already know the word.
3. CCQ concept check questions.
Cottage= kind of house? (yes)
Big or small? (small)
City or country (country)

4. Model it (say it yourself clearly)
5. Drill (choral x 3)
6. Drill individual x3 (dont go around in order as ss will expect and pay less attention) (dont use ss
names so students focus on other sounds, instead point using an open hand.)

7. If possible go back to recap previous vocab. (i.e. whats this?)
8. Re-elicit to write on board (write all at the end together)
9. Mark word stress and part of speech [if it is adjective, verb or if noun dont write] (dont use capitals
unless full sentence):

sociable (adj)
cottage
mansion
cook (verb)
run (verb)
funny (adj)