What It Really Means to Know a Word

Christina Cavage

By Christina Cavage

What It Really Means to Know a Word

As ELT educators we often build our lessons around reading, writing, listening, speaking and grammar. We introduce new vocabulary that students need to be able to accomplish the reading or listening task. This often happens by providing a definition, and maybe a few ‘drill and kill’ type of exercises—matching the word and definition, multiple choice, or fill-ins. But, does this really lead to vocabulary acquisition? In a word, no. Vocabulary, specifically academic vocabulary is the often-forgotten skill in language learning. To effectively foster vocabulary learning, we need to consider what it really means to know a word.

two women talking

According to Paul Nation, explicit vocabulary teaching, is necessary, but not always effective for expanding a student’s knowledge of a word because knowing a word goes far beyond identifying the definition of a word. While form, meaning, and usage are the key elements for understanding a word, Nation breaks these down even further. When you know a word, you know:

Form:

  1. How it is pronounced (spoken form)
  2. How it is spelled (written form)
  3. Which word parts are in the word (prefix, base, suffix)

Meaning:

  1. Meanings/definitions
  2. Concepts associated with the word
  3. Synonyms or other words associations

Usage:

  1. How the word is used in a sentence (grammatical function in a sentence)
  2. What collocations the word has
  3. When and where the word is used (register and frequency)

This list may seem overwhelming, especially if you need to prepare students for university entrance, where their acquisition of the AWL (Academic Word List) is critical for their success. This list of 570-word families contains the words that most frequently appear in academic texts, across all disciplines. So, adding that layer to what it means to really know a word, goes beyond overwhelming! So, how can we adequately prepare students to not only know, but really know English vocabulary while engaging them in the learning process at the same time?

lesson from PECL -- vocabulary

Well, first we have to consider the tools we use. As we have seen, true academic vocabulary acquisition goes beyond what lies in many textbooks; thus, we have to look for additional tools. Within the Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, lies The Modular Academic Word List Course. The vocabulary lessons within the Modular AWL are built around Paul Nation’s work in what it means to really know a word. Students engage in activities where they can practice spoken form, written form, meanings, grammatical functions, collocations, and more. These flexible lessons allow you the teacher to deliver powerful lessons in class and out-of-class.

lesson from PECL -- vocabulary

The AWL Library is divided into 10 sublists, the first containing the most frequent terms and the last (10) being the least frequent. Each lesson begins with an overview of the vocabulary term, highlighting meaning, part of speech, syllable division, and collocations. From there, students are able to see the word in context. Then, students are engaged with a formative assessment, assessing their understanding of the word in context. They listen and choose the word stress, engage with collocations, create their own sentence with the vocabulary item (in speaking and writing), and are given a final summative assessment of the vocabulary item, which is conducted with a gamification tool.

collocations activity

Each microlesson provides a dynamic, interactive learning experience, that is completely customizable. In other words, you, the teacher, can add, delete and modify any lesson to address the needs of your students. Additionally, as students move through the lesson, you receive real-time data on your students’ strengths and struggles, as well as their level of engagement. You can see who is engaging in the lesson, and who may not be engaging.

analytics features in PECL
Analytics in Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod

Teaching vocabulary needs to go beyond word, definition, and part of speech if we want to foster true acquisition. We can do this by providing students opportunities to engage with academic vocabulary that are built upon sound research in vocabulary.


Learn more at pearsoneltusa.com/nearpod

Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.

Exploring Engagement in ELT Teaching

Part IV: A Wrap-Up
By Christina Cavage

Part IV: A Wrap-Up

Engagement—critical for success, not so easy to build. As you may recall, I started this dialogue out by drawing attention to how as ELT educators we are bridge builders. We build bridges not only between people and their goals, but also between people. We help make connections, and this has been challenged like never before in our COVID world. Engaging students who don’t have cameras on or aren’t sitting in the classroom with your other students, or who may be in a time zone that generally warrants sleep rather than learning, isn’t easy. However, with thoughtful consideration, and a wide variety of tools in your teaching toolkit, it’s doable.

First, it is important to recognize the three levels of engagement that we need to build: emotional, behavioral and cognitive. Each one comes with its’ unique characteristics and effective strategies.

Emotional engagement is all about lowering a student’s affective filter or building their comfort with taking risks and trying out new content. As we saw, there are many advantages to building emotional engagement in an online or digital environment. Students often feel freer to take risks and engage. The pressure of making a mistake sitting next to their peers often dissipates. Using a tool like Nearpod can really help students overcome the fears they may have of making a mistake. If you are launching a live session, you can hide student names, or you can launch a student-paced lesson.

Game in Nearpod

Strategies such as building a community of learners, holding a coffee or tea hour, using collaborative tools within your delivery systems and utilizing think-pair-share via Zoom breakout rooms or other functions within a conferencing platform are all effective strategies in lowering that affective filter, and building emotional engagement.

How about behavioral engagement? This is often a challenging one within our classroom walls and can become even more challenging in a Zoom or digital environment where you can’t always ‘see’ a student’s engagement.

Collaborative Board in Nearpod

Well, the key here is to make learning active. Regardless of if your class meets face-to-face, online, or live online, it is important that your students are active participants and not just recipients of language. Selecting the right tools and using them at the right time are critical.

As we saw earlier, microlearning, or learning in small chunks works best in building and fostering both behavioral and cognitive engagement.

Draw It! in Nearpod

Always consider asking your students to do after a mini lesson. Additionally, varying the types of tasks you are using in the class is just as important. Students tend to become more passive if the same type of activities come their way again and again. As the examples here illustrate, consider using a collaborative or discussion board, then after the next lesson, have students use an interactive activity such as Draw It! in Nearpod, or an activity where they have to do something. When you appeal to different learning styles, you are able to reach all students, and scaffold learning.

Lastly, we have cognitive engagement. While cognitive engagement appears to be the most obvious, it is often presents the greatest challenge because of all we often feel we need to accomplish.

Bloom's Taxonomy

As we saw in the third blog post, it is about moving students up Bloom’s taxonomy in a thoughtful, deliberate manner. We need to build up to creating rather than ask students to create after simple remembering and understanding tasks. Consider the teaching of paragraph organization. We may have students first identify the parts of a paragraph with a model text. Then, we may have students fill in missing gaps of a model paragraph. Next, we can have students unscramble sentences to organize them into a paragraph—all before we ask students to go and create their own paragraphs. Without proper scaffolding, students are being asked to jump across wide rivers without a bridge. It puts a strain on their cognitive load, and often creates obstacles in learning.

Now, with the pressures that many of us feel to ‘get things done’ this can be taxing. However, really working your students up Bloom’s can improve the quality of learning. In other words, it will stay with them longer. Research tells us that students who are cognitively engaged during a lesson perform better on assessments.

Example of microlearning

While this is not too surprising, it is important to frequently stop and assess students’ level of engagement. Consider again microlearning, with checkpoints that stop and immediately assess what they have just learned. As you see in this screenshot, after teaching the pronunciation of –ed endings, students receive a short formative assessment on what they just heard. When students know they will be immediately assessed, they tend to be more on task and engaged, regardless of where they may be sitting.

Overall, engagement is closely aligned with achievement. Students are able to achieve their own linguistic goals, as well as your course and programs, when they are engaged. And, when we think of engagement, we can’t simply think of how we can make the lesson more fun, but rather how we can build and foster emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement.

Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.

Exploring Engagement in ELT Teaching

Part III: Cognitive Engagement

Reflecting back on the last year has me, and most likely many of you, asking were my students engaged in this new normal? If this is to be a normal way of delivery, how can I engage them even deeper?  Well, if you have been following along, you are probably pretty familiar with the definition of engagement I have been working from–“the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught”. We know that engagement involves emotional engagement, which we looked at in the first blog, and behavioral engagement, which we looked at in the last blog, and cognitive engagement, which we will unpack in this blog.

What is Cognitive Engagement?

When we think of cognitive engagement, we may ask, Are my students interacting with content and applying the new content? Are they developing their learner autonomy? It’s really about effort and investment. However, this effort and investment begins with the teacher. The delivery of the content, or the manner in which we teach the content, can either foster or discourage cognitive engagement. What exactly do I mean? Well, the content has to be accessible to leaners, and that includes the terminology we use to teach the content. We also have to scaffold learning or take them up Bloom’s taxonomy. So, how can we build lessons that cognitively engage our students?

Strategies to Build Cognitive Engagement

Very much like both behavioral and emotional engagement, it’s all about leveraging our traditional teaching methods and the types of activities we have students participate in. When we unpack this a bit more, we can really break this down into four key segments: language of our delivery, allotted time for ‘learning’, scaffolding content, and time for learner engagement with content.

Element #1: Language of Delivery

Have you ever explained an English grammar lesson, used the correct terminology, albeit subject, object, participle, etc., and looked out at your class and saw blank stares? Or worse yet, called out a question on Zoom and were met with silence? For many of our students these terms may be familiar, but for many more they simply aren’t. The level at which a student entered your program may be a factor in how familiar they are with terms. So, how can we overcome this? Well, a silver lining in our COVID world is the tools we have available to us and are using. Imagine teaching a grammar lesson, and students ‘watching’ the grammar come alive.

video

Take a look at the screenshot of this video from the Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod. It is done in the Khan Academy style. As the teacher is talking through the lesson, students are hearing the lesson, but also seeing it. The visual helps to support the terms the students are unfamiliar with. Furthermore, we need to make sure we focus on not just the what, but the how and the why—think language, form, meaning, and use.

Element #2: Allotted Time for Learning

We often have a lot to do in a little time. We may use our entire class period to present one lesson. However, how many of our students are truly able to absorb it all? How many are ‘engaged’ the full amount of time? In today’s digital world, with today’s digital learners, it is not realistic to think that they can listen to a lecture for an extended period of time, and ‘learn’ all the content and that is why microlearning has become some popular. Microlearning is about learning in small digestible pieces. Students learn in chunks, and then have an opportunity to practice one chunk before moving forward. Studies have shown that microlearning enhances retention and engagement for students. So, when planning a lesson, consider the chunk-chew-check method. Chunk the learning, give students a task or simple activity to chew on the new information, and then check—think formative assessment.

formative assessment

Element #3: Scaffolding

When we deliver a lesson, it is natural to build tasks and practices in complexity. That is really what scaffolding is all about. However, we often work on remembering and understanding in the classroom, or during class time, and then allow students to do the heavy lifting at home—creating. In order for students to be cognitively engaged, and not lose their motivation, it is important we walk them through each step in class, giving them the tools and skills they need to walk themselves through each step outside of class. Scaffolding needs to be thoughtfully designed in and out of class tasks. Take a look at a lesson in the Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod. You will notice how the lesson walks students up Bloom’s taxonomy, each time asking a bit more of them, all the while engaging students in their own learning process.

grammar lesson

Element #4: Learner’s Time

Lastly, our students have busy lives, but we know that for a student to be truly engaged in learning, they need time outside of class to engage with content. This allows them to interact at their own frequency rate, but it also helps ELT students build those very critical academic skills, like autonomy. As educators, we need to set that expectation. We need to let students know that learning a language is a partnership—we can provide lessons, but outside of the classroom, they need to dedicate time. The digital world has once again come to our rescue and provided tools that we can use to engage students outside of class. Whether you use a Learning Management System (LMS), or another digital environment, your students can interact with content outside the classroom through additional practices and interactions.

live or student-paced lesson

Imagine launching a lesson in class, but students being able to work through that same lesson again outside of class. With the Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, you can launch a lesson during class, or as a student-paced lesson, or both. The engaging platform allows students to interact, scaffolds the lesson, and provides a microlearning lesson.

In the end, we know the more engaged our students are, the more they learn. That is our goal, isn’t it?


Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod
Want to know more about the Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod? Visit pearsoneltusa.com/nearpod.

Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.

Exploring Engagement in ELT Teaching

Part II: Behavioral Engagement

By Christina Cavage

We are bombarded by the term engagement these days. While it was challenging to build engagement under normal classroom circumstances, building engagement in remote environment and sustaining it is even more challenging. In the last issue, we broke down exactly what it means to be engaged. You may recall that engagement in learning is simply about “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught” and how motivated they are to learn and progress. We delved into emotional engagement—how we can break down those walls and create a comfortable learning space. Today, we are going to examine behavioral engagement.

What is Behavioral Engagement?

When we think of behavioral engagement, we have to consider our students’ behaviors in class.  Are they participating? Are they working in groups effectively and efficiently?  How attentive and active are our students? Essentially, how involved are they in the learning process?  Now, in a traditional face-to-face class we might be able to clearly see this. We know the students who come to class with their assignments completed, with their books open and ready to go, with their hands up to answer the questions we pose to the class. However, in a remote or hybrid setting, this can be extremely difficult to observe especially when many of our students have learned to Zoom with their cameras off. So, what can we do to foster and maintain behavioral engagement in this new normal?

Strategies to Build Behavioral Engagement

Very much like emotional engagement, it’s all about leveraging our traditional teaching methods and the tools we have. Often times selecting the right tools and using them at the right times can actually lead to a greater amount of engagement. Let’s unpack this a bit more by looking at four effective strategies.

Strategy #1: Make Learning Active

Set the expectation early on that you will be asking your students to do rather than just receive. Imagine you have asked your students to begin to develop a thesis statement for a writing assignment. Rather than have them submit the assignment to you, consider using a tool like Nearpod, to have students post and share their thesis statements. When students know that their work will be shared, there are fewer excuses and fewer long moments of silence as you call on names via Zoom or some other vehicle.

Collaborative board on Nearpod

Strategy #2: Build in Peer-to-Peer Learning

Being an active learner, also means being an active partner or group member. Whether you are using breakout rooms, or discussion boards, it is important to set clear guidelines as to what you want students to accomplish. Using a model is often very helpful, especially for our lower levels. The below example is taken from Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod. Here students need to share with a partner, then post their findings.

Read-Pair-Share in Nearpod

Peer-to-Peer learning may also mean peer-to-peer competition. Students love to ‘race’ against one another. I have found that warming-up with a race is a great way to get class going. It is also very effective in setting the tone for the rest of the class period. It communicates many messages—from how prepared I expect you to be to how active I expect you to be.

Time to Climb Activity, a race for students
Time to Climb activity: a race for students

Strategy #3: Break Learning into Small Pieces (Microlearning)

Microlearning is not a new term. However, it really has been coming to the forefront during these unprecedented times. Attention spans are dwindling and seem to be more so with the distractions of sitting in one’s own home taking classes. Microlearning is about presenting learning in small manageable pieces. This makes learning more accessible. The best practice is presenting content in small pieces, and then building in active tasks so students can immediately apply what they have learned. A great example of microlearning exists in Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod: Grammar. Within each grammar lesson there is a short video lesson on the grammar structure. Within these lessons, there are formative questions that students have to answer to move on. It makes their learning real and immediate.

Grammar lesson in Nearpod

Strategy #4: Personalize Learning

Lastly, in an online environment it becomes even more important to create lessons that are tailored or personalized. Tailored or personalized learning allows students to make greater connections to course content. How can you personalize lessons? Well, most simply, incorporate students’ names into lessons and include information about students into learning materials. What about personalizing or tailoring learning on a more global scale, or in other words, tailoring to your specific program or course?

Well, using a tool like Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, you can add, modify, or delete content. This allows you to customize the content to best meet the goals, objectives, and student learning outcomes of your course. By doing so, you are able to give your students exactly what they need to master your course and programmatic goals.

Personalizing with Nearpod

Overall, engaging students online is not much different and more challenging than engaging them in the classroom. Engaging students when they are learning the English language remotely is even more challenging. It is about selecting the right tools and implementing those tools strategically.

References: Student Engagement Definition. (2016, February 18). Retrieved January 05, 2021, from https://www.edglossary.org/student-engagement/


Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.