Vocabulary and Memory

Haiku Deck

You can say you know a word when  you can retrieve it with ease in the right context and use it in a grammatically correct way.

Noticing the word and spending time with it by looking up its definition, learning about its family and collocates, and thinking about it will give the word a home in your lexicon, or vocabulary database. After wards, the more time you visit the word by retrieving it the more familiar the path to your word's  home will be.



Recognition is one of the initial stages of the learning process. For reading, recognizing a word  may be enough to get you through the text.When you recognize a word you are retrieving it from your memory. The more frequently you retrieve the word from your memory the faster you'll remember the word and the sooner you'll be able to produce it in writing or speaking.
At the beginning you'll need more context clues and hints to remember the word, but eventually you will need fewer and fewer clues and hints. When you can remember the meaning of a word without any help, you'll also be able  to recall the word and use it in a sentence or in conversation. The more you use it in conversation and writing, the more automatic your recall of this word will be. In the end you won't even have to think about the word. You'll use it without thinking.

The slides in Haiku Deck are just one way to help you recall the words we learned in class.

Wordle

Wordle is a program that you can use to create a word cloud. Copy and paste a text in the program and Wordle will generate a word cloud with all the words. Furthermore, the more frequently a  word appears the  larger it will be in the cloud.

Check out the Wordle for Sally's Phone.
Sally's Phone Wordle

Graded Readers and Vocabulary Learning

This week we are starting our novel, the Wrong Man by Kris Anderson. This Penguin Active Reader is a a book that has been especially created for adult English language learners.

Graded readers, published by Oxford, Penguin, Cambridge, Grass Roots Press, are designed for adult learners at various levels of reading proficiency. These books use controlled vocabulary that has been determined useful by linguistics studies of English corpora. Essentially, a corpus is a massive collection of  written text and oral sources that are inputted into a computer database, and scanned with a computer program that determines how frequently words appear in this database. This computer program, a concordancer, scans the texts and brings back a  frequency of occurrence number for all the words in the corpus. The frequency count, or how many times a word appears in texts,  is important because it helps us  understand which words are most frequently used by English language speakers. This,  in turn allows us to use our vocabulary learning time most effectively. Learning words that are  encountered frequently, allows  learners to understand most of the words used in most English texts faster. Thus, when you study vocabulary,  if you learn the most frequently used words in the English language, you are learning the most useful words.

Graded readers can be used for intensive or extensive reading. Readers used for intensive reading contain  activities that help learners understand the story. For this reason it's OK if the reader is a bit challenging, especially since a teacher will often be helping out.  When graded readers are used for extensive or pleasure reading, the objective is to read as many of these books as possible. This is done so that the readers have a lot of exposure to vocabulary and grammar structures that they have already learned. In this way, reading a graded reader cements the language that the reader already has. To read for pleasure, learners should choose  a book that they would want to read even in their first language. A second criteria is that learners should understand 98% of the vocabulary is the book.

Extensive Reading helps SS's become more fluent readers, improves reading and writing  test scores and makes one a more confident user of the English language. Graded readers are a tremendously useful resource for learners of English, and I can't recommend them enough.

Academic Success

Talking about study skills in this first unit of our class, makes me think back to the time when I had to learn about how to become a good student. I remember spending a lot of time at the Academic Learning Center. I think it's a good place to find a lot of resources. Here is a link to the University of Manitoba Academic Learning Center website.

I truly believe that  anyone can be a good student. All you need is to know how to manage your personal life and school life and some study strategies. I particularly appreciated the Concentration Tips from the University of Manitoba  Learning Assistance Brochure that we read today.  I've listed them below because I think they are very useful for students who have a difficult time staying focused while studying.


Ten Concentration Tips

1. Choose a quiet place with good lights and a comfortable chair.
2. Study difficult lessons when you are most refreshed
3. Highlight, take notes and self question to stay interested in your study
4. Use a worry list to write out your personal problems.
5. Take short breaks
6. When you start to think about sth. else, catch yourself and try to get back to work
7. Get lots of sleep regularly
8. Exercise
9. Eat well
10. Reward yourself to stay motivated.

  

Mother's day 2013 at Assiniboine  Park

Welcome to Week 2



On Sunday, May 12th we celebrated Mother's Day. My family and I had a wonderful day at Assiniboine Park. I know that in Europe mothers are celebrated on  International Women's Day, which is on March 8. When do you celebrate your Mother's Day  in your country?

 I hope the first week wasn't too overwhelming for you guys. In reading class last week, you learned at least 15 word families, and quite a few other expressions. You read a story and wrote your language story. You also took the placement test for Reading Horizons.

This week we will continue talking about being academically successful. You will also begin your lessons in Reading Horizons. I can't wait to see how fast your reading, decoding, spelling and pronunciation skills are going to improve.

My Language Story

I was born in Romania, and spent the first 12 years of my life there. My native language is Romanian, but I started learning Spanish in school when I was 8. I started learning English in school when I was 10. I learned a lot about English grammar in school, and because it wasn't very different from Romanian and Spanish, it wasn't too difficult for me

When I was 12 I moved to Canada, where I had to speak English not only in school but everywhere else, as well. In fact, I stopped learning English formally when I  moved to Canada.My Canadian friends taught me how to speak English well, and how to pronounce the words correctly. I also read a lot. I learned many useful words, and had a lot of exposure to good English sentences. Reading English books was a big step for me, but I used a dictionary a lot and with time I became a very good reader.

I continued to do exercises to improve my grammar.  I continue to work on my English,  and once in a while I ask my friends for help with pronunciation and confusing grammar points. Learning a language is a life long pursuit. If you  want to be a good second language speaker, you must commit yourself to continuously improve your language. My future language goals are to become a better writer and  a more confident speaker, so I plan to write as much as possible,  and do a lot more  public speaking.

Reading Horizons

In this class you will have a 2 hour lab. The lab will be on Mondays in Isbister Room 101. This reading lab is designed to help you improve your decoding skills, help you become a better and faster reader, improve your pronunciation, learn new vocabulary, and improve your spelling. The computer program we'll be using is called Reading Horizons. If you want to know more about this program you can visit the website at www.readinghorizons.com.

To begin with you will have to take a placement test. The placement test will tell you if you need to take all the lessons, some or just a few. After the placement you will listen to a demo of the program. You will need to complete each lesson before you can go to the next. However, at the beginning of each lesson you can take a short assessment and if you pass it, you will only have to complete a very short version of the lesson. You should always try to challenge the lesson so that you can finish as fast as possible.

Each chapter ends with a test. You will take the test and if you pass you can go to the next chapter. I will keep track of your marks and progress in general. Your mark for this lab will be a combination of progress and test marks. You are expected to work on Reading Horizons at least three more hours in addition to the 2 hours you spend in the lab.