Oxford`s teachhing methods of english language — страница 3

entertaining way. All authors referred to in this article agree that even if games resulted only in noise and entertained students, they are still worth paying attention to and implementing in the classroom since they motivate learners, promote communicative competence, and generate fluency. However, can they be more successful for presentation and revision than other techniques? The following part of this article is an attempt at finding the answer to this question. The use of games for presenting and revising vocabulary Vocabulary presentation. After the teacher chooses what items to teach, Haycraft suggests following certain guidelines. These include teaching the vocabulary "in spoken form first" to prevent students from pronouncing the words in the form they are

written, placing the new items in context, and revising them..I shall now proceed to present practical examples of games I have used for vocabulary introduction and revision. Description of the groups. For the purpose of vocabulary presentation, I chose two groups of third form students. With one of them I used a presentation game and with the other translation and context guessing. In both groups, students' abilities varied-ranging from those whose command of English was very good, able to communicate easily using a wide range of vocabulary and grammatical structures, and those who found it difficult to communicate. After covering the first conditional and time clauses in the textbook, I decided to present students with a set of idioms relating to bodily parts-mainly those

connected with the head (taken from The Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms ). The choice of these expressions was determined by students' requests to learn colloquial expressions to describe people's moods, behavior, etc. Moreover, in one of the exercises the authors of the textbook called for examples of expressions which contain parts of the body. For the purpose of the lesson I adapted Gear and Gear's "Vocabulary Picture-Puzzle" from the English Teaching Forum (1988). Students were to work out the meanings of sixteen idiomatic expressions. All of them have Polish equivalents, which made it easier for students to remember them. Description of vocabulary picture-puzzle To prepare the puzzle, I cut two equal-sized pieces of cardboard paper into rectangles. The

selected idioms were written onto the rectangles in the puzzle-pieces board and their definitions on the game board. On the reverse side of the puzzle-pieces board, I glued colorful photographs of landscapes and then cut the puzzle-pieces board into individual pieces, each with an idiom on it. The important thing was the distribution of the idioms and their definitions on the boards. The definitions were placed in the same horizontal row opposite to the idioms so that when put together face to face each idiom faced its definition. Puzzle Pieces Board The idioms and their definitions were the following (all taken from The Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms p.77): to be soft in the head: foolish, not very intelligent; to have one's hair stand on end: to be terrified; to be

two-faced: to agree with a person to his face but disagree with him behind his back; to make a face: to make a grimace which may express disgust, anger; to be all eyes: to be very attentive; to be an eye-opener: to be a revelation; to be nosy: to be inquisitive, to ask too many questions; to be led by the nose: to be completely dominated by, totally influenced by; long ears: an inquisitive person who is always asking too many questions; to be all ears: to listen very attentively; to be wet behind the ears: to be naive, inexperienced; a loose mouth: an indiscrete person; one's lips are sealed: to be obliged to keep a secret; to have a sweet tooth: to have a liking for sweet food, sugar, honey, ice cream, etc.; to grind one's teeth: to express one's fury; to hold one's tongue: to

say nothing, to be discrete; The task for students. Work out the puzzle by matching the idioms and their definitions. First, put puzzle-pieces on the desk with the word facing up. Take one and match the idiom to the definition. Having done that, place the puzzle-piece, word-side-up, in the chosen rectangle. When you have used up all the pieces, turn them over. If they form a picture of a landscape, the choices are correct. If not, rearrange the picture and check the idiom-definition correspondences. The game objectives. To work out the puzzle, students had to match idioms with their definitions. The objective of the game was for each pair to cooperate in completing the activity successfully in order to expand their vocabulary with, in this case, colloquial expressions. All