Conveying and checking meaning

Different ways of conveying meaning

There are lots of different ways to convey the meaning of items of vocabulary. A teacher who wants to teach the word ‘clock’ might use realia if there happens to be a clock hanging on the classroom wall. Flashcards can be helpful for teaching ‘airplane’ or ‘bus’ and mime can work well for ‘playing the guitar.’ Other methods include the use of synonyms or antonyms (such as ‘early’ and ‘late’) or clines showing, for example, all the temperatures between ‘boiling’ and ‘freezing.’

When it comes to deciding which method to use, teachers usually choose whichever way will get the meaning across as efficiently as possible. Although it may be tempting for teachers working with monolingual classes to use translation, there are quick and easy ways to convey the meaning of simple vocabulary without reverting to the students’ L1.

But what about more abstract vocabulary like ‘embarrassed’? How can teachers convey the meaning or use of a grammatical structure such as the past perfect?

Teaching language in context

Contextualization has an extremely important role to play when teaching language. Teachers can create a meaningful situation, perhaps by using a combination of storytelling and flashcards or mime and gestures, which shows students what the language means or how it is used.

To teach the two language items outlined above, teachers could create a short story to illustrate the concepts.

This is Mark.

Yesterday, Mark got up late.

His class started at 9.00.

Mark arrived at school at 9.30.

Asking questions is a good way to check that students understand the context:

Did Mark arrive on time? (No.)

Was he late? (Yes.)

Then asking students to finish this sentence:

By the time Mark arrived at school, the lesson…

will help teachers to find out if any of the students have previous knowledge of the past perfect. If they have, great. If not, the teacher has revealed a ‘knowledge gap’, which creates a reason for students to learn this structure.

In the same way, the teacher could continue the story – perhaps by miming Mark walking into the class, showing a flashcard of someone looking embarrassed and asking:

How do you think Mark felt?

How to check students’ understanding

Teaching the target language in context and using eliciting questions to help assess students’ previous knowledge is a good start. However, often teachers are only able to elicit the target language from one or two students. How do teachers know whether the rest of the class has understood the concept? The short answer is that they don’t – so they need to find out.

Concept questions are an excellent way to check students’ understanding of vocabulary or grammar, so it is important for new teachers to learn how to formulate them effectively. Good concept questions focus squarely on what the TL means (or doesn’t mean) – and they are much more effective than asking ‘Do you understand?’.

Examples of concept questions

By the time Mark arrived at school, the lesson had started.

a) Is this sentence about the past? Yes.

b) How many actions were there? Two.

c) Which one happened first? The lesson started.

With tenses, timelines can also be used to reinforce meaning:

Mark was embarrassed because he was late.

a) Was it a good feeling? No.

b) Did Mark feel uncomfortable? Yes.

c) How did his face feel? Hot.

d) In what other situations do people feel ‘embarrassed’?

(If you forget someone’s name? Yes. If you make a mistake? Yes.)

Effective use of contextualization and concept questions can help to cut down on lengthy teacher-centred explanations.