The use of techniques “Pick the Winner and TV Commercial” in teaching vocabulary in ESP

A good mastery of vocabulary helps the learners to express their ideas precisely. By having many stocks of word learners will be able to comprehend the reading materials catch other talking, give response, speak fluently and write some kind of topics. On the contrary, if the learners do not recognize the meaning of the words use by those who address them, they will be unable to participate in conversation, unable to express some ideas, or unable to ask for information.

Vocabulary is not an end in itself. A rich vocabulary makes the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing easier to perform. Learners’ growth in vocabulary must be accompanied by opportunities to become fluent with vocabulary. This fluency can be partly achieved through activities that lead to the establishment and enrichment of vocabulary knowledge, but the essential element in developing fluency lies in the opportunity for meaningful use of vocabulary in tasks with a low cognitive load [1, c.3].

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and word meanings. As Steven Stahl (2005) puts it, ‘Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world. [3]’ Vocabulary knowledge is not something that can ever be fully mastered; it is something that expands and deepens over the course of a lifetime. Instruction in vocabulary involves far more than looking up words in a dictionary and using the words in a sentence. Vocabulary is acquired incidentally through indirect exposure to words and intentionally through explicit instruction in specific words and word-learning strategies.

Considering the important of vocabulary role in learning foreign language the mastery of this element should be ensured and develop. Otherwise, the vocabulary mastery of the language learners will be limited and consequence of it is that they will find difficulties in learning the skills of the language. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the interactive techniques “Pick the Winner and TV Commercial” employed to enhance vocabulary learning and applied them in teaching vocabulary in ESP classroom and especially we used them for activating the learned vocabulary.

Pick the Winner [4] — in this technique is essential developing team working as all groups work on the same problem and record an answer/strategy on paper while working that means simultaneously they listen to each other’s ideas and record them. After completing their work in group, we asked groups to switch with a nearby group, and evaluate their answer, this step develops the critical thinking of students and approaching to other’s work with respect. After a few minutes, we allowed each set of groups to merge and asked them to select the better answer from the two choices, this thing was very difficult as they should have to choose the winner whose work will be presented to the class as a whole. Why it is beneficial, ‘the motivation’ is great there they could learn much in this kind of activity and use their productive skills.

TV Commercial [4] — Commercials are short, focused, and thematic in content. In many cases, commercials possess some advantages over their video counterparts: (a) Attention is directed at entire encapsulated and freestanding message which can be presented, manipulated, and digested in less than one lesson; (b) students tend to stay on task longer and do clear start and finish to the activity because of the concise aim and succinct duration of commercials; and (c) commercials can be easily tied to themes of any text to introduce, review, or wrap up lessons because they introduce one main concept, including topics ranging from textile products, medicine, restaurants to AIDS and environmental concerns such as global warming. This is paramount in an age of content-based teaching where the subject matter and language skills are intricately interwoven.

As we said above ‘the motivation’ is great and there are many different types of motivation, ranging from instrumental to integrative and intrinsic to extrinsic. Many students in university settings are motivated extrinsically, that is, they often focus on what they will receive by doing their work, such as good grades. Teachers can try to shift this extrinsic motivation towards intrinsic motivation by creating a sense of student investment.

Our students were really interested in developing fluency in the language classroom using their vocabulary because they will be doing a contract about their products, then they will be more invested in developing that fluency. As a result, those students were more motivated to participate in activities and showed a greater desire to invest more time and effort in the classroom. Investment describes students feeling a personal interest and involvement in what is happening in the classroom; if they feel they are a part of the activities and can make a difference, they will be more likely to take part and will feel a personal stake in the results. In this way, students will focus less on the external rewards and more on their personal motivations.

For instance, first we applied authentic materials as different colored yarns and make them to feel these yarns and think their names in English by creating an art from them and I think it really increased their motivation to the next steps of learning English and for the second step we forced them to assess their works and announce the winner by themselves as while giving these kind of opportunities the students feel a great reliability and their motivation serve to participate in the lesson actively by producing all 4 language skills abilities. The next extrinsic motivation was to invest their own commercials and present it by creative approach even they sang a song in English which make the lesson more authentic. The last but not the least was to evaluate the groups works by opponent groups with evaluative words as it made them to think critically and then announce their feedbacks under the names “wonderful”, “interesting” and “useful”.

Discussion of Results.

1. Assess — What is the current situation?
2. Think — What caused it? Who is involved? What are we going to achieve?
3. Plan — How are we going to do it? With whom? When? With what resources?
4. Do — Get it done. How is it going? Do we need to adapt?
5. Review -What went well/badly? What can we learn for next time?

So, the current situation was that students were not so eager to learn English and the cause of it is low motivation and for this reason we wanted to implement innovative techniques to raise their motivation to learning languages. And we choose the two kinds of techniques as “Pick the Winner and TV Commercial” and decided to apply mostly pair and group working in order improve their communicative skills by sharing and defending their opinions on the material. These techniques worked very well and we adapted the technique “TV commercial” according the level of knowledge.

Despite of the fact that the technique “Pick the Winner” should lead the discussion in target language most of the students used their mother tongue as it was difficult to control them on it while doing group discussion.

However, they increase their vocabulary bank by using the technique “TV commercial” and applied them in their production practice and showed proper understanding and using of the vocabulary in practice.

Results are the effects of an intervention. Such effects can be intended or unintended, positive or negative. There are three levels of results: outputs, outcomes and impacts. Inputs are used to carry out activities as we completed 3 activities during the lesson. Activities produce specific outputs that mean they created their own productions as a poster and an advertisement. Outputs produce outcomes which mean they could present their works through discussions. Outcomes contribute to impacts as at the end of the lesson most percent of the students could fully acquire and apply the learned material into the real situation. The negative impact was I think some of the students couldn’t use the new vocabulary and the reason can be for it they couldn’t work in the group they might be need to work individually or with teacher.

I think the transitions between the activities may have been the most lacking area of my lesson. When planning the lesson, I had particular ideas that I wanted to relay with each activity, and I had an overarching theme. This should have been facilitated more with a better introduction for each activity. The timing worked out very well with all of my activities, the use of the new techniques was to grab the attention of the class, which it did effectively. I also discovered during the session that a lot of the lesson was based on the participation of the group. All in all, the class went very well, but I did notice weakness in my teaching style.

So, in order to make the language learning process a more motivating experienced teacher need to put a great deal of thought into developing lesson plans which maintain student interest and have obtainable short-term goals. For the foreign language teacher this may result in a certain level of frustration due to the general lack of interest and commitment by some students. Teachers need to create interesting lessons in which the students’ attention is gained. This can sometimes be accomplished by the use of teaching strategies which are not often called upon by other teachers in mainstream subject areas. Encouraging students to become more active participants in a lesson can sometimes assist them to see a purpose for improving their communication skills in the target language. Successful communication using the target language should result in students feeling some sense of accomplishment. The practical value is represented by the fact that the usage of “Pick the Winner and TV Commercial” techniques as innovative methods of teaching of “A Practical English” presented a good model that can be effectively used as a teaching guide for learning of English content based vocabulary. The research with its practical outcomes will improve practice of teaching interactional skills to adult ESP learners and will hopefully, help teachers be oriented on real, genuine communication to fully equip their students with content based vocabulary so that they appropriately conduct verbal communication in the English language.

References:

1. Nation I. S. P.(1994). New Ways in Teaching Vocabulary (New Ways in TESOL). Alexandra VA: TESOL
2. Programme/project management: The results-based approach. May 2008, pp 13–14
3. Stahl, S. A. (2005). “Four problems with teaching word meanings (and what to do to make vocabulary an integral part of instruction),” in E. H. Hiebert and M. L. Kamil (eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
4. http://www.usf.edu/atle/documents/handout-interactive-techniques.pdf