Unit 2

             LEXIS

This unit is about lexis. The term lexis means vocabulary. Lexis makes reference to individual words or set of words which have specific meaning. In this unit I learn that words have different kinds of meaning, those are classified in denotation, figurative meaning, meaning in context and the meaning of some words come from their form. An example of the last kind of meaning is affixation, it is the process of adding affixes which can be suffixes, prefixes or compounds, it also includes collocations, idioms and chunks. On the other hand, false friends, homophones, homonyms and varieties in English can related to one another.

Here we have some tips to learn vocabulary:

ü  Teachers need to teach words in context rather than isolated.

ü  Record the meaning of the new words, pronunciation, any synonyms, etc…

ü  Teachers need to check if words have any false friend or if those words are homophones or homonyms to avoid misunderstanding.

I can say that I as teacher in order to teach lexis  I must consider that learners have different kinds of learning styles but I consider that the better way to teach lexis is through pictures. For example, The topic is “Categories”. I can star saying students to work in groups of four or five. They hand out a piece of paper with three columns which are labelled with the name of a lexical set: Food, transport and clothes. I call out a letter of the alphabet (e.g. A). The students draw down as many pictures they knew began with the letter in about 2-3 minutes. The group with the most words win. Another example can be Pictionary, I divide the class into two groups, and one member of each team goes to the board. The teacher flashes them a card with a word and the learners have one minute to guess the word on the basis of their drawing on the board.

Bibliography

• Ten ways to expand students' lexis (Chris Milnes on 30th July 2014)
• Thornbury, S. (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary, Harlow: Pearson.       
• Schmitt, N. (2000) Vocabulary in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.